Melanie McCabe: “Language Lessons”
LANGUAGE LESSONS
I am being schooled in the tongue that is spoken here:
the white crackle, the hiss that hoards the air
of my small glass life. Words I might have said
buzz in the air, unglossed, and tick against
the windows like moths. Static, that long
knell, becomes the sound I take for silence.
My syllables coalesce to drone, to hum—still, I
think first in the old language—the wind-rippled
chime, the patois of leaves at the eaves of the house.
When all of my desire flattens to a chord held long
beneath a damper pedal, I will at last be eloquent
in the idiom of this changed world. But for now I still know
sparrows in the limbs outside, turning gingerly to spare
their straw bones. I dream with them of other
mornings, of lifting high a brave and foolish throat.
Melanie McCabe is the author of a nonfiction book, His Other Life: Searching For My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams, which won the University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize and was published in 2017. McCabe is an English and creative writing teacher in Arlington, Virginia. Her poetry collection, What The Neighbors Know, was published by FutureCycle Press in 2014 and was recently awarded an Honorable Mention in the Library of Virginia’s Literary Awards competition. A first collection, History of the Body, was published by David Robert Books in 2012. Her poems and essays have appeared in Threepenny Review, Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, The Washington Post, Shenandoah, Cumberland River Review, Sweet, Barely South Review, and Forge Literary Magazine, among others.