"Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously"
—Noam Chomsky
I used to think I was just a half step behind
When I believed in a lost language.
I imagined people sang before they spoke,
That song preceded logos and birdsong
Preceded the language of men.
Words meant exactly what they pointed to.
I loved to watch the flocks of starlings in Echo Park
Explode in unison from the bushes of daybreak
And wheel across the sky.
I imagined a lost language, some ur-lingua franca
That, when found, would repair us all.
I had read that Comanches were understood
When they signed to deaf students at the Gauladette school;
That the Iroquois could talk to the animals.
Aborigines in Australia had songs that were maps
Keyed to sacred landmarks in the wilderness;
That the letters of the Hebrew alphabet
Corresponded to the Tarot’s twenty-two Major Arcana.
Each letter was a number, a concept, a story.
Aleph was an ox,
Just turn the letter upside down.
Beth-le-hem, the house of bread.
If we could just utter
The perfect name and number of God…
After all—the Celts sailed up the Mississippi,
Left their runes and Occum writing on Pawnee war shields
One hundred years before the current era.
Lilly, floating in an isolation tank, dreamed
Dolphins with songs sewn shut in their throat.
People talked to plants and flowers in Findhorn.
Remember how big they would grow.
I knew if I could just create a space somewhere
Between birdsong and the cry of an animal
The night visitors would come and talk to me.
Hush and listen, I would say to myself,
And the spellbound may finally speak,
Not in tongues, or the chill of foreign language,
Not in fragments but in complete sentences.
They would recite The Histories,
Animal, vegetable and mineral.
We would rescue ourselves from “cold hell and thicket,"
Learn to use our breath, to project our voice
And use it like an instrument, as all musicians
Are trying to duplicate the human voice.
But what if the histories are nothing
But secondhand experience, what passes
Between people is smoke from different fires,
Rumors of dying suns shuffled and replaced?
If the Iroquois talked to the animals,
It was only in Longfellow’s dreams.
I know the Comanches broke their horses
In four feet of water and sometimes beat them.
If I used to be a half step behind,
Now things have really gotten away from me.
I feel like a snake handler
Shaking my upraised arms and talking in tongues.
I wonder if the starlings are caught up
In the confusion of the bramble bushes
Or confounded by an excess of light that keeps them
From finding their way home by the stars.
What can you tell me, any little scrap will do?
Ed Frankel is on the faculty of the UCLA Writing Programs and the Antioch Los Angeles BA and MFA programs. His recent poetry has appeared in Fugue, Confluence, The Dogwood Journal of Poetry and Prose, Nimrod, and The Kennesaw Review. One of his poems was nominated for the 2006 Pushcart Prize. He won first prize in the 2006 Winning Writers War Poetry contest. His essay, “In the Lap of the Angel of History: A Memoir," is included in Cesar Chavez and the Farmworker Movement, 1962-1993 (Sal Si Puede Press).
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