About Me
I do not know English. This time a few years ago, I was praying to a statue of John Donne in Westminster Abbey. I do not know English, and therefore I can have nothing to say about this science, this latest war, flowering through a nightscope in the evening sky. I do not know English and therefore, when hungry I can do no more than point repeatedly to my mouth. Yet such
a gesture might be taken to mean any number of things, not all of them wholesome.I do not know English and therefore cannot seek the requisite permissions as outlined in the old protocol.
Such as: May I utter a term of endearment; may I now proceed to put my arm or arms around Him and apply gentle pressure; may I now kiss Him directly on the lips; now on the left tendon of the neck; now in the palm of each hand? And so on. Would not in any case be able to decipher His response.I do not know English. Therefore I have no way of communicating that I prefer this painting of nothing to that one of something. No way to speak of my past or hopes for the future, of my reading glasses mysteriously enveloped by a house in Northwest DC, a watch stopping abruptly in New York.
No way to tell the joke about the rabbi and the
parrot, the bartender and the duck, the Pope and the porter.I do not know English. I am deeply ashamed,
but He will understand why He has received
so many letters from me and why they cannot but go unanswered. Those, that is, where
I write so precisely of the confluence of the
visible universe with the invisible, and of the lens
of dark matter. No way to differentiate the hall of
mirrors from the meadow of muslin, the beetlebung from the pinkletink, the kettlebot from the ventrifact.Nor can I utter the words science, séance, silence,
language, and languish. Nor can I tell of the arboreal shadows, a vouchsafe of Christmastide, elongated and shifting along the wall as the sun's angle approaches maximum hibernal declination.Cannot tell of the almond-eyed face that peered back at me from the well, the ship of stone whose sail was a tongue.How I searched for His name and found Him writing obituaries. No, textbooks. At least one person jumps beneath a subway train every day in
this city. There is no story there. It is not news.
And I cannot report that this rose has twenty-four
petals, one slightly cancerous. Cannot tell how I
dismantled it myself at this desk. Cannot ask the name of this rose. I cannot repeat the words of the
Recording Angel or those of the Angel of Erasure. Can speak neither of things abounding nor of things disappearing...I do not know English, but still the games continue. Games I cannot play: A muscular man waves a stick at a ball. A woman in white, arms outstretched, carves a true circle in space. A village turns to dust in the chalk hills.Because I do not know English I have been called Miss Icicle, She of No-response, The Lost Girl, and Laughed-at-by-Horses.The war is declared ended, almost before it has begun.
