I'm going to read now from this section of the book, which
is called In Salvador, 1978 to 1980.
And I'm going to tell you the little stories
between the poems.
And in this section as well, read a few excerpts
of, sort of, their small prose of vignettes,
that I wrote for this book, which is brand new.
It is a book of photographs taken
by thirty different photographers from Europe,
and North America, and Latin America.
Who were correspondents in El Salvador
between 1979 and the present.
So this will be interwoven, along with these stories.
The section is dedicated to the memory of Monseigneur Oscar
Romero, who was the Archbishop of San Salvador,
until his assassination in March 1980.
Begins with an epigraph.
Lines from the poet Antonio Machado, these lines
are also engraved on the poet's tombstone, in Spanish.
Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar
And in English this is roughly, walker, there is no path.
You make the path while you walk.
Begins in California 1975.
I got my first teaching job in creative writing
and composition at San Diego State University.
This was also the last teaching job anyone ever got
without a poetry book yet--
So I was living a few miles from the Mexican border
and my students at San Diego State
called their city of San Diego, a golf course with houses.
They called their University a cemetery with lights.
So this is where I taught.
It was very comfortable.
It was very beautiful on the golf course.
And the nice-- very beautiful climate and all of that.
So which we took very much for granted, very
affluent community.
And we never paused a moment to think
about conditions in countries to the South of us.
So that is what this poem addresses.
It is, arbitrarily, however titled "San Onofre", instead of
San Diego.
This is because if you live in San Diego
and you drive North to Los Angeles, along Highway 5,
at 90 miles an hour.
You have to slow your car down at San Onofre,
to 10 miles an hour.
So that you can pass through the checkpoints of the US
immigration authority.
And they will look inside the car as you were slowing down
and they will wave you through like this.
And if you don't look American, to them.
Whatever that means.
They must have some characteristics
that we all share.
They pull you over to the side and ask you to prove it.
But while you're doing that you, can have a nice little tour
of San Onofre.
On your left, on the ocean side of the highway,
are the twin white igloos of the San Onofre nuclear reactor.
These are on the beach, on a fault line on the tributary
of the San Andreas.
And on your right, on the coast off the cliff on the top
you'll see a fence, which is the beginning of San Clemente.
Do you remember the significance of that?
So I thought that this town needed a poem, badly.
So that's why I gave it this name.
[LAUGHTER] Darn it.
Close OK.
"We have come far South, beyond here.
The oldest women shelling lemurs into Black Scholes.
Portio scratching his name on the walls.
The slender ribbons of piss children patting the mud.
If we go on, we might stop in the street,
in the very place where someone disappeared.
And the words, come with us, we might hear them.
If that happened, we would pass our lives
with our hands tied together.
That is why we feel it is enough to listen
to the wind, jostling lemons, to dogs, ticking
across the terraces knowing that wild birds and warmer weather
are forever moving North.
The cries of those who vanish might take years to get here."