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In closing this section,
I read a little elegy

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for a friend of mine.

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Do you remember when the
two American labor advisors

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were shot in the Sheridan
Hotel while they were

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having dinner, January 4, 1981?

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There was another man with
them who was also killed.

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His name was Jose Rodolfo Viera.

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He was a Salvadoran,
and his name

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didn't appear in
the papers here.

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They would just say, Michael
Hemmer, Mark Perlman,

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and a Salvadoran man.

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So I felt sort of badly.

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Jose Rodolfo Viera
was the leader

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of a rural labor organization.

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He couldn't read or write.

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And he found himself in the
position of being a leader,

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and at a time in Salvador when
these things were happening.

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And he said to me,
I have never even

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been able to kill a chicken.

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How am I going to
protect myself here?

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Well, he was killed, and I
wrote this for the funeral.

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There is language
in here which is

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figurative, but also
the final metaphor

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or whatever is a literal
rendition of something there.

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Because One is Always Forgotten.

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When Viera was
buried, we knew it

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had come to an end,
his coffin rocking

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into the ground like
a boat or a cradle.

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I could take my heart, he said,
and give it to a campesino,

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and he would cut it
up and give it back.

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You can't eat heart.

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In those four dark chambers,
where a man can be kept years.

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A boy soldier in
the bone hot son

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works his knife to peel
the face from a dead man

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and hang it from the branch of a
tree flowering with such faces.

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The heart is the toughest
part of the body.

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Tenderness is in the hands.

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