Well, I'll read now a few, a few more poems.
I thought I was a little hesitant
about reading some recent poems and these
are the ones I'm hesitant about because not too long ago I
read these poems at a Lutheran college.
And well just as I wrote that poem for William Carlos
Williams, while he was giving his reading,
or perhaps it was afterwards, I don't remember.
But any case, just as I in my day
wrote poems to poets who gave readings, so at the Lutheran
college it came my turn to receive
a poem written on the [? case ?] of my reading.
It was pressed into my hand directly after the reading.
A woman gave it to me.
She had scrawled at the bottom, if you need me, ask.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't know what she meant.
[LAUGHTER]
So the poem went something like this,
I can't say it all but it began, "Go away for now.
Why are you so obsessed with health and disease?
Your words are as cruel as your heart."
And it went on in this way.
And it ended with a line I can't forget.
"In the midst of the jar of life, you are a pickle."
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I laughed too when I read the poem.
And yet the laughter stuck in my throat.
Because I could feel the pity from,
I could feel it too, that in those times
there was something that had reached that woman.
And so I put her letter up above my desk
and had it there for a long time as a kind of modern equivalent
of the death's head.
And it did make me a little timid
about reading these poems.
That is perhaps, I'm even more timid tonight
because I was just told a strange thing
before I came in here.
That an old Sunday school teacher of mine
is in the audience.
And I don't know who it may be.
I hope you'll call me or say hello afterwards.
All I can be sure of that is that a Sunday school teacher
has been well steeped in the doctrine of forgiveness
of the New Testament.
And if these poems are not those that a Sunday school
teacher would want to be proud of in a graduate
from Sunday school, I must invoke that doctrine from her.
I think I'll just read two poems, the kind that--
Well, a prickly poem, and--
Then it's called the porcupine and then
and then it's called the bear.
I don't know if you have porcupines here,
that for here those of you who aren't
familiar with the animal, it's necessary to know
to make any sense of this poem that the porcupine has
a fierce craving for salt and will eat anything
that human beings have left the residue of their salt upon,
even automobile tires or steering wheels.
I even heard of them eating the aluminum
siding of a motor left, [INAUDIBLE] left it,
they left the motor, left in the woods.
And I have this old place in Vermont
and when I was away one period of time
the porcupines ate their way into my cellar,
ate a hole right through the cellar door
and got into the cellar.
And had they got up into the rest of the house,
they would have completely demolished it
because my sweat has been slammed over floor, ceiling,
and wall in that house.
And however, they ate down the cellar stairs on the way up.
They're not a very intelligent animal.
That's because it's-- that's because they're so well
protected, they are the easiest animal to kill.
And they are the only wild animal that
is easy to kill in Vermont.
And you can just get alongside them
and strike them over the nose with a club
and that's the way to finally kill them.
Sometimes it's hard to find some [? intelligent ?] trees
and in that case, the farmer shoots them.
The Avesta is the Zoroastrian printed book
and you may think the doctrine is [INAUDIBLE] they were saved
by [INAUDIBLE] arrow, and force fire
is that name given to the fire supposed
to be able to make by rubbing two sticks together.
[INAUDIBLE]
"The Porcupine."
"Fatted on herbs, swollen on crabapples,
puffed up on bast and phloem, ballooned
on willow flowers, poplar catkins,
first leafs of aspen and larch, the porcupine drags and bounces
his last meal through ice, mud roses and goldenrod
into the stubby high fields.
In character he resembles us in seven ways:
he puts his mark on outhouses, he alchemizes by moonlight,
he shits on the run, he uses his tail for climbing,
he chuckles softly to himself when scared, he's overcrowded
if there is more than one of them per five acres,
his eyes have their own inner redness.
Digger of goings across floors, of hesitations at thresholds,
of handprints of dread at doorpost or window jamb,
he would gouge the world empty of us,
hack and crater it until it is nothing, if that could rinse it
of all of our sweat and pathos.
Adorer of ax, handles aflow with grain, or arms,
of Morris chairs, of hand-crafted objects, steeped
in the juice of fingertips, or surfaces wetted down
with fist grease and elbow oil, of clothespins
that have grabbed our body-rags by underarm and crotch.
Unimpressed, bored by the whirl of the skies, by these
he's astonished, ulta-Rilkean angel
for whom the true portion of the sweetness of earth
is one of those bottom-heavy, glittering sardonic bits
of salt water that splash down the haunted
ravines of a human face.
A farmer shot a porcupine three times
as it dozed on a tree limb.
On the way down it tore open its belly on a broken branch,
hooked its gut and went on falling.
On the ground it's sprang to its feet, and paying out gut
heaves and spartled through a hundred feet of goldenrod
before the abrupt emptiness.
The Avesta puts porcupine killers
into hell for nine generations, sentencing
them to gnaw out each others' hearts for the salts of desire.
I roll this way and that in the great bed,
under the quilt that mimics this country of broken farms
and woods, the fatty sheath of the man [AUDIO OUT] bristles
reversing, blossoming outward--
a red-eyed, hard-toothed, arrow-struck urchin, tossing up
mattress feathers, pricking the woman beside me
until she cries.
In my time I have crouched, quills erected, Saint Sebastian
of the sacred heart, and been beat dead
with a locust club on the bare snout.
And fallen some high places, I have fled,
have jogged over fields of goldenrod,
terrified, seeking home.
And among flowers I have come to myself empty,
the rope strung out behind me in the fall sun
suddenly glorified with all my blood.
And tonight I think I prowl broken skulled or vacant
as a sucked egg in the wintry meadow,
softly chuckling, blank template of myself,
dragging a starved belly through the lichflowered acres,
where burdock loses the arks of its seed and thistle
holds up its lost blooms and rosebushes
in the wind scrape their dead limbs
for the forced-fire of roses."
[APPLAUSE]