Melting Pot

“Who are you to tell us how to live or why,

et cetera?” No Man, of course, and not so tall

as is the current fashion, nor smart enough

in the acceptable modern way, to enthrall

the crowd with stories of my life among

the savages where I was home and growing

baffled day by day, raging through the night

as if it were new music I made, groaing.

It came to me today at lunch, the sound

of women in the next booth, a voice like

Aunt Odile’s—whom I never knew well

nor did I like her, but not her spite

but her voice like home-grown fame, a touch

gravelly, a considerable groan itself, it seemed.

They spoke outmoded French around me, never

to me, except to taunt, I thought. She leaned

above me, on those visits, speaking to Mother

in their private French, laughing. A boy

surrounded by the sound of foreign tongues

knowing what wasn’t meant for him: toy

temptations, suggestive coils of syllables.

I learned Latin, for Mass, and did love

its terrific laddered randomness:

The Blessed hovering Virgin above

every station of a boy’s new path, hormonal

disharmonies, her praises sung into hundreds

the first Tuesday of every month: and yet

Latin could not expose such shreds

of glittering flesh as I found in French,

not like the living tongue whose tip twined

into an Uncle’s mustache as he leered

at the wrong Aunt and winked and a fine

distance crystallized loud there, then

gone. Crashing like German. Father’s family

spoke clear English among the bayous, boys

and girls of immigrants accentless happily

German through two wars, not counting

Civil. I had the tongue for arithmetic

and spoke it beautifully. I loved to count:

precision’s a tempting career, clicking

into a future like an abacus ignoring

all those accents around.

I never learned the luck of any

but English, bland and bound.

But only yesterday I heard a word

the mechanic said in Czech

to his cousin—shop rag—clearly centered

in a welter of incomprehension, the wreck

of my car at their wretched mercies: shop

rag. And he wiped his hands and cried

for me, shrugging like a cousin would.

I wrote a check. I drove home, or tried.

So does it count? Am I a man of passion or

child of comprehension? “Father of little lusts

driving myself home who thinks: Buy some

sentiment, a little like love and she must

speak French this time. She longs

for you, you know; it isn’t just the money.

America loves you for yourself alone”

and so I go for professional help, honey-

blond hair and a disposition like

a happy banker, whose French for dear

sounds like dog; the cost of living

is going up, loving her here.

Copyright Credit: Bin Ramke, "The Melting Pot" from Massacre of Innocents. Copyright © 1995 by Bin Ramke. Reprinted by permission of University of Iowa Press.

Source: Massacre of the Innocents: Poems by Bin Ramke (University of Iowa Press, 1995)