I want to read just a couple more poems.
One of them is a long one, and I've never read it.
And it's a fairly--
I'll warn you, it's a pretty long poem.
And it's a strange poem.
But it's called "Altars Into Time."
One of the things that I never, never write about,
because I'm terrified about writing about it,
is that I was once a Catholic priest, in a former life.
And I don't know, but there's so much to say about it.
And yet, I also think that-- and that was such a public thing
to be a priest, and yet, I consider the act of my leaving
such a private thing, which is totally ludicrous.
But this is part of this poem.
Again, it's part of it.
But also, about being a part of a culture that's Catholic.
Quite apart, also, from the question of faith,
growing up in a materially Catholic culture.
And I love altars.
I have this really this thing with altars.
I have altars in my house.
I turn everything into an altar immediately.
But I'm so taken with it.
When I was a kid, I used to love kneeling
next to my grandmother, who used to wear these lilac dresses.
And she'd sit and pray to St. Joseph, who
was her patron saint.
She was a little overweight, and I could press my little boy
body next to hers.
And I felt I could just sink into it.
And she was a wonderful woman, my Grandma Josefina.
And I remember her altars and how she used to-- well,
my uncle--
I have a poem about this, but I'm not
going to read it tonight.
But I have an Uncle Guillermo, and he
was an alcoholic-- big-time alcoholic.
Would disappear for days.
And when he disappeared for days on this binge,
she'd get her statue of St. Joseph.
And she was holding the baby Jesus.
And you could remove it, so she would remove it.
And she would say, now, when you give me back my son,
you'll get your son back.
Which I think is wonderful.
Like, what a great spirituality, really.
Think about it.
And then when my Uncle Guille would show up,
then Joseph would get Jesus back.
And I was a little kid, and I thought, cool, I like it,
I like it.
I understood that.
I understood.
And really, it's very funny, but it's very moving.
And I'm very moved by that--
that kind of relationship.
I remember a friend of mine became a very Fundamentalist
Protestant Christian, and he used
to say that, you guys are idol worshippers.
And I thought, well, so?
You know, what's the big deal?
But I want to read you this poem.
And this poem is very much about all of these kinds of things
that I'm talking about, in a kind of very serious way
as well.
And they're just in different sections,
and it's kind of fragmented in a kind of post-modern way.
I hate that word.
"Altars Into Time."
"An alien people clutching ad altare Dei.
New Mexico, 1959.
The sun forgave in May.
The spring winds, dead.
Crops, new and garden green, rising in the fields.
In June, the sun would belt. A harsh father beating
useless sons.
In June, the sun would not forgive.
Everyone guilty before the hanging judge.
For now, the summer was far enough away.
Today, a festival of prayer.
Here, no one knows the maypole.
No parades of workers clamoring for rights.
Contracts, unions, strikes as alien as rain.
No city streets.
Here, roads are paved with dust.
Old adobe homes, and hungry dogs, and outhouses.
A place ignored by gringo time.
Altars in Time.
One.
Josefina made an altar out of a wood dresser,
where she kept her favorite saints.
She worshipped San Jose on summer afternoons.
I didn't know what her novellas meant.
I was in love with leaning into her,
with the sound of her voice, the feel of her soft cotton
dress against my face as she prayed.
She smelled of work and lilac.
Teresa had statues everywhere in her house.
I have a picture of her standing before the saints
that she kept on her fireplace.
Everything in her house was an altar.
The altar in San Albino's in Mesilla is stuck in my memory
like a nail that cannot be pulled from the wall.
When I am in pain, I think of it.
When I was a boy, watching the priest stand before the altar,
wearing his heavy robes, made me feel holy.
My mother keeps an altar in her bedroom.
She has a big statue of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
She and my dad keep a candle lit in one of the bedrooms.
It's a prayer for their children.
When I made my First Communion, I
was surprised that God tasted like cardboard.
The taste did not matter.
This was Jesus.
At St. Thomas Seminary, the altar was simple.
It, too, was made of wood.
I read the scriptures.
I studied theology.
I learned words--
Christology, transubstantiation, eschatology, exegesis,
hermeneutics.
I read Augustine and Aquinas, the confessions, the proofs
for the existence of God.
When I became a priest, I stood behind the altar
and lifted the host toward Heaven everyday.
I have never stopped loving the mass, but the robes--
but the robes were heavy for my body.
One day, no longer able to walk, I took them off.
Many years later, I had a heavy dream.
Chimayo was calling.
I woke and built an altar in my house.
I made it out of wood and burdened it with faces
that I love.
New Mexico, 1959.
Today in this town filled with more drinkers than saints,
a crowd gathers around the altar of the Virgin
to pray St. Dominic's beads.
Had he imagined us here?
Had Dominic dreamed this future?
The statue dressed in satin and blue
is crowned with early yellow roses, grown
in my grandmother's garden.
She leads the singing, knows the Catholic hymns better
than she's ever known her husband.
Her old voice quivers like a dandelion's cotton
in the breeze.
The women follow her voice, half a step behind.
The songs are old and brittle like the pages of novellas,
whose words are worn with use.
The clatter of the beads ring out
like wooden chimes calling us to kneel.
The decades-- 10 Hail Marys, one Our Father, 10 Hail Marys, one
Our Father lasts forever to a boy.
But the look on Mama's face, who could see me through shut eyes,
tells [AUDIO OUT]
How many pairs did she answer?
My mother once went on a pilgrimage
to the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
Eat.
Thou hast bread.
Drink.
Thou hast water.
Abel offered the good fruits of his labor on an altar to God,
and God was pleased.
All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin,
build Chartres.
I once went to mass at the Tomb of St. Peter's,
beneath the main altar of the basilica.
Do this in memory.
At Lourdes, wooden crosses--
wooden crutches hang over the grotto.
Heart of sky, heart of Earth, give us
our sign, our word, as long as there is day,
as long as there is light.
When it comes to the sewing, the dawning,
will it be a greening road?
A greening path?
Give us a steady light, a level place,
and we will build you an altar.
In Juarez, in the chapel next to the cathedral,
the old people place milagros at the feet of the statues.
Return our hearts.
Men who've pulled themselves up by their bootstraps
should remember the workers who've crafted their boots.
Abraham built an altar in the desert.
I refuse to accept the idea that man
is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life,
which surrounds him.
I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound
to the stylist midnight of racism and war
that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood
can never become a reality.
I watched a very old man today, who
was still strong enough to pick up his grandson
and toss him in the air.
Barbara, Larry, Karen, Linda, did I tell you?
Gloria, Norman, Amy, Ricardo, Mom, Dad, did I tell you?
Did I tell you all?
I dreamed we built an altar.
New Mexico, 1959.
Every evening in May, we knelt. And after we had prayed,
we stood, repeating litanies, chants, and songs
that brought out all the stars.
They shone like silver crosses in the sun.
I could see by light of candles our nearness to tears
in the eyes of all the women.
But the Virgin seemed unmoved.
Perhaps she did not hear us, this
unschooled Spanish, sad, strange, unknown to her.
Each passing day, the sun grew hot, then hotter,
until, at last, the sweat streamed out
of us faster than our prayers.
On the final day of May, our offerings
to the Queen of Heaven ended.
The women, flowered like their gardens,
brought out food enough to fill our stomachs twice.
Empanadas, pasteles for us and our cousins.
Piñatas, punch with lemons and limes.
At last, free to dive in the dirt
and rub away the prayers that left us stiff and clean.
The food devoured, the singing done,
the women stripped the Virgin of her clothes
and took away her altar, an empty platform
in the center of the yard and trash around it,
gone the singing, gone the women,
gone the whispered prayers, gone the altars of May.
Tomorrow, the work of cleaning, of tending the weeded fields.
Tomorrow, June.
Our praying would not save us from the heat that was to come.
That heat was hell.
Traveling to Chimayo.
Chimayo-- I travelled there one summer with a friend.
Stranger to that place, but living close to Earth,
he knew pilgrims never walk alone.
It was sacred.
Chimayo, he said the word.
In the sanctuary of the church at Chimayo,
there is a pit of dirt.
A legend has been handed down, generation to generation,
that the dirt of Chimayo has the power to heal.
Chimayo, I've heard your name.
I've seen your pilgrims kneel and heard them pray.
I did not join my voice to theirs at Chimayo.
I am ashamed.
I did not pray at Chimayo.
I know I will always be returning to Chimayo.
I saw a father rub the miracle dirt
on the thin legs of his son.
The father said, the hands of God were living in the Earth.
A long time, I have been traveling to Chimayo.
I have heard voices tossing words at God
since the rainless day at dawn, when
my grandmother's stubborn hands pulled me from the womb.
I once anointed a man with the oils of the dying.
He was young, who lived reckless in Navarro, who took a gun,
played a game with his friends as if it were a toy.
A white bandage held his brains intact.
His heart was pounding hard.
It filled the room.
Who has heard it can't forget the sound.
The hearts of fist that fights.
The heart is hard to kill.
I sometimes wake and see the oils of the church
glistening on his skin.
I once watched a child take her first breath in the world.
The child was once her mother, and then the baby
crossed a border.
When her cries hit the air and she breathed,
I knew that sound, solid as the wood of any altar.
I have been traveling towards these sounds all my life.
The Earth is an altar.
New Mexico, 1972.
We learn to make the sign of the cross, dipping
earth-stained hands in Catholic waters.
We fill the desert with our altars.
We prayed our rosaries, played them, rubbed them,
clutched them, rattles in the wind, swaying back and forth.
Our playground swings.
We rode them toward God.
Now hang them on walls or rearview
mirrors of fixed up '57 trucks.
Comenzamos el Padre Nuestro en español
But we finished the prayer in a North American tongue.
De vez en cuando we gather ourselves to baptize a child
in the name of the Father, the Son, and our ancestors,
who command us from the grave.
We have made our way in the world, worked hard,
worked hard.
Now we toss money at the feet of my parents' grandchildren
like pilgrims toss palms before Christ.
In the sounds of our coins against the concrete,
I hear novenas yellowing into dust.
We try to speak of our lives purely.
Our memories will not let us.
We wear our culture as penetrance,
wear ashes on their foreheads.
Una mancha permanente.
We wake in strange-streeted cities
with the taste of the desert in our mouths.
Because we are hungry, the taste is sweet.
We are damned to live forever on a border.
From here, we build our altars to our gods."
[APPLAUSE]