Jennifer Barlett

[this] method of manipulating
the language [by merely not speaking]

at first I thought it was a whisper
that had little in common with
the articulate

a solemn language

the language as anyone might have whispered it

much like one would read sign or
watch the movement of

language in its distorted form

at other times the communication was
like the forest

I thought I could decifer
but I could tell nothing

* * *

to be born means to fall

when a child is born, the family gathers [a]round

so that, while the child is born
one must not talk or laugh

the birth of the child must be kept
from any human noise

the spirits can take the child should
they become aware of this blessing

* * *

[paraphrasing]

the birth of the child can mean the death of the father

the father must look away lest he be trapped in his looking

in this culture there are no comparisons

a hunter [for example] would loath to say

I am better than this or that hunter

[I am better than this or or that man]

there is no supposed order

* * *

and if this parasitic existence
should go on for too long of a time

he will be left at the foot of a tree
before a fire

there he must wait patiently
for death

the waiting may or may not be long
but an old man is not a strong man

and the process will move quickly
he has turned nature upside down

in his attempt to draw the moon
closer to the sea

he must suffer for his wanderings
it is this suffering that he has created

he is forced to pay for this reversal

Jennifer was a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. She is the author of Derivative of the Moving Image (UNM Press 2007) and (a) lullaby without any music. Individual poems have appeared in New American Writing, Ratapallax, The Brooklyn Rail, and others. Bartlett teaches poetry to people with cognitive and/or physical disabilities at United Cerebral Palsy (NYC)and is also a Writing Instructor at Montclair State University.