Ameslan
 
Apparently in our other life we are small-time politicoes in Alabama, Teresa and I,
Because the Chevy with Heart of Dixie plates in the diner parking lot
Has on its bumper Hober for Town Council, Cauthen for Town Supervisor,
In the same typeface, same blue-and-white, apparently we're on the ticket together.
 
We're thinking about this through most of the time it takes the waitress to bring dinner.
We don't know anyone, except relations, with our names. Teresa says it should
Tell me something: all day I've been grousing we can never know one another really,
Not just the two of us but all of us, everyone latched forever inside our
 
Fists of skullbone to play guess-and-hope with the other's mixed meanings and little
Timid disclosures. And I say, yes, it does tell me something. Then Teresa notices
The next table over two old men signing, the kind of old men you'd maybe see
Playing chess in a place like this, and the waitress drops off our food and Teresa says
 
She can almost follow what they're signing, but not quite. I didn't know she
Knew Ameslan. There was a deaf kid at the high school where she worked,
And she picked up some. Another little fact's-worth of her. Well. So we eat, not saying
Much of anything, and only half-watch these old men, not wanting to be impolite,
 
So Teresa doesn't catch them nodding hello to a couple maybe thirty years old,
Probably lovers, who take the table in the corner and start signing broadly:
By their faces, an argument. We must be somewhere near a deaf school.
I point them out to Teresa. This time, she can understand much more
What's being said. They're angry, their gestures are bigger. The woman,
Teresa thinks, is saying I don't care, or maybe I don't understand: pointing to herself,
placing a half-made fist on her brow, then turning it, opening the fingers.
The man says Calm down. This one Teresa's sure she's got, and she inclines her head
 
In that gesture which makes her, all unaware, more beautiful, although it is not
For her beauty that I love her, but because she has lowered her head to take my hands
And clumsily bend them into the sign calm down, when she could have just as easily
Clumsily demonstated it herself. Calm down. The man likes it so well he says it again,
 
Or it's the only thing he can say now, and we belatedly figure we are voyeurs
And let them go about their business. Teresa teaches me the signs for I didn't mean it,
Forgive me, Let me make it up to you -- absurdly, she's whispering their meanings --
And the letters of the alphabet, the numbers. When we look up, they're still
 
Going at it, but the old men are gone. We decide to leave. Out into another
Sodden late summer night. By now, the car with us on the bumper is forgotten,
And when we step outside and remember it, gone. Fair enough. With luck the two of us
Might cure some Town Hall in the Alabama sticks. She more than I,
 
Of course. It's late, past closing time, if the diner wasn't open all night. Jesus,
Don't let them sit there arguing silently all night. Time, sometime soon,
For them to go home: I hope to the same home, and the same one they left. Meanwhile
There's only a few lights left on this side of town, cricket song in the trees,
 
Or underneath the parked cars, nowhere and everywhere. If anybody besides Teresa
Were with me, I might try to explicate the song: so many chirps per minute, so many
Degrees Fahrenheit. A single, focused, indifferent meaning, though God knows what they
Think they're saying. I let her in the car, she closes the door. And I hear
 
The dull thunk of the latch. Cricket song surrounds me, a sound that goes back
Unchanged maybe a hundred million years. Teresa, are we made worse than these?
I see my own face, the one that never ceases to startle and trouble me,
In the passenger window's smeared glass. And behind it you set your purse
 
Down, fasten the seat belt, smooth your shirt there in that peculiar little world. Then look up,
And I'm caught staring again. You blush when it should be me, laugh a bit. I don't want
To look away, not yet, but, of course, I do. I didn't know you knew Ameslan,
Didn't know you could see in our foolish hands some half-formed, unchanging song.