Becoming American

The Yankees needed ditch diggers,
sandhogs, fodder for the wild
hunger of their mills and sent out
invitations with no RSVPs.
My people came then, dimly knowing
they had to cut away the baggage
of the selves they brought with them.
The cutting was strangely easy
as they gaped at clerks smoothing
harsh corners off their names,
docking final vowels like tails.
Distance helped the cutting, too —
the ocean roiling behind them
with all that danger and disease,
the old country already swallowed
by the horizon's bulging lead.
At most it was only a village,
a hut, the midden out back
all frozen in the endless winter
of the past. The new language
squeezed more color from that past,
making it shameful — starving winds
and nothingness. They tugged
the new words into their mouths
like odd-shaped and exotic food,
curiously spiced, hard to choke down.
They rolled its oddness on their
tongues, tried to suck the sense
from it and the new ran together
with the old like milk in coffee,
the color changing until the old
was mostly gone, half their lives
dropping off the edge of the world.
Though some — my grandmother, maybe
yours — spat out the venom of the new words
and hung suspended between the two
languages, citizens of neither until
they lost both. Most learned the tricks
of getting by — how to count their pay,
the names of tools. Later they
prayed their children would have
no accents, knowing how their own
stubborn tongues kept them alien
and laughable, singsong and brogue
impossible to scrape away.
And then the generations forgot
their way across the muddy wilderness —
threshing wheat, scraping coal
from the dark, laying ties, clearing
homesteads with their bare hands.
They clawed away all memories
of the Atlantic and finally reached
the third and fourth generations
where the crops turned ironic.
The old thought it was a kind
of madness. Everything that was so
expensively forgotten, the crumpled
sheets of the past now started singing
like a siren to the young and they
longed for all those lost places.
They wanted the amnesia reversed.
They wanted the erased words back
in their mouths. The destroyed huts,
every ditch and abandoned village
crooned to them, bright and dear
and hopelessly beyond their reach.

Vern Rutsala
How We Spent Our Time
The University of Akron Press

Copyright © 2006 by Vern Rutsala.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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