Hungary 

you tell me
that sometimes
you google the
immigration process
to countries whose
languages you
know you'll
never be able to learn--
you tell me 
Hungarian isn't
a romance language or
germanic-- that it's
Uralic & neither of
us know what that means
but we know we could
at least get lost
in it-- i trust
you because sometimes
i want to wipe
my body clean of
all traces of myself--
it's not that i don't
like my life--
it's that i'm curious--
i'm curious of 
millions of iterations
of my tongue?
what poetry would
i write if i
had spoken 
hungarian instead of
english?
would i have written
more about meadows
& flowers?
would i be less
infectiously 
nostalgic about
your barefoot backyard
worlds?
i'm getting us
two plane tickets
with the last money
in my bank account--
become untied with
me-- let's make
new names--
are there churches 
you want to visit
in Budapest?
let's lock arms
so we don't get
lost from each other--
i'm okay with
being no one if
you will walk with
me-- exchange
vows of silence--
i can feel the 
lights from the
széchenyi chain bridge
dripping
into the danube river--
we fall in too
& cut out our
tongues to let them
swim as fish--
we get more
& more distant from 
our old lives--
from the green mailbox
on noble street--
from the broken
blue & yellow glasses
on the red speckled
kitchen floor--
the sound of thrashing
corn melts
into water churning
around us &
when our tongues
swim back they speak
perfect hungarian--
soaked we emerge--
night is genuflecting--
it's saturday &
tomorrow we 
will have to find a church
for you--
we stop a young
couple
to ask for directions
to a hotel to
spend the night 
& they think
we belong here with
our english fed to
the water--
with the river
slicing our bodies
in half-- 
what rivers have divide
you?
where do you 
go to wash off 
the sun?
the couple gives
instructions-- 
walk up
two blocks 
& on the left 
there is a 
a step-ladder
you can take all
the way to the front
lawn of the moon--
they paused to add
oh & welcome home
welcome home 
& as we walk away 
i put my arm
around you &
say 
welcome home
welcome home
in a language  
neither of 
us will ever know