--was asking, is there a third sonnet?
There is a third sonnet to that sequence.
I want to read that right now for you.
In the Border Triptych, the first--
in the first sonnet, the speaker is a border patrol agent.
And the second sonnet is a transcript
of a woman who crossed the desert, who
survived a horrendous ordeal.
Is it raining?
Oh, my god.
That's what I do miss about the desert--
the rain, like this.
Growing up in Casa Grande, Arizona,
we lived in a mobile home.
And every time it rained--
4:00 or 5:00 in the morning-- you
would hear it on the tin roof.
So I would always walk out onto the porch,
no matter what time it was, to watch it rain.
Great, I got to compete with this--
with beautiful, beautiful rain.
The third sonnet is in the voice of an unnamed narrator,
a man who's crossing the border with his friend.
"Border Triptych-- Three."
"Sapo and I wait for the cool of night under mesquite.
Three days in the desert, and we're
still too close to Mexico, still so far from god.
Sapo's lips-- so dry he swaps the pus leaking
from the ampollas on his toes across his mouth.
I flip a peso.
Heads-- we continue.
Tails-- we walk toward the highway,
thumb our way back to Nogales.
The peso disappears into a nest but the hard-on
inside Sapo's jeans, slightly curved, points west.
I catch a cascabel and strip off its meat.
Sapo mutters, No que no guey.
I bury its forked tongue--
for one night, our names won't flower in the devil's throat.
We're Indios though no gringo will mistake us for Navajos.
Above us an owl grins like Cantinflas.
The arms of the saguaros strike down the hours
but the sun refuses to set.
Sapo shits behind a cluster of nopales,
and shouts out his favorite joke, No tengo papeles!
Thank you guys very much.
[APPLAUSE]