Bruce Dean Willis

is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at The University of Tulsa. His research and publications focus on diverse aspects of poetry and performance, and expressions of Indigenous and African cultures, in Latin American literature, particularly Brazil, Chile, and Mexico.

TIME FOR CHOCOLATE is available for purchase through One Act Play Depot! A brief description:

An intoxicating evening of music, poetry, and chocolate... in pre-conquest Mexico!
Based on a fifteenth-century dialogue among nobles schooled in rhetoric and philosophy, the play pits father against son in a war of words over the power and beauty of artistic expression.

Thursday, August 29, 2013

These things I know

These things I know -
these things that have not yet made known to me how to refer to them -
these are the things I summon to this poem. 
 
These things I know –
they know me too.
We know each other.
We know through each other
intimately. 
Things known so deeply that memory alone does not attain:
the viscera, the nucleus store them,
but they store these things less than they
are these things. 
 
I cannot take them for granted, these things,
because they act, through me, with me, every moment. 
Even to perceive the use or disuse of these things
is for me to act through these things. 
 
These things I know -
how do I know them?
I read them I laugh them I smell them I eat them
I cry them I squeeze them I hide them
I find them...
 
Maybe these things I know are really one big thing,
and that is the thing about which the ceaseless cycle of learning
is also the act of living.