I began working with Amnesty International,
and most of the time, as many of you who might work with them
as well know, our work is writing letters
and sending telegrams.
But they also have people who gather information and do
particular kinds of work in country.
My job in Spain was to interview Latin American exiles
and compile material on human rights conditions
from the countries they had just left.
The next poem I'm going to read to you
was one that arose from one of those stories.
It's the only one that ever entered a poem,
but it's about a woman named Elena.
She was married to an Argentine journalist for 25 years,
and on their wedding anniversary,
they celebrated by going out to dinner
and then taking a walk along the Rio de La Plata,
the Silver River of Buenos Aires.
And then they hailed a taxi cab to take them home,
and taxi cabs are not very frequent late at night
in Buenos Aires in those days, but one came immediately.
And they got in and gave their address,
and the taxi driver repeated it back to them, as is customary,
but also into a communication device on his person.
And he took a roundabout route to the house.
They didn't notice this, and when
they pulled in front of the house and opened the door,
her husband was machine gunned to death
and she was wounded in the mouth.
She was taken, by her husband's assailants,
to police headquarters for 24 hours, interrogation,
and then permitted by Isabel Peron to leave the country.
She went to Paris.
She told me the stories over lunch in Palma,
and she wanted me to try a specialty of the Mediterranean,
a dish called Paella.
Paella is a round dish of saffron rice
with various kinds of sea fruits and meats arranged on it.
The Memory of Elena.
We spend our morning in the flower stalls,
counting the dark tongues of bells
that hang from ropes waiting for the silence of an hour.
We find a table, ask for paella, cold soup, and wine,
where a calm light trembles years behind us.
In Buenos Aires only three years ago,
it was the last time his hand slipped into her dress,
with pearls cooling her throat and bells like these chipping
at the night.
As she talks, the hollow clopping
of a horse, the sound of bones touched together,
the paella comes, a bed of rice and camarones fingers
and shells, the lips of--