"Simple Words for Big Ideas."
Don't try to sound learned or literary
when writing about sex.
It demands the simplest words.
One should write about it using the very words in which he
thinks of it.
Never literalize it, lessening individuality and smudging out
its color.
The sage bundle in its abalone at the foot of the bed,
he asked about it jokingly, are you a curandero?
And once when we lay in impossibly bright moonlight
through the blinds, we looked at our striped legs, torsos,
and feet.
I noted his dark hands and face, exposed to the high desert
sun, the surprise of dark nipples, and even darker sex.
The Jumanos, the striped ones of the Southern pueblos,
their clay ollas painted with painted peoples, Tompiro.
Gone now, but you're here next to me, stripped and striped
and smelling of rivers.
The homely concrete Anglo-Saxon, of which we naturally
think and speak, more effective than the abstract Latin
and his unhappy heritage.
I beg to disagree.
Colonization via language, that part of our vocabulary
which has come to us through the French from the Latin,
has added greatly to the reach and exactness
of the English language.
But it's valuable as an addition to our stock
of Anglo-Saxon words, not as a substitute for it.
Our stock?
Whose stock?
Who speaks?
Who listens?
Who learns?
Who loses?
Who knocks?
Who opens?
Who's turned away?
This evening you knock lightly at the screen door.
400 women and children are turned away.
Knock lightly, America.
We bare our teeth in moonlight.
The gold in your mouth gleams.
They bare blinding veneers and smash fists against busloads
of entering immigrants.
They wave flags and carry homemade signs.
"Return to sender."
"Respect our 'sick' country."
"Speak English."
America has been invaded, but that was 500 years ago.
I lie along your back to cover you.