Then I'll read-- this is only in English, because I didn't
bring the Spanish version.
So I will just have to read it in English.
"Language Current."
"English is like a nuclear reactor.
I'm in it right now, As I shoot down
its fast track, small bits of skin,
fragments, cells, stick to my side.
Once in a while, whole sentences gush forth, and slam
themselves against the page, condensing the rapid sprays
of pellets into separate words.
Sometimes I travel at 186,000 miles an hour,
the speed of light, when I lie sleepless on the bed at night.
No excess baggage is allowed, no playful baroque tendrils
curling this way and that, no dreamtime walkabout all the way
down to Australia.
In English, you have to know where
you're going, either towards the splitting of the self,
or the blasting of the molecules around you.
Spanish is a very different tongue.
It's deeper and darker, with so many twists and turns,
it makes me feel like I'm navigating the uterus.
Shards of gleaming stone--
emerald, amethyst, opal-- wink at me
as I swim down its moist shaft.
It goes deeper than the English Channel, all the way down
the birth canal and beyond."