Michael Palmer(b. 1943)
I Do Not
"Je ne sais pas Fanglais.
GERGES HUGNET 2
I do not know English
I do not know English, and therefore I can have nothing to say about
this latest war, flowering through a night scope in the evening
sky.
I do not know English and therefore, when hungry, can do no more
than point repeatedly to my mouth.
Yet such a gesture might be taken to mean any number of things.
I do not know English and therefore cannot seek the requisite
permissions, as outlined in the recent protocol.
Such as: May I utter a term of endearment; may I now proceed to put
my arm or arms around you and apply gentle pressure; may I now
kiss you directly on the lips; now on the left tendon of the neck;
now on the nipple of each breast And so on.
Would not in any case be able to decipher her response.
I do not know English. Therefore I have no way of communicating
that I prefer this painting of nothing to that one of something.
No way to speak of my past or hopes for the future, of my glasses mys-
teriously shattered in Rotterdam,3 the statue of Eros and Psyche4
in the S u m m e r Garden, the sudden, shrill cries in the streets of
Sao Paulo,5 a watch abruptly stopping in Paris.
No way to tell the joke about the rabbi and the parrot, the bartender
and the duck, the Pope and the porte-cochere.6
You will understand why you have received no letters from me and
why yours have gone unread.
Those, that is, where you write so precisely of the confluence of the
visible universe with the invisible, and of the lens of dark matter.7
No way to differentiate the hall of mirrors from the meadow of mul-
lein, the beetlebung from the pinkletink, the kettlehole from the
ventifact.
Nor can I utter the words science, seance, silence, language and
languish.
Nor can I tell of the arboreal shadows elongated and shifting along the
wall as the sun's angle approaches maximum hibernal declination.
Cannot tell of the almond-eyed face that peered from the well, the
ship of stone whose sail was a tongue.
And I cannot report that this rose has twenty-four petals, one slightly
cancred.
Cannot tell how I dismantled it myself at this desk.
Cannot ask the name of this rose.8
I cannot repeat the words of the Recording Angel9 or those of the
Angle of Erasure.
Can speak neither of things abounding1 nor of things disappearing.
Still the games continue. A muscular man waves a stick at a ball. A
woman in white, arms outstretched, carves a true circle in space.
A village turns to dust in the chalk hills.
Because I do not know English I have been variously called Mr.
Twisted, The One Undone, The Nonrespondent, The Truly Lost
Boy, and Laughed-At-By-Horses.
The war is declared ended, almost before it has begun.
They have named it The Ultimate Combat between Nearness and
distance,
I do not know English
EAVAN BLAND
b. 1944