Now, I have a whole section in this book of Mexican poems.
And I thought, oh, the cool thing is not read any of them.
[LAUGHTER]
As I'm too close.
People will know it's not exotic enough.
Then I figured the cooler thing is
to read one, and let it stop right there.
So, that's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to read one called "Monte Alban."
I'm sure many people know about Monte Alban here.
It's a site outside of Oaxaca.
It's a mountaintop that's been leveled.
And there are fantastic ruins there.
It just blows you away.
Someone went and leveled the top of a mountain off.
Then he built huge temples all around it.
When you stand up there, there are mountains all around you.
It blew me away.
I went back a couple of times.
I was living in Oaxaca at the time.
And I thought about it.
And I don't like to write poems about famous places.
It would be like writing about the Statue of Liberty.
[LAUGHTER]
And I didn't think I could manage it.
But I remembered that I admire Auden very much,
and Auden could do any of that kind of stuff.
So, I figured I'd approach it like Auden.
Well, of course, I didn't succeed.
But that was what was in the back of my mind.
This was going to be an orden--
an orden-- an Audenesque poem, where I just
got Monte Alban down there and stepped away.
You can decide for yourself.
The Mexican poem of the evening.
The ghosts trot back and forth across the almost empty field,
a plaza, once, where men came to worship and appeal their fates,
even as I appeal my own, but did so massively, in stone.
Kings were buried here.
In the end, rulers change.
One gives way to the next, but the gods merely take new names
and live where they have always lived.
We're sitting down.
One knows what makes for holy ground.
A mountain, tumbled stone, white puff-headed stalks of grass.
To all men who must die, they left this sense,
this air of being nothing, and yet
part of all that men can raised to their recall.