Some of those women swept me close with their brooms to growl
The groundrules of sidewalks in gutturals that promised
To use one end or the other on my thoughtless face,
Their dogs snarling the same sentences of woe until
The street turned into the squalling radio of fear.
Some people suddenly speak a language not their own.
Some people start to write what they recall in spellings
That bond in the quick Spanish of the first Mexican
Family on Prospect Street listening to speech so strange
They thought everybody in Etna emigrated
From a village bound by the rope of related tongues.
A director, once, made a film in Esperanto,
Transforming dialogue to mystery, believing
Each exchange became as eerie as the Incubus
Who stole the souls of sleeping women while he slathered
Each scene with subtitles or dubbed over flapping mouths.
That film waits for Esperanto's rise, the world joined hands
Around the campfire of common language. My grandmother
Told me, in English, about the eighty-pound ice heart
Omaha carved to lure Sonja Henie back to town,
How it's shrunk to sixty pounds, still warehoused, speaking to
The dead in the universal language of waiting.
Like Ludwig Zamenhof, who believed he could form peace
With the Yugoslavia of good intentions;
Like all of those diplomats who listen on headphones
To simultaneous translations, each of their nods
Staggered by the varying lengths of rephrasing.