Speaking Gillican by Jane McKinley from The Georgia Review

It was a perfect language—
rarefied, precise, and all my own.
At three I spoke it fluently
to dust motes in prismatic light,
and to the bear who sang Brahms
each night as headlights prowled
across my bedroom walls.

Gillican gave voice to the night
my father scooped me out of bed
to see the northern lights,
to the witch who lived in granny's cellar,
who hid in ripples of sea-green glass.
It could evoke the ethereal spirit
of the stray cat we took in, moth-grey
fur in clumps, three legs, half a tail.

If Gillican had words for loss or death
I don't remember what they were.
I lost a red boot—stuck in the mud
when I fled from a giant bumblebee—
but it happened in a dream.
Animals died—old ewes, frumpy
in their tattered coats after shearing.
There was a word for orphans—lambs
who nuzzled our knees after we fed them—
and an expression for the black-eyed guppies
whose mother ate them up.

I made up a lovely name
for the tortoises from Galápagos,
the ones I sat on at the Reptile Gardens.
I saw them again last summer—
all of them were still alive, thriving
on melons and prickly pears
eaten in slow motion.

JANE MCKINLEY
The Georgia Review 
Fall 2010