The Garden of Languages

You can't draw a plan for it,
can't trace on your graph paper how

it lays itself out. In the soil you'd find dung,
peat from the long past, shards of earth's mantle,

castings of worms. You may learn
of bees' idiom, how they dance the location

of foxglove or bergamot. You know that it's brushed
with birds' war-cries, love-slang. Know

butterflies' semaphore (verbena! sweet pepperbush!)
graces it. Know how it's been interwoven

by all the month's dialects, from leavy-fill
to the planter's subterranean dark.

You can excavate, translate — though
poorly. Can try to decode the glyphs and

their grammar. But you must also
know none

of these argots is yours.

Copyright © 2006 Jeanne Larsen All rights reserved
from Green Mountains Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission