Brings me to the matter of the schools
and what kids are getting in the schools this year,
of course, is Columbus.
Let's do Columbus.
[EXASPERATED HISS] Don't worry, I'm going to take care of it.
[LAUGHTER]
I decided, since I was traveling all over the country this year,
being confronted with this question, to do some research.
And I owe a particular debt to a book called The Conquest
of Paradise, by Kirkpatrick Sale, S-A-L-E.
There's another excellent book called, Columbus--
His Enterprise, by Hans Koning.
Check them out.
In any case, this poem is called "The Hidalgo's Hat
and a Hawk's Bell of Gold."
And again, there is some Spanish in the poem,
which I will translate.
Hidalgos were the lesser Spanish nobility, many of whom
followed Columbus to the New World in search of riches.
I refer also to Indio, which, of course, was
the mistaken nomenclature applied to the locals--
Indian.
Española-- the island we now know today as the Dominican
Republic and Haiti.
Columbus was the governor of that island from 1494 to 1500.
Most people are not aware of that.
They think of him only as the admiral on the ocean sea.
But indeed, he was there as governor.
And while there, he instituted a tribute system,
so that the Indians could pay him gold.
And that is at the center of this poem.
I mention also Caciques, The Caciques were the leaders
of the Indigenous people, the Taínos.
And I refer as well to Isabella.
Isabella was, of course, the queen at that time,
but also the name for an early capital of Española,
which was quickly abandoned a few years after its founding,
and then became the source for many a ghost story,
which also turns up here.
Again the title, "The Hidalgo's Hat and a Hawk's Bell of Gold."
"Columbus hallucinated gold wherever sunlight
darted from rock to water.
Spelled the word slowly in his logbook,
so that the Lord might see, and blow his ship
into a storm of gleaming dust.
When god would not puff his cheeks for trade winds of gold,
the Admiral flourished a decree on parchment.
A hawk's bell full of gold from every Indio where
the river's gilded the soil of Española--
1495.
The Indios could only load the bells with mirrored sunlight.
For bells without gold, the hands
are pressed together as if in prayer, gripped on the block.
Then the knobs of wrists were splintered
by a bright and heavy sword.
Their stumps became torches, seething flames of blood.
The vowels of their language lamentations
flattening the tongue.
While the Admiral slept in the exhaustion of dysentery,
or amused the queen with his zoo of shackled Caciques,
the town he named Isabella dissolved into the stones,
like a rumor of gold, deserted swamp crowned.
There is a spirit legend that the moans
of men in rusting helmets would radiate from the vine
matted walls, starved with a mouthful of bark,
a man with a brain soaking in syphilis,
or digging an arrowhead from the eye fired by an Indio
with two hands.
Someone saw the Hidalgos there.
Ghosts of noblemen, bowing in a row, a swirl of velvet cloaks.
As each swept off his feathered hat in greeting,
his head unscrewed from the hollow between caped shoulders,
swinging in the hat like a cannonball in a sack."
So Columbus [? se acabó ?].