Words for Empty and Words for Full

Endangered species

15 Endangered species Very busy sensing there’s nothing down the train tracks except remembering there are only five remaining speakers of Mohave. There might be a loose and rusted spike, a smashed bottle of Bud is likely if I walk long enough into picturing a basketball team of old men and women in a gym in Oklahoma bouncing an orange ball against a team made up of how the rest of the world can’t understand them. Coal trains come through here, taking across the mountains what we’ve taken from the mountains, I think this is like walking over cows while eating a burger, and feel filled up on the empty feeling night is good at bringing to me like flowers before a date. Here, night says, I brought you this bouquet of gone, and it occurs to me these are the flowers of negation the man who spent a night in a foxhole with a dead Viet Cong was handed over and over. He doesn’t talk about that, there’s not a single speaker I know of the language called “this is what it’s like to dig a hole and be alive in your death with the example of what that looks like.” Nor am I the last speaker of the language called “I will too often use crows to express my deepest self,” which it turns out is only centimeters below the surface, now that we’re trying to go metric. The gravel sounds like breakfast cereal eaten straight from the box. If night is crows touching wings somehow in place, stars their eyes and the moon a hole in the patience of crows to obliterate, only the air, with its high absorption rate for dead languages, could speak of this to the past, which I’ve been trying my whole life to get in touch with. So the last speaker of Mohave will soon be sitting on the edge of her bed, noticing for a last time the beauty of cups, the entirety of their existence the honor of holding and giving over, emptying fullness into the empty mouth, and she will whisper a word the cup has heard many times over, and when she’s dead, someone will take the cup away without putting it to their ear to listen to the last, the entire ocean of what is left of a people. They will be gone, the cup taken to a new life full of waiting for water to come. I understand that sensation most of all, feeling there should hicok pages i-120.indd 15 1/7/10 3:23 PM 16 be something inside me there’s not a word for in English or Urdu or Wichita. In grunt, perhaps, in the language I’ve called “heat this blade upon the stove and press it against your forearm,” absolutely. If languages have to die, kill that one. Every time I walk it down these tracks and leave it, it drags its way back and kisses the neck of my sleep with its teeth. hicok pages i-120.indd 16 1/7/10 3:23 PM ...