And this is another but much shorter catalog.
This one is called "The Word Water."
And it's one poem out of a sequence
of poems called "Talking To Helen,"
Helen being Helen Keller.
And in this sequence of poems, what I was trying to do
was imagining that I was explaining the meaning of words
to someone who could neither hear nor see,
using tactile images.
"The Word Water. " And water, of course,
was the first word that Helen understood as a word,
as language.
It was from that word that the whole idea that language--
that everything had a name, and the world was
made up out of language, and world could be understood
through language, came to her with that initial word water.
The word water, meaning what leaps on your hands,
under the pump, but crawls down your back from the washcloth.
What runs down your cheeks and tastes salty.
What licks your feet in the early morning
grass with spits out smooth rocks and lets
you fly like a fish.
What coaxes green from black and brown seeds.
Helen, try to imagine green.
What has one home in the sky, another in the Earth?
What will teach you the word deep, and the word cleanse,
the word flow, and the word drown, the word inexhaustible,
and the word birth?
What is beginning to quench your thirst,
for the real name of the world?