I am thinking about the difference between what I think & what I say.
How I take a nebula of emotions & impulses and expect
words to find stable orbit in that space; and I am sure language
must be a kind of translation. If I had not failed as a musician, I would
play the piano and ignore words completely. Keith Jarrett moans
and we understand he means you don't know what love is
.
So maybe there is something universal about language.
When I argued with M, I was always two topics behind
because I kept going back to revise the point I didn't mean to make.
Every expatriate in Korea thinks woegukin means foreigner.
I didn't learn until I returned to Nashville and snapped at a Korean
friend in Starbucks I can't be a foreigner in my own country
,
that the best translation is not Korean. I'm more frightened
every year at how effectively my mouth misrepresents me.
What would you think if I told you I wished M a broken heart?
But what if I said this poem was once titled Duende? What if
this were a song called 마음을 잃다 but I didn't tell you how
to say that or what it means? What if my Korean friend spoke
no English and didn't hear my petulance? I don’t know
if I'm making myself clear. Pretend I elucidated the problem of turning
ideas into words. Pretend I did it with fewer words. If you asked
what I've learned, I'd say now I embrace my mind's slow system, send
thanks to the women who showed me music starts in the soles of the feet,
surges to the tongue. I have to thank those women who took what
I needed to lose to make room for the vowel of recognition I hold in
my mouth for as long as it takes to reshape the soul into a song.
This poem was first published in Connotation Press.