When you finish a book, it's kind of a Great Depression,
because you have to start another one though
but you know, where do you start?
So I think this is where this next poem gets its title
because it's called "Start Again Somewhere," which
this coincided with other events in my life.
I wanted to invent this character who
was a kind of flamboyant San Juan type to talk about again,
risk that's why I'm reading these poems next to each other.
And I make a lot of fun in this and I thought
this was a very funny poem.
And it was published in the New Yorker and a fellow in Missouri
read it who teaches writing at a school down there.
And he wrote to me and he said, "This is a very good poem,"
he said, "but I am totally opposed to it's life for you."
Gee, that must be a good poem.
I mean, because and it's somebody,
at all that country out there saying,
I'm totally opposed to it's life you.
I think it's because I used a male character named Miguel
Ricardo, my main character.
If I had called it Rosa, what's a nice Spanish name now.
What?
Rosa Ricardo, it probably would have passed unnoticed
but I think that's why.
But obviously, I have to understand
this character and this character is a part of myself
or I couldn't have written this poem, you'd see?
So I might be totally opposed to this life too.
I don't know.
I just wrote the poem.
[LAUGHS]
Here we go.
"Start Again Somewhere."
Don't let her stop you this time, Miguel.
Though this isn't your name and you won't look back
if she calls to you, for today you
are Miguel Ricardo of the daggers and stallions.
Already, you are galloping away on the great sexual beast
of your refusals.
No, Miguel, it isn't right.
No man who loves truly should stand for it.
And anyway she couldn't have cared much.
The way she got prettier, and prettier
for her own sweet sake, tossing her hair
from the high arched brows, looking away.
We've seen her type.
The soft mouth and the set of the head
like a dare, who could resist?
You only did well to catch yourself in time
before your heart made a mess of it,
before you did something you could live to regret.
But we were watching you, those of us
who know better than to take such chances.
You didn't go too far and now you've set yourself straight.
And you did it just right, Miguel.
Taking all the blame like that so she couldn't hate you,
so she'd have to think of you the rest of her life as someone
she should have loved better.
[LAUGHTER]
You're not young, Miguel.
But there's time, time to find that woman you
adored in your youth.
The one who married the butcher and stayed in the same town,
raising his sons, scraping the maps of blood from his apron.
All in all, we're proud of you.
We see you're no fool.
You wouldn't give something for nothing.
To be a fool, takes devotion of the most pigheaded sort.
You have to want one thing in the wrong place
so badly you make it a way of life.
You forget what it costs.
You forget that others see what it costs you.
And at night, when the butcher's wife
takes her red hands from the water,
you are there to kiss them.
Though you close your eyes, though secretly you
have galloped away like the fool you
are, but a fool of your own choosing,
wasting the soft lips of her, over and over
in starved corners.