Thank you, Jonathan.
I think I'll always remember your image
in the "Garage of Her Faith."
I think that poets, maybe-- that's what poetry is,
the garage of our faith, and we're always writing from
that--
maybe the basement.
I don't know.
Sometimes I think I'm in the attic, but OK.
Thank you for being here.
I am so happy to see so many kids here at the book festival.
I was delighted yesterday.
Do you guys all have umbrellas from yesterday?
You have to go get your umbrellas.
They are so cool.
They're the colors of popsicles.
They're really lovely.
I was walking around with my green one
yesterday and this guy came up to me and he said,
do you know what?
With that green umbrella, did you know your hair is green?
Don't tell me those things.
OK, I want to start with a poem about a mother,
and this poem is for my friend Terry Acevedo and for Lola,
and it's called "Mother's Day Celebration."
And actually, the poem was taken from an incident
that happened here in Tucson last Mother's Day.
What is love but feasting atop a grave?
Mother's Day and the Catholic cemetery
is packed with barbecues, mariachis,
and plastic tablecloths laid for picnics.
There, alone with his hands pressed into a burial mound
and in the cool shade of a concrete Angel's wings,
a boy sits cross-legged.
He could be a Yogi concentrating on the orderly column
of black ants that carry one blossom
at a time, yellow Mesquite flowers to their eggs
underground.
Except that it's Mother's Day, and he
is as alone as he'll ever be, staring
at the empty curl of his fingers holding nothing
but the distant mourning of doves.
At desert noon, even the dead enjoy
singing that braids heat waves shimmering,
molten lead between spring blooms.
My friend has come to speak to her mother,
riding the spirit horse of memory
along an underground river this past year.
She lights a candle and brushes debris with her tender palms
from the ant-tilled soil above her mother's ghost face.
Walking between graves, her skin fills
with the guitar's laughing blue cords, with charcoal smoke,
with the boy's mute hands, with loneliness spun by hot wind
each afternoon under the invisible birth of stars
where the dead begin to remember their names.