The last time I was in Tucson, I went to a Mexican restaurant
with the Sheltons where there were some musicians playing.
And when I came home I wrote a poem about it,
which it's a poem that I still feel needs
to be changed in some ways.
But I thought I'd read it because I felt in the mood.
It's called "The Mariachis--
A Glimpse."
"Hot Mexican food, the pepper sauce in a silver dish.
Seven musicians wearing yellow jackets, black pants
with silver disks along the outside seams.
White shirt, string ties, all with black mustaches
corpulent bodies.
The bellies hanging a bit over the silver buckle belts.
Trumpets gleaming like sunshine.
The sad sentimental, but lively music
like sunshine on the faces of pretty, but foolish girls.
A deep fat guitar making bass sounds with two strings of rope
and the rest of gut, bumping along with the melodies.
It's partly player with the biggest sideburns washing
across his face for women to love and touch.
An old gray haired singer, all the men worn cafe musicians
yet somehow making me feel that they are
happy with the songs they play.
I'm here, a stranger, eating and talking
with a nice local family wondering
what my life is about.
Wondering about the world in my place in it.
I see another party of local people about 20,
they are sitting under the Mariachi band.
The face of a young Mexican man catches my attention fleshy,
but handsome with its mustache and sideburns Ivy League
suit very serious like a young lawyer.
But the expression in the clothes
barely covering his sensuous reality.
The heavy muscular man underneath sitting possessively
with his wife, whom I just now notice.
Pale almost phosphorescent with pale auburn hair
her face a mask blowing out of the dark room.
Underneath she's probably thinking
about her makeup or the clothes she's
wearing assessing the costs of others
are dreaming of some maudlin housewife's wish.
Yet her exterior is fragile and poetic
and you feel her husband would kill
to keep her would name the face of any man who
made an improper remark.
I am haunted by the two of them.
He's so dark and smoldering and complex beneath
his conventional exterior.
She's so exotic on the surface, contrasting in her whiteness
to his passion.
Her surface all cold and powdery,
like a clock with a phosphor dial glowing through the room
as you wake up in the dark.
Her interior is so empty and uninteresting.
She nods time to the Mariachi music,
I dream of some romance she might have
with the best trumpet player.
The one who leans his head back to play
like a drinker throwing his head back for the last swallow.
I sit there wanting to steal away her husband
with his dark passionate face guarding his pale lovely face--
his wife.
I wonder about my own life, why are you
the man I love are not with me passionately guarding my face.
And know that it is for civilized reasons
that I am here and you are there,
and we will probably never be together.
You and your woods hunting communing with yourself.
My life hurts me to think about, it
is neither stable and calm with a contented husband to love,
nor passionate and exciting with stolen moments of pleasure.
You and I care for each other yet,
I feel you'd leave me tomorrow if it were convenient.
Have done it before.
We'll do it again, without even poetry on my tongue.
It is ironic because only I really
know how impossible it is to own things.
How impossible to expect life to be calm and good yet,
you who can have what you want on any terms
and have every security a man can have
lecture me on foolishly wanting some promise of faith.
My mind is with that dark young husband
who guards his pale wife.
And I know it is she who will leave him
her cares being foolish and insubstantial.
The moon is no friend, but a companion.
How lonely is this desert we all call life."
[APPLAUSE]