How to Learn a Language

Las Grutas, Argentina

If it didn’t sink in baby teeth
to learn a language you must again don a bonnet.

Fear not to drool your imperfect syntax
or rug burn from the crawl through blank stares.

Soil your diaper with a misplaced clause!

Find someone to look into your eyes
and tell you everything, knowing you understand only sleep and suckle-

nothing else makes sense, until one day
it does.

Blues for an iPod lost on the bus

He’s listened so many times,
 so often hummed under his breath
 got those tricky slide-chords down
 and without a trace of accent, sings:

“I'm gonna get up in the mornin',
I believe I'll dust my broom.”

Translation will provide no insight in to Robert Johnson
  but he sings anyways, much to the ire of hermanita: “¿Que mierda es eso?”
  the slick lust of the music burns his fingertips.

In twenty years, somewhere between Calí and Popayán
  I’ll listen for him, he who saw to it to remind me
  that music doesn’t come from headphones.

Panela, or The Making of Sugar

Where sugar is made,
-not the kind you know, but panela
beige bricks of saccharine condensed from a sea of cane
that swallows the hut where grim campesinos furnish stalk to the shredder’s maw
ladle brown syrup from vat to vat, each one darker than the next
shovel husk to the flames.

Only a sticky toddler stops to stare at a foreign face.  
No questions asked, none taken.

Four Bolivares buys a green pole rolled in the caramel,
the same that stuck to my six year-old face at the fair
the same that steamed from a rolling boil of birch sap in my back yard 
a world away.

A woman tells me that around here,
there’s always a little panela in empty cupboards
takes the edge off like white sugar never does
of this she is sure.

Hands ladle, shoulders lift, brows sweat  
sweet mist glazes the air
candy coats the way things are.

Eternity

by William Blake

He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy He who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sunrise

High Flight

                                          Colombian Flag at center.

High Flight

      by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up the long delirious, burning blue, I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace Where never lark, or even eagle flew - And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod The high untresspassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee No 412 squadron, RCAF Killed 11 December 1941

Thanks to Susannah N. for first sharing this poem with me, 9 years ago.