TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

I remember, growing up, reading or hearing somewhere that some sets of twins have a special, secret way to communicate. Twin speak. The siblings could talk without anyone around them knowing exactly what they were saying. That kind of intimacy and privacy seemed like a superpower—like invisibility or being able to fly!

Thinking about it now, I’m not sure how I even heard of twin speak! Was it something from a movie or a book I’d read? Was that concept even real? So I looked it up, and sure enough, and it is a thing. The term is cryptophasia, from the Greek crypto-, meaning secret, and -phasia, meaning speech. Nancy Segal, director of the Twin Studies Center at Cal State Fullerton, writes that, "Based on available studies, it is safe to say that about 40% of twin toddlers engage in some form of 'twin-speak'” or cryptophasia.

I grew up with two younger sisters, and we were all close in age. While we didn’t share a language no one else understood, there were plenty of inside jokes and anecdotes between us. Bits we’d do—and some we still do!

In that sense, maybe every family has a secret language! And when I say family, I mean that broadly defined: chosen family, too—people who are part of your community.

In our house, my kids and I have plenty of private jokes and stories we refer to with a word or phrase—a kind of shorthand only we understand. I think my kids have their own, too, without me—things they talk and joke about, just the two of them. It’s not twin speak, but that kind of intimacy still seems like a superpower to me.

Poetry can be a kind of secret language, too—a way of saying the unsayable, a way of articulating experiences or ideas that are hard to wrap our minds around. Sharing poems with others, the way we share poems on this show, is a way of inviting other people into an intimate conversation.

Today’s poem is one I’ve carried around in my mind for years, one whose language I flash to instinctively when I see a flock of birds, especially a murmuration of starlings. I think of the phrase “never-ending birds”—a phrase coined not by the speaker of this poem, but by the speaker’s child.

Never-ending Birds
by David Baker

That’s us pointing to the clouds. Those are clouds
of birds, now we see, one whole cloud of birds.
There we are, pointing out the car windows.
October. Gray-blue-white olio of birds.
Never-ending birds, you called the first time—
years we say it, the three of us, any
two of us, one of those just endearments.
Apt clarities. Kiss on the lips of hope.
I have another house. Now you have two.
That’s us pointing with our delible whorls
into the faraway, the true-born blue-
white unfeathering cloud of another year.
Another sheet of their never ending.
There’s your mother wetting back your wild curl.
I’m your father. That’s us three, pointing up.
Dear girl. They will not—it’s we who do—end.

“Never-Ending Birds” by David Baker from NEVER-ENDING BIRDS © 2011 David Baker. Used with the permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.