I learned that ave meant farewell
because I'm a neurotic cruiser of dictionaries,
of all kinds of dictionaries.
Not because I know anything.
This next one is called "Parts of Speech"
and I'm going to read it here because I dedicate it
to Jane Miller whom I only met once in my life
at a lesbian writer series in Los Angeles.
But I was so impressed by her work.
I love that intellectual jazz kind of thing and the fact
that she memorizes it and embodies it.
I was completely like wired and I
couldn't wait to go home and start writing on something.
And then I wrote this.
And it took me maybe about three weeks
of intense sort of not answering the phone and just
really sort of getting into it.
And then after I finished writing it,
I picked up her book of essays and she
talks a lot about the things that are in the poem.
She has a connection to Eduardo Galeano
for instance and whatever.
So anyway, you'll see, memory and lots of things like that.
So it's dedicated to her.
It's called "Parts of Speech," and there's an epigraph
by Eduardo Galeano from his book, El libro de los abrazos,
The Book of Embraces.
And it's in Spanish.
And it says Si la uva está hecha de vino,
quizá nosotros somos las palabras que cuentan lo que somos.
--which means, if the grape was made of wine,
perhaps we are the words that tell what we are.
"It's the mind that marshals everything
into neat sequence in retrospect,
subject, verb, predicate, fooling us
into believing words don't dig their tangled roots in us.
But rooting around we uncover evidence, fanning files,
figures strobe into motion.
In yours an arm rotates around stone or a grinding bed.
In mine hands materialize to tie scalloping lines onto posts.
Behind our names lie the measured crush
of grain, the transliteration of grapes,
now abstract and separate from us as definitions.
Definitions that, once removed from the body, flap
like flags claiming the moon.
Chances are our ancestors were never
consumed by dependent or independent clauses
but consumed them instead.
Yet what happens to hunger when what we make
is not a thing but an idea, the mind levitating
like a frivolous monarch.
Truth is the vineyards behind the 300-year-old houses
on the Canary Islands appear at first wordless until,
years later, the verb rodrigar jumps out of the Velázquez
to explain them.
The mind, correcting for the continuity error,
splices it behind the houses earlier, so that in the story
I tell you I crossed the ocean verb in hand
like a suitcase ready to lift the vines into sense,
into rows that become the sentences I am speaking to you.
You understand, don't you?
In a kind of dream with a fidelity to the future spoken
by the ventriloquist of the heart.
If you believe the soul is born knowing itself,
then that explains why the bullfighter
hides behind his mother's skirts and Churchill stutters
as a child, a record already skipping and popping with age.
And if Julio Cortázar lived life backward from cynicism
to innocence, from air to egg, and Rilke imagines us not
for a moment hedged by the world of time incessantly flowing
over and over to those who preceded us and to those who
apparently come after us.
What happens to the grammar that creates us
and whose utterance is apparently dependent on us?
Is this why Jane was the first word
I spoke in English sprawled on the cool tiles
of my front porch in Cuba?
A Dick and Jane book spread before us.
My playmates saying ha-neh and I confident
about its pronunciation.
The mind, snakily syntactical, places the revelations
in future tense, like that childhood party
game where things are hidden in plain sight.
It's the context that obscures them.
Standing now, in what passes for now, the doorway of my house,
night a refectory table between eucalyptus trees, at its head,
in diminishing perspective, the past tense props
elbows on the table like a peasant, ravenous.
Closer there gleams a skyline of covered dishes.
Here come the subverting voles of volition, the picnic
ants of anticipation."