Helen Keller, 1880-1968

1 THE SOURCE

A well
that ran deeper
than roots
and memory

a spring
that wanted to climb
into a world
of mirrors

a pump and a hand
that spoke
the thing and its name

the flash
so cold, so clear
it burned like ice
before it bloomed
into light

2 THE WORD WATER

The word water, meaning

what leaps on your hands
under the pump

what crawls down your back
from the washcloth

what runs down your cheeks
and tastes salty

what licks your feet
in the early morning grass

what 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

3 THE SAVIORS

Before you knew the word dream
and the word fire, you dreamed of fires.
Later you wrote how the swaying shapes—
orange, were they, did you
dream in color?—
closed in around you, hot
and threatening, a lynch mob
from which you could not escape
except by screaming and waking.
Then the words came,
kept coming, water, mother,
father, flower, door,
earth, give, open,
a growing army, proof
against the ring of fire.
You slept. You smiled in your sleep.
You slept all night without screaming.
You still did not know the word
language, the word saved.

4 THE WORD FEELING

“You feel with your fingers,”
the teacher told us,
dismissing expressions
of love and fear.
He was a tyrant
and wore a large ring.

Years later, I understood,
when I read about you, at twelve,
in a Niagara Falls hotel,
your face overwhelmed 
by the roar you felt
when you pressed your fingers
against the windowsill,

and how, on another day,
you said you loved white roses,
meaning the thin-skinned sisters
of the fleshier reds.

5 THE WORD VAST

Flying above the clouds
I am in a blank space,
perhaps a sunlit version 
of your darker world.

And breaking through the clouds
I am above a country
scaled to your palpable map,
your raised geography.

I dream of touching the winter trees,
their stiff unruly hair,
and the collection of roofs
from a child’s bag of blocks;
the land laid out like a chocolate bar,
squares bordered by ridges
that intersect at right angles;
hills that fit the palm of your hand,
railroad tracks for your fingers.

I used to wonder how you made
the leap from your shallow liquid
to the real Mississippi,
how you got to the ships that lie
on the Atlantic floor.

But coming down, approaching—
wheels out, already gripping
the runway—I think it was easy.
Your world was imagination,
all possible worlds, while mine
shrinks with the speed of speed.

One hour: New York/Chicago.
The long drawn-out idea
of the word vast contracts
into four brief letters,
already obsolete.

6 THE WORD AUTUMN

Helen, this is a maple leaf.
It is a hand. Put your fingers
against the five of the leaf
and feel how they match.
It is golden,
that is to say the feeling
that lies down deep inside you
like an unhurried animal
and keeps you warm longer
than green or red. Each tree
has a thousand golden hands,
soon they will fall all around you.
Helen, it is autumn,
the sun today bears down
intense as an evangelist
and imprints each hand once more
with its large signature
before moving on to another town.