This is the final poem.
I have allergies.
I take a strong medication for it,
and it dries out my throat, just cracking.
It's all right, I think I can make this.
This feels like a long poem, to me,
it's really relatively short for what
I do when I do a long poem.
It's called "The Red Fiddle in the Moon Parlor."
It's for a student of mine, who is sort of eccentric, perhaps,
psychotic.
And I think that's why I liked him.
I mean, I enjoyed the confusion deciding which it was.
And he always-- he never made it easy for me.
I was very fond of the man in any event.
It's called "The Red Fiddle in the Moon Parlor."
One.
You remember the straw hat Mele filled with icy, natal plums
as you sat on a low balcony in Nogales.
Now, you are driving the old truck out of Phoenix.
And in just 10 minutes, you'll be
sitting on a stool in the open, tin parlors milking cows.
You're 17.
You call yourself "the Sonoran."
And Mele will be 17 on Christmas day.
You both believe that she's pregnant.
This dirt road runs along a dry wash.
And out across the desert, the smoke trees
puff up among the indigo agave scrub.
She embarrassed you, at dawn, at that abandoned railway
station in the Sierra Madres.
The boarded windows with faded handbills and a single bell
working out in the hills.
An old toothless woman sat beside you on a bench.
Her scarf had a dead locust on it.
And Mele began to undress, covering her breasts
with the sombrero she had made from the dry head
of a sunflower.
She dropped her skirt and stepped into a large rain
barrel.
She sank in the water with just her yellow curls
like fallen aspen leaves on the surface.
Two.
Two hours of daylight left and then 12 hours of night.
For 14 hours, you will sit on the milking stool and tug
at your lovely cows that listen through the night
while you recite to them two pages of Chekhov you've
translated.
You ask them if this time, you've got it just right.
Their teats are peach-colored, rough, like garnet sheets.
Mele was put on a bus for Oregon.
And after a month, she still doesn't write.
A 111 cows on a desert farm.
Your thumb over your little finger, both under the palm,
and the three remaining fingers are, you say,
a rusty trident drawing down, stretching the teats,
the yellow milk filling the pails until dawn.
Under the black sky with its patch of stars,
you've named the cows Swan, Charles's Wain, Orion, Mons.
You tell these girls that soon they
can eat the blossoming lupine, phlox, and the willow-orchids
by the artesian pond.
Two other workers outside the open barn
are playing ball with a coyote-melon,
and they laugh at you.
Your long hair, thick glasses, la barba negra, and your poems.
You drink tequila in the raw milk to keep going.
You say, you can ignore the black widow
spider who nests in the corner of the barn beside the bales.
You've named her Obsidian.
The red fiddle on her stomach, you tell her,
is worthy of Chagall.
This is three.
When it rains at night into the open barn beside the palms,
you sing in a canvas poncho to your cows.
Mele's name you've changed to Verbena.
"Not a word from Verbena in two months."
You said that you were going back to the Sierra Madres
to find an old woman with a pearl white insect
on her scarf, to ask her what she remembered of Mele's bath.
Could she describe the girl's shoulders, her legs?
Was there a moon?
Was the girl's name known to anyone?
Did the dish run away with a spoon?
You laugh.
Again, you change Verbena's name.
This time, to Cenzina, but then, back to Verbena.
She's finally wrote from Portland,
saying you were the father of a little girl.
She asks, would you like to name her?
You settle on Beth.
Just Beth.
You said once the boss at the farm took a photo of Mele
and you in the barn.
You saw it and said, "virgin with child."
A manger in the desert, Bethlehem, Beth.
I preferred, Dalea.
You laughed.
And now, you're gone.
Your cows must be giving vinegar.
The old truck you probably abandon somewhere
in the Dakotas.
You might have gone to Oregon or Canada.
You said that, one day, you would turn up missing.
Not to worry.
You're probably a dishwasher.
The dish and the spoon, or a cold night
with stars walking back to your room
must remind you of your girls in their barn.
I remember you sitting on the milking stool, the broken
laces of your shoes, and how you put a little salt
in your tongue, swallowing tequila, and then grinning,
sucks straight from the teat of Orion or Swan.
You said, only a king may kill a king.
Mele wrote, I opened her letter in the evening.
She said, you lived together for three weeks, the only work you
found was in a slaughterhouse.
And you were still naming animals.
You walked them from the trains under the stars
and into a room with chutes.
That your name was now Joe.
Just Joe.
That you accused Mele of being unfaithful.
That you stopped naming animals.
You couldn't eat.
You were certain the government was grinding
cattle bones into our milk.
You left her a note--
I'm going to another country.
You went to Canada.
Climbed stairs to the roof of a tall building.
Mele said you would drink her breast milk, that each evening
you brought the baby a balloon.
She said, "I'm sorry.
But in Canada, under a clear night sky,
Joe heard a little dog laugh.
Joe jumped off the moon."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]