poetry of the month
In my mother’s house when we said sorry we had to mean it which wasn’t always easy. On the last day of my brother’s eighth year
I put the fear of God in him. I told him he was dying—
every second you are getting closer to your death
I said. You will never be eight again. The next morning
when Mom sang he wailed. When she found out why, she made me read from James, as usual. Your tongue,
she said, is a fire. I sat at the table in shame. I read about my tongue, that rudder, a world of evil. It would set me alight. In my mother’s house there was ritual—
I’m sorry, I said. And what does that mean? she
asked. I’ll try not to do it again, I said. My brother had to forgive me because those were the rules. Imperfect contrition, also called attrition, is saying sorry for sorrow of soul, fear of damnation. My brother hugged me and wiped his nose in his sweatshirt. I don’t want to forgive you, he said, but he had no choice.
The dessert comes after the ham
Boterkoek tastes better than its translation, butter-cake, and the first time I translated ollie bollen into English
I understood words have nothing to do with taste.
Laid bare in another language they mean nothing, oil balls. When Oma made chocolate chip cookies we asked her for bolletjes, dough rolled in her white hand, popped into our mouths and they tasted like love, though Google translate will tell you the word is bullet, small bun. Once, after boterkoek my brother bit me—this was before illness and tablets stole Oma’s clarinet, her desire for Mozart and ham. She wiped her hands on her apron and chased him under the organ where she sank her teeth into his little arm. Don’t bite your sister, she said. Pain can be translated because it’s the only Esperanto. My brother gazed at his arm, Oma’s fresh moon dents. Come, have some ham, schaatje, she said to him. Schaatje means schaatje—there’s no other word for being small.
It-is-having-a-long-neck
i. in Cayuga, the translation of giraffe. Languages are disappearing and how you feel is up to you. When Oma buys bread and grapes the cashier asks her where she’s from. Oma hates the question, a reminder that she’s failed at shedding her Netherlands. I’ve been here forty years she groans and turns the key.
She’s proud
of who she is, but she wants people to know this is her home. I love the Dutch in her syllables, a reminder of where I come from. Location isn’t always geographic. I’ve peeked ii. at Cree, Haida, glottal stops. Dutch has a word that can’t be translated, gezellig. Some will tell you one word encompasses an entire nation. MyOma photographing a giraffe, buying us ice cream, doling out ham and pea soup Sundays, that was gezellig—what happens when you’re with the people you love, in the place you want to be.
I searched the obituaries of The Economist. Marie Smith is dead. Her real name is another word
I can’t pronounce, Udachkuqax*a’a’ch: iii. her name means a sound that calls people from afar.
Attrition is when your language leaves you. Loneliness, is when you’re the last one left: ongezellig. Marie, when she was little, wanted to be a pilot. When she died, Eyak died too. Ovide Mercredi addressed an audience after Oka, because everything was at stake. I live different from you, he said, not that I hate you but because I like the way we live ourselves, as people. My Oma does some inexplicable things. She has a carpet on her coffee table, eats candied salt. Marie Smith, according to the magazine, knew what the death of Eyak meant.
She said it was the not-to-be-imagined disappearance of the world. Excerpted, with permission, from Self
Portrait Without A Bicycle, by Jessica Hiemstra (Biblioasis, 80 pages, $18.95)