Brian Christopher
Barriers
My new neighbors speak only Russian,
their conversations thick and blurred with consonants.
Even their four-year-old daughter,
her blonde curls bouncing as she plays alone,
sings in this dark language
from which I cannot decode a single syllable,
her melodies sweet and lilting as nursery rhymes.
When I see them each day, I wave, say "hello,"
and they mimic my word and action back to me
but cannot seem to wrap their tongues around the English,
as if it were too thin and inconsequential to be worthy
of anything but an errant exhale, almost like a sigh.
A few weeks ago, as I worked on my car,
a man came to fix their stove.
For five minutes he tried to explain this
to the woman who answered the door,
but then gave up and left, unable to bridge the distance.
Last weekend, they had friends over to visit,
and they stood around drinking beer, laughing,
and listening to Russian rock-n-roll on the stereo.
In the four months they have lived beside me,
I have come to love the mysterious music of their voices.
At first, I distrusted them reflexively,
imagining conspiracies and secret plots
curling in the patterns of their speech.
But now, as I hear them talking amongst themselves
while they are folding clothes in the garage
or staring out at the trees and the sky,
I suspect they are merely discussing the weather,
the beauty of the view, or the fact
that only a few blocks away there is a store
where they can choose from a dozen brands of bread
and toothpaste and toilet paper, day or night,
and that here in America, no one can tell them
how much they do or do not need.
Brian Christopher runs the Quiet Lion press in Portland, Oregon, and is the publisher of the Rain City Review. See his other poem this issue, Progressive Anatomy.
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