Out of the Door of the Mouth
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPThe confinement of an empty house, the restrictions of the poet’s lifestyle, and the practice of a compressed poetics reflect and reverberate in one another.
To Speak in Tongues
To speak in tongues
is simply to follow desire
out of the door of the mouth
and into the open air—that place
where language is seldom
understood. They will bring
doctors and interpreters
who will shake their heads
before they move on.
Soon even words will fade,
as stars must do at noon.
There are no choices here. [End Page 56]
When I wrote this poem in 2005, I was thinking in part about my own life as a poet at a time of frustration with critics, even with friends who worried about the possible autobiographical implications of my darker work. From time to time I have considered a different career, a different life, one that was more social in nature, one that didn't take place largely in an empty house, looking out of a window. But as the final line of my poem says, "there are no choices here," at least there were no choices for me.
It was impossible to contemplate and write about this subject without thinking of Emily Dickinson in her Amherst confinement, her house, writing poem after poem—an output that puts so many of us to shame. And perhaps the compression of this particular poem of mine was based, at least unconsciously, on her famous conciseness. If anyone spoke in tongues, she did: in her hymn influenced metrics (so often analyzed); in rhyme that wasn't quite rhyme; in language so often charged and cryptic. And she has had more than her share of critics down the years parsing her every word, her every possible, even imaginary, love affair, her relationship with herself and with each family member. But there is a difference between Emily Dickinson and most of the rest of us. Her words have not faded, will not fade, not even at high noon.
Linda Pastan has published twelve books of poetry, most recently Queen of a Rainy Country (Norton, 2006). She was Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995 and was on the staff of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference for twenty years. In 2003 she received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement.
