Two more poems-- see if we can bring a little light
into this space.
This was a poem-- it was written in a renga, which
is a very elaborate Japanese form, which is a chain poem
form which has been Americanized,
which means that all the rules were dropped,
except one, that the poem that you receive, the last line,
becomes your title.
So the title of this, which was written in a renga with other
women, "Of a Sun She Can Remember. "
And it is a true story of the day that Annie Sullivan spilled
water into one of Helen Keller's hands and spelled "water"
into the other.
So it also has this nice circumstance
that this was something--
words from one woman's hand to another.
It's very much my notion of what language is for.
And if it had an epigraph, I think
it would be that line from Theodore Roethke,
"In a dark time, the eye begins to see."
"After they had been in the woods,
after the living tongue woke Helen's hand, afterwards,
they went back to the little house of exile,
Annie and Helen, who had lived in the silent dark,
like a bat without radar in the back of a cave.
And she picked up the broken doll
she had dismembered that morning in her rage.
And limb by limb, her agile fingers moving
with their fine intelligence over each part,
she re-membered the little figure of the human.
And though she was inside now, and it was all still dark,
she remembered the missing sun with a slow wash of warmth
on her shoulders, on her back, as when
you step shivering out of a dank shade
into the sun's sudden balm.
And as the warmth spread, it felt
like the other side of water.
And that is how she knew how light on water looks.
And she put her outspread hands into the idea of it.
And she lifted the lines of light,
cross-hatched like a web, out of the water, and dripping,
stretched a golden net of meaning in the light."