My particular radio heaven tonight

is a women’s choir from Cote d’Ivoire praising Jah in French with percussion backup.

I wish I had better luck in my use of languages other than English. I have no easy facility with them. I can stumble through French to speak read and understand; have lost most of the conversational Spanish I acquired through long exposure in the warehouse and hours of poring over bilingual editions of Neruda, Lorca, and Mistral; don’t really get German all that well.

But I have strong affinities with each of them because they each seem to reveal a different way of looking at the universe in the way they are structured and syntaxed.

Almost every day I change my mind as to which language’s nuances best describe creation at that moment for me. Most nights I settle on Spanish with its liquid melancholy. German does the job better other nights when I feel the need for its muscular definition of solid matter in the service of spirit.

I almost never choose English, as it seems to lack something of the necessary metaphysical flair. Perhaps this is why I am a poet who writes in English.

Tonight, though, it’s all about French and its difficult scaffolding of gender and address. There are times when the only way to worship is in French, because God’s so distant that only French will do for the necessary elliptical approach.

I do not know what I am talking about. At least, not in English I don’t.

Again, I think this is why I am a poet…