Mario

How did he get in Portuguese 202?
He"s from Brazil, he speaks Portuguese
a Brazilian kind of Portuguese, folding in
some rainy toucan calls. Do you object?
Well, he makes the rest of us seem . . .
But he charms us. The syllables run
like vines in a baffling forest where
we"ve never been. His eyes look down
from the canopy. When he's called
to the blackboard, his letters have curious
tails, like fibery strands of meaning
coming loose. He sits at one side
toward the back, looks out at the starlings
bobbing and strutting on the grass.
What birds is he imagining? His eyes
settle on us, one by one, a tuft
of jungle feathers landing on a branch.
We come to class early, wanting to feel
the humidity change when Mario walks in.
Don't listen to Mario, the professor says.
But we do, his talk throatier, slurred,
faint drums and hungry insects underneath
the ornate Lisbon churches in the text,
the situation at the travel desk,
the doctor"s office. Mario
is what we came for, we now believe.
We lose verbs and pronouns somewhere
in the underbrush. We may fail the course.
Students. Students. The language
has rules, conventions, idioms. .
We understand that. Mario does not
resist this order. He studies, takes
the tests. But we can't seem to hold on
to the bank. We slip into some tributary
of the Amazon, slow swirls and eddies,
silt of a continent drifting toward
the sea, and in our ears Mario's sweet
Portuguese, snakes tangled in tree roots,
bats dodging and dipping, now that it's
nightfall, out of the cave of his mouth.

-- by Conrad Hilberry,
published in Shenandoah