You know, I'm glad you got that joke.
So if I told that joke in Massachusetts,
no one will know what the hell I was talking about.
There are other things people don't
understand in New England.
For example, people in New England have never heard
of Juan de Oñate.
Ah, yes.
People nowadays are up in arms about Confederate statues.
Confederate statues being taken down, neo-Nazi marches
to defend Confederate statues, but let's
not forget there are other statues in this country too.
Statues of conquistadors, that not only are still up, but keep
increasing in number.
I went and visited the novelist John Nichols in Taos
some years ago.
And he said, you've got to see this.
You got to see this.
So we pulled off in a town called Alcalde,
where we went to see the statue of this conquistador,
named Juan de Oñate.
And amazingly, someone, person or persons unknown,
had taken a chainsaw and cut off his right foot!
He said, look, isn't this amazing?
I said, yeah.
And then maybe a year or two later,
I got a ride to the airport in El Paso,
from a Chicano scholar named Arturo Madrid,
and Arturo brought me to the airport.
He said, wait, before you get on the plane you got to see this.
And he showed me another statue of Juan de Oñate,
bigger than the last one.
I said, what, they're making more of them?
And they're larger?
Because this man was not just a discoverer,
the so-called discoverer of New Mexico.
He was a conquistador, which is to say he was a killer.
And there was a reason why someone sliced off
his right foot in the dark.
So this is the poem that I call "A Tale Of Two Statues,"
also known as "The Right Foot of Juan de Oñate,"
for John Nichols and Arturo Madrid.
On the road to Taos, in the town of Alcalde,
the bronze statue of Juan de Oñate, the conquistador,
kept vigil from his horse.
Late one night, a chainsaw sliced off his right foot,
stuttering to the bowl of his ankle as Oñate's spirit
scratched and howled, like a dog trapped within the bronze body.
Four centuries ago, after his cannon fire burst to burn
hundreds of bodies and blackened the adobe walls the Acoma
Pueblo, Oñate wheeled on his startled horse and spoke
the decree.
All Acoma males above the age of 25
would be punished by amputation of the right foot.
Spanish knives sawed through ankles,
Spanish hands tossed feet into piles like fish
at the marketplace.
There was prayer, and wailing in a language Oñate did not speak.
Now, at the airport at El Paso, across the river from Juarez,
another bronze statue of Oñate rises on a horse frozen
in fury.
The city fathers smash champagne bottles across the horse's legs
to christen the statue and Oñate's spirit remembers
the chainsaw carving the ball of his ankle.
The Acoma Pueblo still stands.
Thousands of brown feet walk across the border, the desert
of Chihuahua, the shallow places of the Rio Grande
that bridges from Juarez to El Paso.
Oñate keeps watch high on horseback above the Rio Grande,
the law of the conquistador rolled in his hand.
Helpless as a man with an amputated foot spirit
scratching and howling like a dog within the bronze body.