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How to Make Love in a Foreign Language
 

Pull the shades.  Darkness is a great aid
to speaking well.  If this is wrong, your lover
will let you know with a gentle tug.
 
Begin with verbs – “rumble,” “jettison,”
“bend,” “explore.”  Roll them in your mouth
like marbles or small stones, let their juices
 
sluice along your lips and cheeks and down
your radiant chin.  If you stumble, look
away.  Remember, a lisp is charming
 
in a foreign tongue.  A wise lover will
smile, lift your head with one crooked finger
and whisper a secret name.  Carve
 
this on the inside of your eyelids so that it flames
when the world turns dark.  Learn the words
for “sheets” and “fluid,” and “grass” and “wine.”
 
When pleasure becomes so great you forget
to breathe, relax.  You have become a silver
horse drinking at a cool spring, everything wet
 
and sweet and out of your control, grammar
of stars and leaves and wind, rhythm of fish
pulsing upriver, and the leaping syntax of flesh.
 
First published in GHOTI. The Saint Cloud State University web page reproduced the poem in the notice about that publication, but it was taken down after about fifteen minutes. Too racy for college, I guess.
 

The Dog Under the Table


The dog under the table is French
and knows how to behave, barks
only when the plat is magically
revealed beneath its silver dome. 
White as snowflakes tumbling
wet into the Seine, he somehow
knows my name.  How good
to have a friend in a foreign land! 
 
Tomorrow we meet for chess
at a café in the square just below
Sacre Coeur and he has promised
to teach me the subjunctive once
and for all.  Or was that a dream? 
 
Was it him I saw once through wet
morning streets blow great white
clouds as he drank coffee, argued
with his cronies about Jean-Marie
le Pen? Too soon the weight
of hours groaned.  My last day
in Paris, occupied only by a pride
of cats and their great rose-window eyes. 
  
First published in Whiteleaf. The incident with the dog in the restaurant is true – when the dog barked, his mistress said “Sois sage!” and the dog quieted right down.



Golden Trees

 
It was in a restaurant by the bay where I sat down
and ordered Pad Thai, but the waiter brought me Pho
 
with a carp’s head and shrimp, and noodles clear as glass.
“Healthier,” he said, and poured my tea. I asked for water,
 
and he brought it in a red glass with one ice cube.
“Another cube please,” I said, but he shouted in my face.
 
“You get one piece of ice! You are no rich man!”
He was right, so I sipped my Pho and imagined my life
 
along the canal, watching stray dogs bound along a ledge
above the water with its thin boats and its filth. The woman
 
beside me was tall and dark. She spoke in German I recalled
from home, reminding me that we did not have enough beer,
 
and that nothing was all that easy. I replied with the phrases
I had learned – The spiders are drinking. The child does not
 
like his room. The jewel is large. We are girls. We are women.
All theory, dear friend, is gray, and the golden tree of life is green.
 
(The last line is a translation of a famous line from Goethe’s Faust.)