mercifulserpent

We Say We Love Each Other // Minnie Bruce Pratt

You say: The trouble is: we don't understand
each other.
           Your sounds have fascinated me
from the first, the way you laugh in your throat
like a saxophone. But last time the radio played
reedy brass, low sexy, I started crying. (Last time,
in the car alone, and jazz being played in a room
in a distant city). 
        Lately I understand this:
I want your voice, mysterious music of your body,
yet our words, gestures, are from different languages.

If we are sitting on the couch, eating oranges,
sweet acid, like lovemaking, 
               and the phone
rings in another room:
     you answer, you murmur,
my stomach vibrates, deep drum flutter at your sound.

You come back. I do not ask Who was it?
To me, intrusion, a push into your room.
To you, removal, uncaring of closeness:        

Then we are sitting on the couch, abrupt
separate. The bitter orange rinds sit
in a neat pile on the round dish before us.

I am sitting in a place made for me
by women, generations, Scot, Irish, sitting
on a little bit of land, holding on,
survival on an island, isolation, a closed mouth
in their own kitchen, self-containment.

You are sitting in a place made for you
by women, generations, Jews in Spain, Holland,
Russia, the Pale, Poland, Roumania, America,
the pogroms, no bit of land safe, none
to be owned as home, survival by asking, asking,
knowing where every one was, enemy, family.

Later if we talk about this moment, we observe,
abstract. Even as I write, I make it distant,

but we are sitting on the couch: separate, not abstract.
History speaks like a voice through our bodies:
how often we do not know that it is this we do not
understand.
            Fascination with what we have not known:
Your hand gripping my chin, drawing me to your mouth.
My interest in a yellow gingko leaf, in veins in my palm,
my look up, the sudden kiss I give you.

What we fight bitterly: voices scraping against
demanding, selfish.
            Where is the future we spoke of,
between us, stronger by difference?
              We sit on the couch
trying to understand each other, pointing to an object:
What did you mean?
              Lists, signs, paper with pictures,
paper with words, poems, photographs,
repeating, explaining, exasperation, anger.
             Asking:
What did you mean?
              The other says she loves: how believe
when her words, her gestures, are not the ones that speak
love to you?

             We sit on the couch. You rub my feet,
my heels are small oval drums. The radio plays
something we can't dance to. The room smells of oranges.
After a while, we say again we love each other.