We're OK.
I've got to watch the time.
This is a longer poem.
And I thought it was appropriate since we're having the--
we're having the signups outside.
It's called "Codex Luna."
And this is just to give you some background
because people often want to know where do poems come from?
And they come from different places.
Obviously, if I see a spiderweb on a morning glory,
it's going to be a Haiku.
It's not going to be a book length poem probably.
But when I was a kid, my dad had a green card.
My mom as you heard was American.
And we ended up-- we left Tijuana and we ended up living
in this neighborhood called Clairemont in San Diego.
And a little middle class, working class neighborhood.
And a lot of-- how do I put this delicately?
A lot of my relatives were maybe not necessarily documented.
And my father was old school Mexican.
Some of you will know what this means.
It means he had "families," plural, along with mine.
And so I had siblings.
And they were using our mailbox for their address
to receive mail.
And I didn't get it.
I was, like, I've been getting like 50 letters here.
It's everybody we ever knew.
And my brother was married to a woman.
They were later-- the basis of the main characters
in House of Broken Angels.
And she had a sister who would come across undocumented
and was heading to Los Angeles to be a maid.
I was a boy scout.
And I had been at a campout.
And I came home, and there were my brother
and my sister-in-law.
And I was flipping out.
This was so cool.
They hadn't told me that this young woman-- she was 13--
was asleep in my bed.
And I went back in my bedroom.
And you can imagine me in my boy scout shorts
this creature sleep in my bed.
And so there was this whole kind of relationship
with me and her asleep not figuring out, what do I do?
I don't know what to do.
And she woke up and then this poem
came from the aftermath of that when they took her north.
And that night when I went to sleep,
everything smelled of her perfume on my pillow.
I had never had a woman's perfume or a girl's perfume
on my pillow.
And it was just this incredible thing.
And she went through some terrible difficult times.
So that inspired this poem.
And she died a couple of years ago.
And I've always remembered her.
So that inspired this along with the plights of so many people
that I have written about so many times.
It's called "Codex Luna."
"My moon pulled a different darkness across the sky.
My unknown sisters tucked in the barbed embrace of the border
fence saw a different face in the moon.
Theirs was Luna Tochtli, the rabbit moon, moon of running,
fear, and hiding.
My bed was soft.
Their beds were stone.
My moon was origami floating in a water cup, a Japanese artwork
of rice paper and pearls, a light to dream of girlfriends.
Their moon peeled a panicked eye, goggled blind as they ran.
Headlights froze them, twin moon beams ran them down.
Tufts of their dreams tangled in thickets of border tumbleweeds.
My sisters brought undocumented scents to sweeten the valleys.
Their perfume settled on roadsides
misted over bloodstain, rattlesnake, boot print, guard
dog, flashlight, illegal exhalations, unlawful breathing
tainted with cinnamon, coffee filling
cries like sugar in the bellies of honeysuckle.
Underarm sweat from running.
Belly sweat, back of the neck sweat, small of the back sweat,
shoulder blade sweat, brow sweat.
Behind them, hunger, before them, night.
Tang of terror under their skirts.
Smell of hope burning like mustard blossoms in the caves.
Burning stink of running.
Death smells of squatting where they
hope no one could see them.
Black soap, fresh hair flagged in the wire.
Sun smell of clothes once hung in the wind,
heavy hopeless breast milk smell, smell
of Morelos gardens in bloom, burning stink of running.
Two.
I did not need to run.
I had a paper moon stamped and certified.
Mine was a colonia moon, a barrio moon, a suburban moon.
I knew where I was, where I was supposed to be,
where I was allowed to go.
And that was anywhere.
We lived the outhouse moon, the tortilla moon, the channel 12
bullfight Tijuana moon.
And then we migrated north like monarchs following the light.
And my moon was a boy scout moon, a campout moon,
a drive in triple feature moon.
My moon remained poor as a rusted coin in a frozen pond
but documented.
The green men in the trucks could read my belonging
by this moon's light, gave us the all clear
to walk, work, die on ground our ancestors had forgotten.
Let us don bat patrol patches and troop to 60 uniforms,
hike the ridgelines where the Mexica had
taken Huitzilopochtli in their arms and begun
their 100 year walk to the south.
My moon rose over tidy houses.
Three-- she ran.
She ran all her life.
She ran to stay ahead of charging darkness,
galloping hunger.
She ran west to el poniente, north toward winter
and Mictlán, land of the dead.
Worked the light of the moon in her small hands,
the color of Earth.
She molded moonglow into trinkets
traded for coins, the color of sun, wove moon into bracelets.
She traded for perfume.
Worked the ceremonial motel chambers,
swept the floors of the moneyed, folded bloody sheets and knelt
at toilets scrubbing sins of the mighty from the seats.
She was 13.
Mactlacti ihuan yei.
I was 10.
Mactlacti.
Somehow, she came to rest in my house.
Trucks could not track her for an hour.
Dogs could not follow her scent.
She was on that invisible railroad to Los Angeles,
enemy city of the great walled city of Tijuanatlán.
I was in the invisible mountains of Cuyamaca,
walking in the ghost footprints of vanished hunters
in their tribes wondering where their arrows went.
And she slept in my bed, too tired to eat,
too tired to join in the gathered laughter of my living
room.
She slept in my bed.
She lay in my sheets, smelling the odor
of Thunderbird and America.
And her eyes pulled themselves, closed to protect
her dreams of home.
Four-- and I came in.
And I found her.
I came in and found her.
Is there any other story?
Any other legend to tell?
I came home, I found her, her head
on my pillow, the first woman to ever sleep in my bed.
Her hair black across my pillow spilling toward the Earth,
reaching for the heart of Ce Anáhuac, the One World.
Her eyebrows shallow as streams fringed in cress and licorice
in Cuyamaca shadows.
Her brown brow unlined.
One hand, fingers curled, nails pale small shells
against the Chichimeca shores of her skin.
Her breath making small melodies of breezes and tides.
And me holding my breath.
The thrum and sigh, thrum and sigh,
thrum and sigh of her sleep.
Then they woke her.
She didn't want to wake.
She didn't want to rise.
She didn't want to go.
I didn't want them to wake her.
I wanted her to sleep beside me.
I didn't know anything else that men wanted
to happen in bed with a woman.
I wanted to sleep beside her.
I did not know the language of beds.
I wanted to pass through the door of her color.
I wanted to pray in her temple of hair.
She knew more than I did about this language.
She blushed when she saw me at worship.
I wanted to pray.
I blushed, discovered it in my wanting.
We touched hands.
Hello.
We touched hands.
Adios.
Then they tucked her in the back seat of a 64 car,
smuggled her under blankets through trucks up freeways
laden with runners north where she'd
bask in the light of a thousand toilets,
where her nails would break on porcelain, where she'd sweep
more sheets off more beds where she could not afford to sleep,
where helicopters searched her alleys with burning eyes
all night, where she could speak to no one
and no one could speak to her except to give her orders.
Girly, get your ass over here and wipe this up.
You come when I tell you to come.
And you do it now.
Have papers?
You like this.
You do, don't you?
You like this.
I'll teach you a little something right here right now.
That night I lay in her outline in my sheets.
She was hot as a sunburn on my skin.
I sank my face into the imprint of hers.
Her perfume crept from the pillow.
The smell of her memories.
I smelled her mother in a kitchen
with clay pots and cilantro.
It was all there.
It is still there.
Hibiscus tea.
A river, a handful of shampoo falling
to a drain like melting snowdrifts.
First grade, the Mexican national anthem,
the snap of the flag, chalk dust sneezes,
smell of library paste, village church, incense,
the crack of unopened bibles, laundry day, the boiling,
tamales, day, and the aunts with their crow voice laughter.
The meat, the masa, the raisins, the cinnamon, morning glory
vines all tangled through cheap Tijuana perfume.
Just an illegal and crepuscular dawn.
If you see her, protect her, revere her.
My unknown sister.
Light candles in her honor, you travelers.
She is the mother of my race."