#janowen

BY JAN OWEN

She Collected Dictionaries

as other women take up men

and shelve them:

manuals, grammars, Teach Yourself

German, Malay, Italian, Swahili, Welsh,

like a passion for clothes that would hang

unworn in the dark,

for peridots, garnets, amethysts, pearls

in a shut case, nouns declined.

Each unknown word shone with delicious fire

and the alien phrases silked her skin

with their genders and connotations.

  She might have been the end house

on the waterfront of Macau

welcoming every sailor in.

But the longing for many tongues

to part her lips – si, igen, ja,

ah oui, yes, yes –

was departure’s smile,

a leaning to the wind

that sweeps a glitter of light

across the sea and sets a silvery chill

at the neck. Quick, to those books

guarding the mantelpiece,

ISBNs snug as a span of days;

to bread and fruit and sparkling wine.

  She had been given a cyclamen with scent,

some new trick that married violet and rose,

as if a flower should yearn to sing

and the pink timbre tremble

into quietest words.

She touched her flesh and knew

that it would fade as speech did

and did not.

And yet it was not language that she sought,

nor the music of any meaning.

An old allegiance drew her on

beyond the first ground of thought

and the idea even of silence

to the fifth season which must at last return

with its weather of recognition