I'm just going to read some excerpts now from a longer
piece, again, back to Tucson.
"Those who make it North across the border to Tucson
have considered what are power and slavery.
Those of us asleep can only dream we are running, thirsty,
scared, and wounded.
We're running through a forest of stinging cacti
with helicopters spraying light like an automatic garden
sprinkler, an automatic weapon spraying death.
Which keeps coming round to little blue violets
expiring of thirst, dying of exposure.
It takes more than a broken poet,
more than the most sacred heart, more
than a cathedral to hold them in its embrace.
These women and girls and boys and men being fired upon.
Those of us who are writers, write about the forlorn.
They are not we in any case.
Who answers for the dead sister caught in a crossfire?
My nightmare as a writer is that I will have to say something.
Yes, the dead are becoming dead at the Mexican border
because they're moving their own bodies one at a time
through a desert with armed helicopters hovering 30
yards above the pricked Earth.
A wall is being built to make crossing the border harder.
I have failed to leave plastic water bottles in designated
places for the crossing.
Nor, I confess, can I get a man who
slits a woman's throat in revenge to understand death.
I cannot correct death, nor take down so much as an emotional
wall without a pill and a glass of treated water.
I can only make a safe drive across an unprotected border
into Arizona from California lost
in thought, head in the clouds.
I watch movies, I read books, therefore, what?
Therefore reality?
Where is it?
There's the Seine full of water in Paris,
where the movie, Head in the Clouds, was filmed,
seen in the far distance from one
of the world's great cathedrals at the head of Montmartre.
I would like to live in the world in my right mind.
And here is one survivor without a lesson in mind,
with the walls of his religion completely detonated.
The cathedral of his family completely detonated.
And the view from a great mind completely detonated.
Here, my friends, is Paul Celan.
And he jumps into the moving river.
In his little pocket calendar, he has written depart Paul.
Sonoran desert, Paris 02:00 AM."