The Last Word in My Language
On the night of the crossing, a poet feels his mother tongue begin to peel from his body
On the night I crossed the border, I knew I was carrying my language out of the country forever.
A language is not luggage; you cannot weigh it, declare it, or leave it folded in a drawer.
It lives in the mouth like a second tongue, warm and muscular, older than any thought I own.
For fifty years my mother tongue had done my breathing, my dreaming, and my quiet arithmetic of grief.
Now, at a wooden lit by one bulb, I felt it begin to from me.
The guard asked my name, and I gave it, hearing the syllables as though for the final time.
Each vowel tasted of the house where I was born and the orchard behind it.
I wanted to say something enormous, but the language of departure permits only small, words.
"Papers," he said, and I understood that a life can be reduced to a single stamped page.
Behind me the country folded shut like a book whose last chapter I would never read.
I boarded the train and sat with my hands open, as if holding something that was already leaving.
My mother tongue had never once betrayed me; it was I who was abandoning it at the .
I whispered a line of my own poetry, and the words came out fragile, like breath on glass.
Somewhere ahead lay a city whose language I could spell but never yet inhabit.
I had read its grammar in books, but a grammar learned is not a grammar lived.
The wheels began to turn, and with them turned the slow machinery of an farewell.
I thought of my mother, who had taught me my first word, kneeling beside my cradle.
That word had opened the whole world to me; now the world was closing it again.
Language, I have since learned, is the only country you may carry whole across any border.
Yet a tongue with no soil to stand on has begun, , to at the root.
I pressed my forehead to the cold window and rehearsed the names of streets I would never walk.
Each name was a small coffin in which some part of me was quietly being buried.
The conductor spoke to me in the new language, and I answered with a , borrowed grace.
My true voice stayed behind, pressed between the pages of the country I had lost.
I understood then that is not a place but the silence where your first words used to live.
All night the train carried me toward a dawn spoken in syllables I did not yet trust.
I held my mother tongue against my chest the way one holds a sleeping, feverish child.
And I did not know, as the border lights sank away, whether it would survive the journey.