[APPLAUSE] He's a wonderful poet,
I recommend him Cary Nelson, who is a scholar I think,
believe he's at the University of Indiana,
is doing a lot of work recovering working class
literature in this country.
And I believe that he's going to edit
a book on the poems of Edwin Rolfe, so look for it.
I want to begin my poetry tonight,
by reading a poem that I wrote while I was at Stanford.
While I was at Stanford, I had, in my life,
I had the great opportunity to work
with a very, very fine Chicano writer by the name of Arturo
Islas.
Who, a couple of years ago, died of AIDS.
He was a mentor, a teacher, and a friend.
And I wrote this poem, and it's really about his mother.
My brother, too, died of AIDS in 1985.
And I wrote this poem, watching his mother be in pain one day,
right after his death.
She was giving me some of his clothes in his house.
Arturo, Your Mother.
And his mother kept all these things in memory.
She sat on the edge of your bed, her mourning hands ironing out
the creases in your sheets.
And endless task, so many wrinkles, Arturo.
And she's still dreaming of smooth, she was born to iron.
In grief, she searched the room.
I disappeared and she saw you in your room again.
She reached her voice quiet, quiet,
listening to the fragments of your boyhood in the room,
the unforgiving blade of your life cutting,
and cutting, and cutting.
Your death, everywhere on her face,
but what did I know of her wounds.
What does a childless man, what, what
does he know about sons and their deaths.
About first words and final breaths.
On the edge of your bed, the edge, too, of her life.
How many more years for her.
The air she breathes is nothing but memory and grief .
As she sat, she stared at your many colored coats,
she wrapped them in your arms.
Today, cremating him, today, he's ashes now, she says.
She was bent in the wind of your death, her tears, a rain,
watering your house.
But they would never grow you back to life.
Never, never grow you back to life.
My mother, too, has worn that look, that hurt.
Has lost a son, lost him to that straight and pretty angel that
flicked you off this Earth, like a Lord would
flick an insect off his plate.
I hate, I hate that messenger of death.
His heavy hand is cruel to crooked sons, and cruel, too,
to those that gave them life.
You'd think my mother and yours would
have grown accustomed to their losses, raised
to accept, accept, accept.
They never cursed God and rebelled,
born to bear, but never break, is that what we decided.
In the midst, their son's create,
they know, love, and only love.
What if they hate that angel, more than any of their sons.
The last time I saw you, you sat up weak in a wrinkled bed,
and caught each breath of air like a pigeon begs for crumbs.
Hungry for health, for words, for anything
tossed in your path.
I thought of your mom, you said, was thinking and thinking
of her.
Generous, you died thinking of the living.
She gave me your coats, Arturo.
I look fine in them, that's of little comfort.
You did not buy them for surviving friends.
I asked her for your hat, the one you bought and wore
to protect you from the heat.
The medicine you took turned your skin to wax,
without your hat, you might have melted in the sun.
That day, when you returned to ash,
your mother searched your closets
and gave away your clothes.
In grief, she is giving life.
She is pregnant with a memory of her son.
She will dress and sleep in sorrow, and when she wakes,
you'll be thumping, thumping, thumping in her heart.