Sprach ist Namen Scholem


I.

Hide language in
a name
sacred
or
was it sacr-
ed

poetry in the abyss
fragments
always
spectre haunting
my mouth
Hölderin’s
husky mouth
already the
fear always
dolce Muttersprache

salivating
o that tastes
good tongued
mother
talking whose
birth
keeps on\talking
always


II.

You’re wrong
lady from Germany
Heidegger’s Jew
you’ve wronged
a displacement
my language
via trains
Lisbon on a
German balcony
fires above graves
so recently dug
music and shovels

then put the blame on
Mame, Arendt, put…
locked up in the
attic, la folle du logis
folly in logic tongued
tied ice-cream on your chin
suffer want
in la casa lingua franca
or swing baby
swing higher
father’s pushing you
daughter says push
higher heart beats
faster, faster over-
looks rocks green
river below bridge
ahead


III

Levinas: "The soil
this language’s soil
is French soil"

solitude after the
Greeks O
Athens it is the time
of French.

Host says: " Come in!"
Hostage says: "So soon?"

A colonial language
not the master’s
mastered in black
velvet cloth on face
elsewhere my little
Chick-a-Dee in the…
childish armory
ça va mal

Speak!
do we?
we all speak
whose
tongue anyway
in my mouth
the kiss of life

someone’s mother
I spoke then one
language
I wrote was it another?
then a translator?
followed by a
hyphen
cat gut sewing
my wound

silence
we are reduced
to a wound


IV

A sepulture
at the crossroads
wake mourning
birth here
with hearing
ear-shot
nationality: birth
a citizen then
stripped of Cremieux’s Decree

in those days of shadows
unconscious for years I
never thought in another
language but this
one like blood unaware

I who might have been
anchored by another
tongue Spanish perhaps
without the expulsion
or Russian spoonfulls of
caviar and balalaikas
now French O
Odessa the famine I sold
my shoes for sustenance

My alibi we’ve all
got to have an alibi
something which
rocks us to sleep
late at night
my alibi I recite
no lines by La Fontaine
but count syllables
on my fingers
my French fingers.


V.

Barren.
Misbegotten.
Disarmed.
stay! demeure with death
whispered, meure!

now sprachlosen mund
I leap on the back
of the Broadway trolley
heading toward the Paramount
Judy Garland meets me in
St. Louis…Louis at the fair!

switch tracks
French & English
tracks slip from hand
turn torn the rain
washes signs away

knocked my head on a
sidewalk now forgetful
the end what next?
nexus where?
where?

turn
on myself a trope
excessive tongue
fire cuts out
this tongue remains
dies
quietly without
a word.