Where Language Ends
After Keith Leonard
How can a single
language carry a pitch-
perfect word? A color
parade dozens
of nuanced inflections
in one tongue but only sing
a solitary hue elsewhere?
The slang-term overused
in Playa del Carmen
mean the exact opposite
in the high-altitude pulse
of Bogotá?
In Japanese, there is a single
word that means finding beauty
in imperfections.
Linguists think the word bully
evolved from the Dutch word boel,
meaning lover. The word
awful meant full of awe. I listen
to old recordings of myself
at three telling my sister
secrets in a language I no
longer speak.
In Farci, there is no direct
equivalent to I love you.
Instead, the commonly used
phrase literally translates to:
I know you as my friend.
My friends, I do not know
the precise day my first language
fully left me, but I recall
relishing its familiar
music like a muffled
eavesdrop against a door.
I listened to my parents argue
as a small child in a language
I thought I knew. I would hear
each word clearly but could not
make out a single word’s meaning.
I wonder if the poems matter
at all.
In German, there’s a single word
to describe a face badly in need
of a fist.
In Norwegian: the euphoria
you feel as you begin to fall
in love.
When I comfort my love
the first time she encounters
death unexpected, it is the sturdy
haven of my arms & chest.
Only the vernacular of touch
keeps her from the floor.
In Brazilian Portuguese
there is a single word for tenderly
running your fingers through your
lover’s hair.
I’m not writing a poem, I’m running
my hands through her hair, on days
like today, when the stanza feels
like the most suffocating
room. I part
& braid the hair
of my beloved, fingers
detangle strands
into smooth lines
like the arteries
of a map. I inhale
the scent of essential oils
& shea butter. And there,
peering around the corner:
a dialect of six-year-old irises
carried through generations,
across oceans, the marvel & loss
& rebirth of language, where
absence became the brutal
miracle from which lineage
was drawn.
Our daughter is up
past her bedtime, tracing
her mother’s crown
carefully for the first time
with her eyes as though
it were a smuggled book
teaching her to speak.
Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet and the author of "Fractures" (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), selected by Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Winner of the International Book Award, Gómez has been published in New England Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Carlos is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He lives with his family in Atlanta.