Other Tongue

Jem Burch

“I don’t want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning.” - Orhan Pamuk

In Vermont, a man speaking Russian
says talk like there is water in your mouth.
The sky is like a river here; every afternoon
it curdles with new rain. I grow
used to wearing wet shoes, to wading
uphill to the bright cafeteria, where our mouths still make mockery of the dry sibilance
of rain, the soft trill in storm.
In improving, the inadequacies
are only sharpened: the mismatch
between flood and potóp, the way my tongue
fails to leap between my teeth.
Only one night do I dream of a dam
forced out. I ask the words to prýgat’,
and they do, and I speak without error. I wake
with a mind like a young tree, budding after rain.
No wonder they call the unit of language
a root. The knot of it. How it unfurls
from some hard space. In Russian, all the words
I find come from old places: the willow íva,
the pine sosná. They thrum inside me,
like deep water. At the end of summer, the light
drips yellow from the leaves. I watch a boy
sprint headlong through the graveyard,
stepping without heed on the dead.
From far away, he could be a tree.

Jem Burch is a student at Yale University majoring in Linguistics.

ABOUT THE ART | Bloom by Alex Jin, 2024. Alex Jin is a student at Yale University.