One of my favorite places to hang out
is the language lab, universities.
I don't know if many of you have frequented them.
I would go there, of course, to see the people in the pilots'
headphones and everything.
But what I really like is hearing the obsessive regret
that goes on in so many different languages.
If you remember, it's only ever the same problems,
but is the same problem in god knows how many languages.
This is about a language lab at Cornell University.
"Doing Spanish, a young girl resumes her lament, briskly,
in a blood-chilling monotone.
'My father is very sick, he is growing thin and pale.
Yes, my mother is sick too, and we are terribly worried.'
For half an hour, a slim marzipany voice
renders color, fruit, and weather in French.
He orders lunch in a cafe, then his mood sours.
'I was hungry,' he moans to his tape recorder.
And mispronouncing only one vowel, says instead,
'I had a woman.'
Sniggers from the Belgians and Ghanaians.
A Black face drifts around the booth wall like a nimbus:
faim, not femme.
He wags a long finger: bad trouble you mix them.
Hunched over a machine, a Syrian mutters, 'I am not your sister,
I am nobody's sister.'
A Bolivian boy waves from a corner seat, his teeth
fiery in the bomb-bright neon.
'Hola, Diana, how's your sick family today?'
His new English wobbles like a first bicycle.
'About the same,' I answer, dragging off my headset.
'Mom's dying, dad's still in that same auto wreck.'
'I'm sorry, so terribly sorry,' a Korean bows,
as if telling Hail Marys.
'So sorry, so terribly sorry, so sorry,' while a spiky red-head
repents in Portuguese for all the heresy and lust she looks
forward to.
Only false gods rule in this babble
of curt pleas and one syllable verbs,
where the heart's always blunt enough to slap a noun on.
And too willingly, the felt dissolves in the salable.
The room swells with an extra Afghan, Thai, or Swede
and the occasional onlooker, trying to make sense of it,
finds the world shrunk to 25 bright islands, an archipelago
of madness and regret."
[APPLAUSE]