Bienvenidos todos.
Thank you all for coming tonight.
It's such an honor to be reading with Ofelia
and Sherwin and Natalia, who's out there somewhere.
But there are so many friends in the audience tonight,
so many friends and students.
But I especially want to acknowledge the Sheltons, Dick
and Lois.
Dick was my teacher many years ago,
who introduced me to many things,
but surrealism in particular.
I'm not going to read anything surreal tonight.
I want to thank Gail and Renee and Wendy.
And I especially want to thank Karla Elling
for the wonderful book that she produced,
that is a testament to some of this great language
that we're in the middle of, this great desert
ocean of words that I'm happy to swim in.
I'm going to start by reading something
that has to do with the border, that was not
one of the assigned poems.
But it's something I wrote at the behest
of then-governor Janet Napolitano,
in honor of the visit of then-president Vicente
Fox of Mexico.
And I got to read this with him standing next to me.
I wish he'd listened.
This poem is called "Borderlines."
"Líneas Fronterizas."
And it begins with an epigraph.
"A weight carried by two weighs only half as much."
"Un peso cargado por dos no pesa más que la mitad."
"The world on a map looks like the drawing
of a cow in a butcher shop, all those lines showing
where to cut.
El mundo en un mapa parece el dibujo de una vaca en la carnicería, todas esas líneas mostrando dónde cortar.
Pero ese dibujo de la vaca es también un rompecabezas, mostrando cómo todas las piezas extrañas caben muy bien juntas.
But that drawing of the cow is also a jigsaw puzzle,
showing just as much how very well all the strange parts fit
together.
La manera en que miramos el dibujo nos hace ver la diferencia.
The way in which we hold the drawing
makes all the difference.
Parecemos vivir en un mundo de mapas:
pero en verdad vivimos en un mundo hecho no de papel ni de tinta sino de gente.
Esas líneas son nuestras vidas.
We seem to live in a world of maps.
But, in truth, we live in a world made not of paper and ink
but of people.
Those lines are our lives.
Juntos, demos vuelta al mapa hasta que veamos claramente:
La frontera es lo que nos une, no lo que nos separa.
Together let us turn the map until we
see clearly the border is what joins us,
not what separates us.
If he had listened.
[APPLAUSE]