language change (poem)

{little weed-skeletons over the ice, north saskatchewan}

{north saskatchewan riverbank, looking north to hawrelak park}

language change (in progress)

“we used to speak / a different language / i wasted my breath / on words soon forgotten / left unattended / they're moving their feet -- but nobody's dancing” – low, ‘like a forest’

speaking to eachother
now we find ourselves unintelligible.
you’re not listening, yer not
lissening, yuar nalissineng
there is so much accusation
but really i do hear you
you just sound like a bird
singing with water trapped
in a cold little throat –

through glottochronology
we can see how
time has elongated my vowels.
since i moved across the river drift
became inescapable.
visiting less & less & less
soon i found new names for things:

first for the tamarack,
then the blue-jay
then the pinecone
then slowly through these
lexical half-lives
i began to pronounce other sounds for
such universals as attraction
& compromise
& lust.

now when i speak
i am calling upstream to you,
into the past, against a current
with a tongue weighted down
by delta silt
& the words all waterlogged
just float further away –

banks erode slowly
& we filter differently
through the gravel bars, the eddys
& oxbows that can’t quite be bridged
without translation –

never thought we’d be
such stubborn monolinguals,
not then. though
it could still be argued,
really, that we still speak
dialects of the same language –

yet we insist that
our mutually intelligible ancestor
has passed away, one
wrote her down
& now we’ve become too proud,
too politicized
to admit, acknowledge
that maybe we still
understand –

perhaps in the future

some linguist
will want to study us,
reconstruct our old tongue,
recreate that proto-speech
with its slippery soundchanges
& forms & asterisks,
study the strange dialects
that arise with movement
& the lessening of someone’s
love.