On not learning to speak German

There is no shame

in letting your ignorance

run ahead of you,

so that you can tell yourself

apart from your forebears:

Those who look at a tree

as if it were a cabinet, closed and quiet

where each object stands in the protected solitude

some call peaceful.

You are looking down at your mother’s rubber boots—

standing where ice gives way to mud,

in a shelterbelt half a mile west of the farm

where they broke ground

and bread and zoat and you.

They saw you bone idle but you walked with employable purpose: to draft your deviance outside the mother tongue, as the wheatgrass danced for her friends beside an empty ditch at the gravel’s edge.

You move along your sheet of ice, feeling it bend under your weight.

Forget your feet and the sky will step with you.