The Love Poem in a Language I Barely Speak
I wrote it with a dictionary and delivered it with my whole chest.
Portuguese has a word for missing someone who is standing right in front of you, and I learned it in a laundromat on Western Avenue in February, from a woman who folded towels like they had personally wronged her.
Her name was Luiza, and by the time the towels were done I was in trouble.
She was from Belo Horizonte, in Chicago on a two year research grant, studying soil. Actual soil. She could tell you the age of dirt by the way it held water, and she told me this the way other people mention their zodiac sign, casually, at eleven at night, while a dryer thumped between us like a heart with a shoe in it.
My sock had disappeared into machine number nine. She had witnessed the whole thing. "It is gone," she said. "The machine keeps a tax." Her English was better than mine and still she apologized for it constantly, which I later learned is a thing bilingual people do to make monolingual people feel less like furniture.
I am furniture. Let me be clear about my qualifications. I speak English and roughly forty words of restaurant Spanish. But I walked home that night through the gray crust of Chicago snow repeating one word she had used, saudade, because she said there was no English for it and I wanted to prove her wrong and could not.
So I decided to prove something else instead.
There is a used bookstore on Milwaukee Avenue where the language section is one shelf, alphabetical by optimism. I bought a Portuguese English dictionary printed in 1987. It smelled like somebody's basement and cost four dollars, and for the next six weeks it was the most important object I owned.
Here is what nobody tells you about writing a love poem in a language you do not speak: the dictionary gives you the nouns and then abandons you at the verbs. Portuguese verbs conjugate like they are being paid by the syllable. I wanted to say you make me want to be braver. What I could actually build was closer to you cause in me the desire of more courage, which sounds like a legal document filed by a knight.
I worked on it at my kitchen table with the radio on. I worked on it on the Blue Line with the dictionary open on my knees while a man across the aisle watched me like I was doing a crossword wrong. I whispered conjugations into my collar at work until a coworker asked if I was praying, and I said yes, because in a way I was.
Fourteen lines. Six weeks.
I have written entire work presentations in forty minutes, and this small wrong thing took longer than my last relationship's final argument.
I had also been reading, in that stretch, everything I could find about how other people had said it, poems filed under love by writers far above my weight class. Neruda made it look easy... Neruda was not working from a basement dictionary with a coffee ring on the letter S.
The line I was proudest of was supposed to say you are the star of my sky. I checked it twice. I copied it out in my best handwriting: Você é a estrada do meu céu. If you speak Portuguese... you already know what happened. Estrela is star. Estrada is road. I told a woman with two degrees and a federal research grant that she was the highway of my sky.
I delivered it on a Tuesday, in the laundromat, with my whole chest.
She was at the folding table. I set the page down on top of her towels like a subpoena and stood there while my hands did something insane at my sides. She read it once. She read it twice... Then she made a sound I had never heard from her, a kind of collapsing hiccup, and she laughed until she had to hold the table.
"The highway," she kept saying. "I am the highway of your sky." Tears... actual tears... were moving down her face. An old man by the vending machine turned his whole body around to watch me be destroyed.
I reached for the page to take it back and she pulled it away from me, hard, and pressed it flat against her chest with both hands.
And that is when I noticed she had stopped laughing.
"You conjugated for me," she said. "Do you understand? Nobody conjugates for me. People wave. People point at menus. You bought a dictionary."
Then she reached into the tote bag she carried everywhere and took out a folded page, soft at the creases from being opened and closed too many times, and handed it to me without looking at my face.
It was a poem. In English. Dated three weeks before mine.
Her English, so careful when she spoke it, had gone gorgeously wrong on paper. You are the most quiet loud I have known, one line said. Another: with you the winter is a rumor. She had been carrying it since February, waiting, she told me later, until she was sure I was worth embarrassing herself for.
Fluency is a nice trick, but it is not love. Love is agreeing to sound like a fool in someone's mother tongue and then handing them the evidence.
We read our wrong poems out loud to each other at the folding table while the dryers went around. Hers made me feel like weather. Mine made her laugh again in three new places she had been too polite to laugh at the first time. The old man by the vending machine gave up on us entirely and left his socks behind.
A year on, at her insistence, I entered my poem in a monthly poetry contest, mistakes intact, with a note explaining exactly none of them. It did not win. She has never once let me forget that hers, which she posted on a community wall for poets under a fake name, collected seventeen comments, one of which said only: crying at the airport.
People ask how we managed it, the language thing, as if it were a river we had to swim. The truth is the gap was the whole romance. Every word either of us got wrong was proof we were reaching. You cannot fake that kind of effort, and you cannot buy it, except technically I did, for four dollars, on Milwaukee Avenue.
The dictionary lives on our shelf now, next to an English one she bought in Belo Horizonte that same winter, four thousand miles away, for the same secret reason. Both of them wrong in places. Both of them kept.
Some nights she still calls me her highway. I have stopped correcting it. There are worse things to be than the long road somebody chose, on purpose, in the wrong language... all the way home.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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