Well, my beloved daughter, Lucinda Bliss, some of you
know, and she is an artist, visual artist.
And when she turned 40, we went on a trip
to Oaxaca, which is one of my favorite places.
So I will read you a poem that comes from that trip,
really comes from the flight back from Oaxaca.
"The Village".
"The jet crosses an hour of plush green forest,
a single dirt road zagging upslope to a village
the size of an atoll.
'How did they get there?,' asks the woman in the seat behind
me.
'They were born there and they stayed,' I bark,
surprised at my bite.
Cities are like lakes, gathering water
from the hillsides, an aluminum ribbon curling down
through mountains like the footpaths of those
who leave and get swept into the larger flow.
Maybe the family I saw at the airport
came from such a place, the women's heads wrapped
in shawls, faces of silt and furrow.
Everyone, the men too, weeping, 15 or 20,
who'd come to see two boys leave on the flight
to Tijuana to become soldiers or border guards, belonging,
ruptured by duty and family need.
Even after the boys had left, the family,
the village remained clustered at the window.
An atoll in the future's slosh and flow.