The Maynard
Fall 2020

Subarctic Archipelago Tongue

The farthest north of the Shetland Islands. So it is,
he travelled to the watershed of the Red River Basin.
A glacier river moving north as if it might find
passage forward into a tongue not of his wife’s or her kin.
Theirs a tongue fusing English, Cree, and French.
He looked for northern currents, eddies of water movement
toward sinewy diphthongs, long vowels, and percussive consonants:
Hit’s göd ta lay you doon in your ain calf ground.
Means more than it’s good to be home.
Means in the reflective, how good it is to feel, to sink into,
who you are. So it is, a Shetlandic tongue set loose
on the confluence of Bois de Sioux and Otter Tail Rivers.
Looking for the subarctic archipelago of Scotland.
Until loose, it’s lost, and his tongue
takes up vowels which he instinctively extends
as if he can make Michif more Shetlandic.
His wife tells him how he inserts the hhhh
across the Michif tongue leaving it filled with inhalations of sound like a hum of the letter H
as if the Métis need a mouthful of air.
She tries to tell him how to arrange
the English with the Cree and soften the French.
He thinks how it is only the lilt of the Scottish remaining
in his children’s hands and in their feet. In the fiddle and the jig.