Now, I'll read a couple of poems.
The first one, average length and the second one,
very short, about certain elements
of the grotesque in our lives.
Elements of the grotesque about which I feel rather strongly.
Flannery O'Connor, a writer whom I
admire to the point of worship, said
that in order to write about the grotesque, a novelist,
she was talking about novelist, I guess,
must understand what is not grotesque in our society
and why.
And I think that's very difficult, especially
for a poet to know the line between the grotesque
and the non-grotesque.
I can tell when something's really enormously grotesque
pretty easily.
I remember when I was about 19 or 20, I sat down on a toilet
and it fell over with me.
[LAUGHTER]
And the water began to shoot out.
And I was caught in the position of trying to get my pants up
while being attacked by a geyser.
[LAUGHTER]
Now, that's obviously grotesque.
And I can tell immediately that that's grotesque,
but I can't always tell when something is grotesque.
[LAUGHTER]
The element-- the grotesque element, which, I suppose,
caused this first poem I'm going to read
is grotesque in a totally different sense.
It's horror, I suppose.
This is an ecological poem.
When I was in Idaho this past summer, I saw in the park
in the poem two magnificent black swans.
I had never seen anything like them.
They were black, they had curly tail feathers,
and brilliant red beaks, and legs and feet,
and they were, oh, gorgeous things.
And I was talking to my brother about them.
He said, this pair of swans you're seeing here
is not the original pair.
That these are very rare birds and they
have had to be replaced because the original pair was killed.
And I said, well, how did they get killed?
And he said, well, at night, they come up on the bank
and sleep.
And the teenagers made a sport out
of driving down here and driving off the road
and chasing them around until they ran over them
with their cars.
Perhaps an extreme case, but I think, kind of,
indicative of some of our problems with our environment,
the senseless slaughter.
I really can't look a stuffed animal in the eyes.
I find that very difficult to do.
And I think when we all reached the point where
we can't look at stuffed animal in the eyes,
we will have a little better attitude
toward the world around us.
This is-- this poem will be in the New Yorker,
which pleases me because--
more than it would if most were, because I
hope some heavy industrial type will read it maybe,
I think, in that magazine.
Heavy industrial types read that magazine.
Maybe someone will read it and get something out of it.
It's called Seven Preludes to Silence
and it is numbered one through seven,
but I won't read the numbers.
Seven Preludes to Silence.
All day, a wounded mountain followed
me, gentle and crumpled like a fern.
It was too shy to speak of its great need.
And what could I have done to help it?
The desert has forgotten what it is waiting for,
even sand will not survive without a purpose.
Can thus learn to swim?
Will flowers be able to repeat themselves in stone?
We have removed the Earth's flesh
and torn out its bleeding veins.
Sunlight reflects from our knives.
It blisters the surface of the lake where nebula of fish
will never return.
A few gulls carry their white grief
on delicate hollow bones from water to water.
We have forgotten that once there
were black swans with brilliant red beaks and curly tail
feathers.
Soon, the last birds of desperate passage
will ricochet through our oily rooms.
The stars confirm nothing, deny nothing.
Heads of animals grow on our walls.
Their hopeless glass eyes stare down at us without reproach.
We, who invented the clock and the metronome cannot keep
the calendar alive.
We exist not on the edge of life, but at its limits,
asking no pardon of the grass or the delicate shells,
which arrive and depart on each tide.
In the book of our history, it will be recorded
that we murdered the Earth.
With the name of a different crime tattooed on each finger,
we walk out into the Orchard and find tiny mirrors
hanging from the trees.
Listen, the leaves are screaming for help as they fall.
[APPLAUSE]