Enrico Caruso.
Does that ring any bells with those of you over 30?
He was before my day, certainly.
But I think my--
I heard about him from relatives.
Italian opera singer.
Well, he was American, I guess, or he came to America
and sang in operas.
And, apparently, he was the idol of young ladies of the day back
in the '20s and '30s, I suppose.
And this poem, though, called Perfect Romances,
has mostly to do with the settling of the West.
And, of course, here, we have so little water
that, when you see water, you really appreciate it.
And I remember several years ago,
I went backpacking in the Sierras.
And we jumped off from Bishop, California.
And I remember, in the outlying districts,
the irrigation water running down the ditches and what
a favorable impression that made.
So this is an imaginary tale about the settling, I suppose,
of Bishop, California, or other towns like it.
And it ends, believe it or not, with Enrico Caruso.
Perfect Romances.
Now that they've reached success, now
that they've left behind the plague of steatorrhea, evenings
in the valley, in each house, they
open the storybook of their lives
and feel the great sadness of how they got there.
The buttes always ahead, fleshed,
carved out with an axe.
The wagons pulled by the hefty demons of oxen
breaking down, dragging behind them.
And at night, their wives refusing to cook,
withdrawing to talk about the perfect romances
of their childhoods.
And when they arrived, guns out ready
to defend what wasn't yet theirs.
How the animals led up the hillsides, elk and rabbits,
instantly turned into chimaeras and wyverns,
looking back over their shoulders
through their smoky beards.
Wild-eyed for a last glimpse of paradise, theirs.
For as the carpenter sang, the houses
went up almost without trying.
The furniture they built tumbled from their own fumbling hands
to stand like foreign guests.
Cantadores glowing in their rooms to be admired
passed on to future generations.
Even the plowmen, the most docile of idiots
came drooling back in their rubber boots
at noon to report birds hovering over the distant marshes
where their treasure is, and married early.
So now they have their orange groves,
a bit of the Mediterranean, thick and rich
as legends with mirrors stuck in them, where evenings the lovers
whisper.
Now outside the placid houses run the braided irrigation
ditches, where weary men stoop, drink, go home young again.
Now behind each village farmstead
is a barn hewn from oak and timbers, clean and cavernous
as a theater, where, an hour after sunset,
the bull, his skin still touched with it,
pokes his head out a window, stretches,
tests his golden throat like Enrico Caruso getting
ready for a date.