A very few more pieces.
This is one piece of prose I want to read
and then it and the last poem's all from the Rising and Falling
manuscript.
The title of this is "The Penalty for Bigamy
is Two Wives."
[LAUGHTER]
It has two-- it's a piece with two characters.
One is somebody who admires about artists
the imagined beautiful doom in which they live,
a favorite and stupid romantic myth about artists.
The other one is an artist who is a little nervous about being
seen in this light, since it's going to require him to suffer
to keep up his public image.
And they have a discussion.
The discussion, though, is reported only
by one of the characters.
And so they don't actually talk.
This character who's speaking recalls their discussion.
"I don't understand how Janis Joplin did it,
how she made her voice break out like that in hives of feeling.
I have a friend that writes poems who says he really
wants to be a rock star--
high-heeled boots, the handheld mic,
the glare of underpants in the front row--
the whole package.
He says he likes the way music throws you back into your body,
like organic food or heroin.
But when he sings, it is sleek and abstract,
except for the pain, like the silhouette of a dog baying
at the moon, almost liver-shaped,
a bell hung from a rope of its own pure yearning.
Naturally, his life is exciting.
But sometimes I think he can't tell the difference
between salvation and death.
When I listen to my Janis Joplin records, I think of him.
Once I got drunk and sloppy and told him
I feared artists always had more fun and more death, too,
and how I had these strong feelings but nothing
to do with them.
And he said, don't worry.
I'd trade my onion collection for a good cry.
Wouldn't you?
I didn't really understand.
But poetry is how you feel, so I lie back
and listen to Janis's dead voice run up and down my body
like a fire that has learned to live on itself.
And I think, here it comes, grief's beautiful blowjob.
I think about the painter who was
said to paint with his penis.
And I imagine one of his portraits
letting down a local rain of hair
around his penis, now too stiff to paint with,
as if her diligent silence meant to say,
you loved me enough to make me.
When will I see you next?
Janis, I don't care what anybody thinks or writes.
I don't care if my friend who writes poems
is a beautiful fake, like a planetarium ceiling.
I want to hold my life in my arms
as easily as my body will hold forever
the silence for which the mouth slowly opens."