Natasha Sajé

T

Ursula is sure hybrids are sterile, like mules. I say
ligers and tigons, those spotted and striped hybrid cats,
aren’t healthy, and they’re confused about whether to hunt alone

or in packs, but they can breed. We’re arguing in a restaurant
in Trieste: Ursula’s Italian is better, and I’m sure
couscous is semolina, just bigger, although I don’t know

what constitutes a species, whether Australopithecus
is the same as Cro-Magnon. Each of us thinking, boy, I’m glad
I’m not married to her. Is our quarrel scientific—

she wants things fixed, I like them open? Or about names
and groups—the threshold of language? Faith exists in a world
where every day someone’s painting quail heads black or cloning

a baby. Why argue if there’s no money or land at stake;
is it just talk? The city’s Austro-Hungarian
and Italian, Alpine and Mediterranean,

with a beach that separates men and women with
an eight-foot wall built into the sea. Ursula photographed
me among the half-naked bodies, ridiculous in my

sunhat and shorts. Yet I’m invisible to the women;
like a pigeon, I don’t count, and neither do they, to me.
Eighty years ago, James Joyce and Italo Svevo—

Irishman and Italian-Austrian Jew—did they debate
Darwin? Did they stiffen their necks, gesticulate knives,
someone always speaking a foreign tongue? Ursula’s from

Bern, and my German’s shot with English, or should I say
American? The German for hybrid and sterile is close
to English—it’s fertile that won’t come to me. Mule is esel,

jackass. That beach suggests a different century, not
lesbian monkeys and the error of the gametic
binary, but categories crisp as breadsticks. Maybe

lions and tigers shouldn’t be bred. Ursula and I
are crow and jay, squawking at each other from across
the table. Taxonomy, from taxis, order, not from tax,

tangere, touch.

NATASHE SAJÉ is the author of two books of poems, Red under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994) and Bend (Tupelo, 2004) and many essays. Her essays on poetry have been published and are forthcoming in the Writer’s Chronicle, among other journals. She teaches at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and in Vermont College’s MFA program. She spent the spring of 2005 in Slovenia as a Fulbright scholar teaching the sociology of art at the University of Ljubljana.

“T” appears in our Autumn 2005 issue.

return to top