EARLIER THIS YEAR, as I was driving to a poetry reading in southern Colorado, I was trying to remember a certain part of a song that I wanted to sing that evening.

In the last part of the song, there were a few notes that seemd to dip and lower, then the song repeated itself again. I felt I had to get that tiny part accurate before it was sung in public. I asked my father if he remembered it and he did. He was sitting in the back seat and looking out at the mountains, then leaning forwards toward me to listen as I sang. He sang it over and over again. After a half-hour or so, I finally learned it right and we sang it all the way into Durango where I was to read.

Before the reading, I asked my father if he thought I should sing that particular song as it was attached to a poem. He said, "If you know the song and like it when you sing, then sing it. It's your song. The English in the poems, though, is not yours. You are only borrowing that. Once you read it to others, it becomes theirs, also. You are responsible for what that may create. You should be careful with that particular use of English."

He is right in that the language I have chosen to write in and express myself with is not truly mine. I have adopted it and learned to use it for myself. Because I was born into and come out of an oral culture, I learned early that the use of the words involves responsibility and respect for oneself. A person is known primarily by his use of language and song. One's family and upbringing are reflected in the way he or she talks among others. So one does not act alone in the use of words or songs; it always involves his parents, his family and distant relatives. In telling me this again, in English no less, my father was essentially saying, "Remember, you are talking for us all, the things you write will come back to us, because you are part of us. We are together whole."

And so it is in this way of learning and of being spoken to, that I have come to see my work as not even really being mine but as an outlet for those whom I belong to. So that I do not write alone and I am responsible and held accountable for what I write in terms of my history, my family and myself.

It is this sense of having "borrowed" that increases the value of the language for me. In Navajo, there is a song or oration that goes with every activity in daily life. To use these out of context, whether carelessly or in jest, is frowned upon greatly. As I write in English, I am aware of how this particular line or feeling would be in Navajo first--so that I am translating roughly into English the song or the prayer, the story that accompanies whatever I happen to be writing about. Thus it becomes important for my work to carry the "rhythm" or the "feeling" of the story or the vent as it would if I were sitting at my mother's kitchen table telling about the event.

After the reading that night, it was snowing as we drove home. As we neared Shiprock, the snow started to thin out, becoming lighter and clearer. "It was like this the night your sister was born," my mother said and she went on to tell about that night and why this sister possessed this or that characteristic because of her birth-night long ago. In my mother's telling of that event, the weather that night became synonymous with my sister's birth in my mind and the songs she sang immediately after will remember that.

It has been that way my whole life, and my sense of language, my awareness of words becomes entangled with songs, memories, history and the land. It is not separate--the borrowing of English--from the way I would use it in Navajo. My sense of poetics, in this case, becomes a sense of myself.