the t/v distinction

tutoyer. sich duzen. jij zeggen. these are
the soft sides
of a distinction we English
speakers live without

socio-linguists call it tu/vous weighing
intimacy against
distance

‘du’ is no make-up, shaggy socks and doughnuts
for breakfast it is not ‘Sie’ arched
eyebrows, silk underwear or eggs
benedict it is we belong
to each other not
do I know you

but I am an English speaker I am not used
to these distinctions

when my grandmother retreated into webs
into ancient fog in south
Holland my mother visited her manicured
her nails rinsed her violet-blue hair
sat with her

my grandmother said suddenly to her
‘wie bent u’ who are you
stranger

I am your daughter said my mother I am
Ada

I had a daughter once called Ada, said my formal
senile grandmother oh, she was my own girl she was
beautiful like popping orange fire roasting chestnuts
in the autumn

if she had only said ‘wie ben jij’
who art thou, whispered my raw-eyed mother

I am an English speaker I could only
sit with her

you never thought

I could rear so high and bite
your head off your shoulders like
puffed corn like
Cheetos that I could grab

your life like a shirt
from the dryer snap
shake it out fold it so
small and drop it off so
easily at the thrift store

striding by
on my high
long legs headed
for Jupiter

just a few things
you never thought

vocation

he thought was a monk wearing
brown wool wearing
silence

in sweet tenor on four
or five bronzed notes he knelt
on the polished stone

of what was not him but was
all him, he woke greatly

to pealing bronze
bells spent his days in thrall
to an oboe

in his dreams at midday the sun
dropped on him drenched him
in thick

butterscotch in whole blankets
of angry bees

the night dancers

would come and get us if we didn’t go to bed
and stay there, Teresa said
they float along at ground level
in white gowns with fire
between their hands they eat dead bodies
all night

during the day they could be
anyone she said they are so good
at pretending

they could be tall Isaka
glistening blue-black in
his vegetable garden chasing us
off carrot beds and cape
gooseberries knocking down for us
the pinkest guava the ripest
mango

or hard-handed Teresa herself
wood-smoke-smelling wiping
noses on her apron telling catastrophic bedtime
stories of Kintu the first
man of Nambi the first wife or

our thin tired
mother tapping
her soft-boiled egg at breakfast our square
father mutely rehearsing
his plea to the jury for that week’s
complicated case

we went to bed and
stayed there marveling

at their beautiful
subterfuge all of them just waiting 
for floating white night for fire
between their hands and the rich taste