Ni l’un ni l’autre

Emy, I know what it’s like to love a language
and come home to find it gone
                                                     from your mouth,

the window open
onto a purple field of irregular verbs, the keys
on the silver hook rattling nonsense.

Emy, I know what it’s like
to wake up in Rivière-du-Loup

from a dream where everyone in your family
is eating French like soup
                                               from fluent spoons
but you. I woke up
once to a woman in my bed speaking
in tongues,
                     her long hair over her face
like well-combed rain, her mouth a crowded subway:

tongues elbow to elbow
in blue raincoats, fogged glasses, Latin running
to jam its arm in the closing doors

while ink drips from a newspaper
in its fist,
                  unreadable. Emy, if our mouths

are subway trains, mine got stuck between stations
during a late-afternoon summer storm
and it is starting to get hot and dark

but then two tongues start talking, somehow,
to each other, breaking the public
                                                           code of silence
to realize they both have the same
dentist and love lilacs,

and the strange freedom of it
spreads up and down the train like an accent,


and yes, it is a little sad
when the train rumbles on at last and its doors open
onto a platform where stern men in neon vests

lead everyone towards the cool, perfectly
grammatical air
                                 of the world again.

Emy, sometimes English feels like an invisible
parasite that snuck into my body
as I dove 
                                 into a turquoise lake of slang
when I was eight,

and it just lay dormant in me for years
before I awoke it by listening to Purple Rain
during a thunderstorm in 2006.

Emy, let’s drive to Montreal, I know a dome
of bad weather there
where we can finally let our tongues loose

like birds into the air. We can let tourists snap photos
of them, point and say
                                           That one is weird,
what is that one called? Where is it from?          We can let

a freckled nineteen-year-old wearing a nametag
and a Safari hat
                                 explain our etymologies to them,
Emy, mechanically.
Mechanically by heart a hundred times a day

every day of this long, homesick summer. French
is still in you. It’s just waiting

for a break in the rain. In the corner of the dome,
there is a quiet spot
                                 where children watch languages
                                   hatch under a warm red light.

Look at the cracks, Emy. That’s a good
thing. That means
                                    it’s pushing its way out.