That idea of the possible now leads me to a personal poem.
Today is-- if you grew up in the culture I grew up in-- is Día
de los Santos.
Tomorrow, technically, Día de los Muertos.
It's a confusing time.
[LAUGHTER]
Día de los Santos today and Día de las Criaturas,
the day of children who died young,
who could not take care of themselves,
that very wonderful tender word, "creatures."
When we hear it, "Day of the Dead," it's become everything
it's become.
But perhaps a better way to say it
is not the "Day of the Dead," but the "Day of our Dead,"
and perhaps even more, the "Day of my Dead."
And then it's not so funny, and things change,
and we think about it a little differently.
I'm teaching a course right now in magical realism,
which so many people think of as, well, it's all ghosts.
It's that kind of stuff.
It's not about ghosts.
It's about what I was just talking about--
the possible.
Maybe there's ghosts.
I don't know.
I encountered ghosts when I was quite young,
and this is where I found them.
This poem is called "When There Were Ghosts."
It might be important to know I was born in Nogales, Arizona,
and so that's what the early reference is here.
"On the Mexico side, in the 1950s and '60s,
there were movie houses everywhere.
And for the longest time, people could
smoke as they pleased in the comfort of the theaters.
The smoke rose, and the movie told itself on the screen
and in the air, both.
The projection caught a little in the wavering mist
of the cigarettes.
In this way, every story was two stories,
and every character lived near its ghost.
Looking up, we knew what would happen next before it did,
as if the movie were dreaming itself, and we were part of it,
part of the plot itself, and not just the audience.
And in that dream, the actors' faces bent a little,
hard to make out exactly in the smoke,
so that María Félix and Pedro Armendáriz looked a little like
my aunt, and one of my uncles.
And so they were, and so were we all in the movies,
which is how I remember it.
Popcorn in hand, smoke in the air, gum on the floor.
Those Saturday nights, we ourselves
were the story, and the stuff, and the stars.
We ourselves were alive in the dance of the dream."