My husband loves languages lavishly: latin, arabic, greek-
a polyglot traveler (hic/ibi), so to speak, as if to seek
more tongues might mend a broken heart
(le coeur) but still kept mine apart-
from inside him- his blood, his passion
(su pasion) my own language still unspoken.
“I am,” he said, “entering the ancients’ home,”
(“kalos/beauty.”) But did he know I could not roam
those woods, the words (lexi, logi) not mine
to understand? I did know how to harmonize
(armonioso, harmonisch): at night alone
in bed with silence, books and poems
until I learned to teach the tongue
he had not heard, had never sung
with me- though even all those years,
frozen, mute with fears,
hiding in translations in his hand,
and crouched outside the lushest land,
I like to think we knew that, even wordless, none
could keep our hearts from being one.
Martha Kahane is a psychologist and an avid choral singer. She misses choral singing terribly since singing in groups has become lethal. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband of forty years.