I'm going to read a poem that starts with a--
this is actually one of the first poems
I wrote as a student.
I wrote this for one of Peter Wild's prosody classes,
and this was about my grandmother.
And when I came here, when I first turned in poems,
I turned them in Spanish because I didn't know how else to hide.
And I didn't find my way into literature through books.
I came from an oral culture, a tradition
of family storytelling, and my literature
came from somewhere else.
So that when I started to read books
and started to be introduced to them,
it was thrilling that you could take ideas, the imagination,
and turn it into words and colors
and other things like that that had meaning.
It was literally thrilling.
This is a poem in terms of my sensibility
about having potentially lost some of that
or come close to it.
When I was growing up, we were punished for speaking Spanish.
By the time I was in junior high school,
I thought I couldn't speak Spanish anymore.
It wasn't true.
It all came back.
It hadn't gone anywhere.
But for a while, I thought I couldn't.
And I was still going to my grandmother's house, at least
once a week, for lunch.
And my grandmother only spoke Spanish.
I thought I only spoke English.
You would think we had a problem.
But a grandmother and a grandson sitting down for lunch,
that's not a problem.
And what we ended up doing was inventing for ourselves
a third language, a better language.
One we concocted together, and it's one I think so many of you
will understand.
She would cook, and I would eat.
[LAUGHTER]
But no joke, I remember it to this day.
This is called "Nani."
This is the diminutive of Nana, which if you go to Mars
and ask where the nanas are they're
going to point you to the grandmothers.
I don't know how that's a universal word
in so many languages.
Nani.
Sitting at her table, she serves the sopa de arroz to me
instinctively.
And I watch her, the absolute mamá, and eat words.
I might have had to say more out of embarrassment.
To speak, now- foreign words I used to speak,
too, dribble down her mouth as she serves me albóndigas.
No more than a third are easy to me.
By the stove, she does something with words
and looks at me only with her back.
I'm full.
I tell her I taste the mint, and watch her speak smiles
at the stove.
All my words make her smile.
Nani never serves herself.
She only watches me with her skin, her hair.
I ask for more.
I watched the mamá warming more tortillas for me.
I watch her fingers in the flame for me.
Near her mouth I see a wrinkle speak
of a man whose body serves the ants like she serves me.
Then more words for more wrinkles about children.
Words about this and that flowing more easily
from these other mouths.
Each serves as a tremendous string around her,
holding her together.
They speak Nani was this and that to me.
And I wonder just how much of me will die with her?
What were the words I could have been or was?
Her insides speak through a hundred wrinkles, now,
more than she can bear, steel around her, shouting then,
what is this thing she serves?
She asks me if I want more.
I own no words to stop her.
Even before I speak, she serves.
You ever tried to tell your grandmother you don't want more
to [LAUGHTER] It doesn't matter what language you speak.
It teaches you a lot about language.
It goes beyond that.
Something I've often said is a dictionary is efficient,
has all the words in the world.
But a poem is effective.
And there's a big difference.
You just need the right words, right?
I mentioned in this poem, "Nani,"
that she is looking at me with her back and her hair.
I wrote that in the '70s.
That poem in the '70s.
And I came back to that because I thought all of these years
that I knew everything about my grandmother.
Turns out I didn't.
And I didn't know why she actually
wore her hair short, which was not the fashion for her.
And in her pictures when she was very young
her hair was very long.