Language Lesson 

The language I teach you won't obliterate wordless thought
but leave space for silence and sensation. It counts, categorizes,
but also wonders at wild, uncountable, unnamable things.

We'll send each other messages ripe with meaning,
gradually growing a shared comprehension, and all talk
stops when we encounter the incomprehensible.

Let's not fill in the blanks; they are holy places where knowing
and not knowing meet and merge, like please and thank you,
the two essential words, stronger and kinder than yes and no.

I'll teach you to speak as the world was spoken into being,
every tree, rock and cloud a poetic phrase, each earthquake,
storm and sunset an exclamation, every breeze a breath.

Can we chat like bees and blossoms do?
Like fawns following their mother?
Like river water rushing over rocks?

We could recover a primeval proto-lexicon for weaving baskets,
gathering berries, following tracks and trails, scanning the forest
for opportunity or danger, listening closely, recognizing faces.

Seventy thousand years ago our ancestors brought forth language,
and spread from continent to continent, talking all the while,
as what was real co-mingled with fictive plans, visions, and tales.

Now two young bucks with velvet antlers step cautiously across
the yard, a small doe follows. They nibble grass and thimbleberries
that the Wiyot call deerboukshughutsguqhe' (little-one-hangs-upside-down).

Perched at the picnic table I taste tidbits of language and scribble
words on paper, trying to find a way to teach you how to say
what you want to say to yourself, to me and to the world.

Naomi Steinberg