Revive the Archive: Emily Deardorff’s “I Could Not Speak Your Mother’s Tongue” (2008)

Revive the Archive is a weekly series that brings new eyes to previously published works. This week we look at “I Could Not Speak Your Mother’s Tongue” by Emily Deardorff. This piece was originally published in volume 14 of The York Review.

We depart too quickly —
Just before the sun sketches out the hills,
just before

my lips have fully committed you
to memory. The lavender behind your ear,
the scent of it on my pillow —

I clutch it now, like the whole history of
Southern France is held against my chest,
I see them running out into a blue
like that, bluer than your eyes,
dying for no one and nothing, impressions
left in the wake of a pretty little

flower. Could we have
a morning-glory-colored future like that? You
remind me of a garden deep within

wild wilderness, a hyacinth language
I need desperately against my tongue. But
no — already sleep is refurbishing the form of

you onto a distant hill, the place where the ocean
brushes against dry grass, the place where the whole
picture of us slips into foam.

A lighthouse disposes everything.
A lighthouse
cuts open a quadrant of the cobalt sky,

calls us down into closeness, opens up a
bright, patterned, unofficial
truth.
Anyone who doubts that need only
to look out the window,

past the reflection of themselves.
I have looked through the window of you —
I know your beauty and your

distinct edges. I feel something
in the wind that reminds me:
your image sways like a birch tree

in front of the great picture window of
my days.