ODE TO AMERICAN ENGLISH
(Barbara Hamby)

I was missing English one day, American, really
with its pill-popping Hungarian goulash of everything
from Anglo-Saxon to Zulu, because British English
is not the same, if the paperback dictionary
I bought at Brentano's on the Avenue de l'Opera
is any indication, too cultured by half. Oh, the English
know their dahlias, but what about doowop, donuts,
Dick Tracy, Tricky Dick? With their elegant Oxfordian
accents, how could they understand my yearning for the hotrod,
hotdog, hot flash vocabulary of the U. S. of A.,
the fragmented fandango of Dagwood's everyday flattening
of Mr. Beasley on the sidewalk, fetuses floating
on billboards, drive-by monster hip-hop stereos shaking
the windows of my dining room like a 7.5 earthquake,
Ebonics, Spanglish, "you know" used as comma and period,
the inability of 90% of the population to get the present perfect:
I have went, I have saw, I have tooken Jesus into my heart,
the battle cry of the Bible Belt, but no one uses
the King James anymore, only plain-speak versions,
in which Jesus, raising Lazarus from the dead, says,
"Dude, wake up," and the L-man bolts up like a B-movie
mummy. "Whoa, I was toasted." Yes, ma'am,
I miss the mongrel plentitude of American English, its fall-guy
rat-terrier, dog-pound neologisms, the bomb of it all,
the rushing River Jordan backwoods mutability of it, the low-rider,
boom-box cruise of it, from New Joisey to Ha-wah-ya
with its sly dog, malasada-scarfing beach blanket lingo
to the ubiquitous Valley Girl's like-like stuttering,
shopaholic rant. I miss its quotidian beauty, its querulous
back-biting righteous indignation, its preening rotgut
flag-waving cowardice. Suffering Succotash, sputters
Sylvester the Cat; sine die, say the pork-bellied legislators
of the swamps and plains. I miss all those guys, their Tweety-bird
resilience, their Doris Day optimism, the candid unguent
of utter unhappiness on every channel, the midnight televangelist
euphoric stew, the junk mail, voice mail vernacular.
On every boulevard and rue I miss the Tarzan cry of Johnny
Weismueller, Johnny Cash, Johhny B. Goode,
and all the smart-talking, gum-snapping hard-girl dialogue,
finger-popping x-rated street talk, sports babble,
Cheetoes, Cheerios, chili dog diatribes. Yeah, I miss them all,
sitting here on my sidewalk throne sipping champagne
verses lined up like hearses, metaphors juking, nouns zipping
in my head like Corvettes on Dexedrine, French verbs
slitting my throat, yearning for James Dean to jump my curb.

me too

"I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe that there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it."

Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam

This past summer a Yo-Yo Ma CD reduced me to tears in a Barnes & Noble audio department

My most vulnerable memories usually involve public musical experiences, like that one. I'm settled quite snugly behind my intellectual armaments when from beneath my feet a geyser erupts and propels me fifty feet up, over the wall, and out to sea. Suddenly my sister is eyeing me in confusion from the church pew as the deacons march down the aisles during a moving offertory solo. My piano teacher is patting my quivering shoulder in bewilderment, having just demonstrated how you're supposed to play that intermediate Arabasque. The Barnes & Noble clerk politely averts his eyes as I hang up the headphones and blinkingly step around the shelf towards the exit.

Usually I manage to be just tense enough or studiously flippant enough to avoid triggering that geyser. I keep my vision idly trained on the stained glass windows in church, or on the distractingly cute child three pews up. I fiddle with my earrings or trace my collarbone in chapel, keeping my eyes moving across the numerous polite faces surrounding me. I avoid audio departments on principle. I keep my heart sealed in the vacuum-wrap of intellectual distance.

And that makes me wonder about all those other faces around me, so relaxed and vacant, so gently focused. Are they feeling as vulnerable as I am beneath their quiet restraint? Do evoked memories and hopes and fears heap like casualties of war against those careful battlements, to be buried once the song recedes?

Do they yearn, as I do, for the frankness of isolation? Or do they long, even more secretly, for kinship in their emotion--a sympathetic hand to squeeze in fellowship of feeling?

Are we all gingerly seated atop the same geyser, without realizing it?

(What would happen, do you think, if we all surrendered at once? Where would it take us?)