PEOPLE WITHOUT LANGUAGE

For R. Slater

Is it too little to say
that it is because we don’t know how to live well?
That the ones who should have shown us
stayed behind,
in the old country.

Who were the ones that turned their backs
on village opera houses,
and street markets,
for the New World?
For trees that cannot converse?
Here among the apple orchards,
black flies,
and Indian Burial Grounds,
you may kneel for as long as you like.
Burn witches, change your name, own men as livestock.
Here they let us pay on credit.
Told us we can, “Take care of it down the road.”
I wonder if anyone has figured the price?

Americans followed the Italian Renaissance
by perfecting campfire songs and Boy Scouting.
.
Rushing to California to stumble on Gold
during the European Enlightenment.

Cowboys and Indians,
Elvis and Hollywood,
Handguns and Billy Graham.
America could not be itself
if its people could measure
the weight of History,
Civilization,
Language.
Isn’t it more than ocean and dirt that separates Hawthorne from Dostoevsky?

Mine is a society raised by outcasts,
born on prairies, in swamps and cornfields,
upon mountain tops, and icy granite islands.
You could not see a neighbors house.

Who is surprised that we lack a sense of humor?
That we carry guns and pill bottles
and have neither a history
or a language
to explain ourselves in.
We do not have a language in which to question our leaders.
A language to organize neither dinner parties nor revolutions.

We have no language to love in,
an old face looking through a nursing home window.
We have no language to love in,
the father who enjoys his long commute.
We have no language to love in,
the mother who hasn’t had a close friend since high school.
We have no language to love in,
the daughter who wishes she could live in a book.
We have no language to love in,
the son who want’s everyone to think like himself.

And so we live,
generation to wounded generation
in the manner that all
carnivores without language
have lived.