Our next reading will be one week from tonight
in this auditorium.
There will be a reading to honor the students who are
winners in this year's contest.
That's the 28th at 8 o'clock here.
There's a great deal going on this weekend.
Chax Press tomorrow night is sponsoring a reading
by New Mexico poet Janet Rodney.
And part of that--
for part of that reading she'll be
joined by Joy Harjo and Keith Stoutenburg,
playing saxophone and keyboard jazz.
And very exciting event this weekend, the Tucson Poetry
Festival.
And they have tickets on sale here tonight for the festival.
It begins on Friday night with a reading
by Jane Miller and Ron Silliman.
Saturday, there'll be a small group
discussions with all of the poets
who are here in the morning.
And afternoon, open mic reading, a discussion at 3:30 PM,
and at 7:30 PM the readers will be Nathaniel Tarn and Edward
Brathwaite.
Sunday afternoon, the readers will
be Meg Davis, Daphne Bartlett, and Robert Creeley.
That's it.
The Scottish Rite Cathedral, 160 South Scott Avenue
in the Downtown Arts District.
So there'll be more information where the tickets will
be on sale out in the hall.
And please stay and have some brownies
and tell Maxine Kumin how wonderful she is.
We almost didn't invite Maxine this year
because last time she came my husband tried
to run away with her.
And I said, why should I put up with that again.
[LAUGHTER]
She's both a poet and a novelist.
Her most recent book of poetry is Nurture.
And we have copies of Nurture on sale tonight.
Her honors include a Pulitzer Prize
and the appointment as a Consultant
to the Library of Congress.
That appointment now is called the Poet Laureate of America.
They changed the title just recently.
It's a great, great pleasure to have her back.
Maxine Kumin.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much.
And that's just an ugly rumor that Lois is passing around,
Richard and I are prepared to deny.
Where are you Richard?
Deny it.
We're just good friends right?
I want to open the reading tonight with a poem which
is more a found poem.
I had very little to do with the writing of it.
It's true that the poet is a meddler.
And I moved things around a little.
And I did write the ending of it.
But most of the language of this poem
is found in a pamphlet that's published by the Canadian
Minister of the Environment and it
is distributed throughout the parks of the Canadian Pacific
Northwest.
And the pamphlet and the poem have the same title,
"You are in Bear Country."
"They've been here for thousands of years.
You're the visitor.
Avoid encounters.
Think ahead.
Keep clear of berry patches, garbage dumps, carcasses.
On woods walks, bring noisemakers, bells, clap hands
along the trail, or sing.
But in dense bush or by running water,
bear may not hear your clatter.
Whatever else don't whistle.
Whistling is thought by some to imitate the sounds bears
make when they mate.
[LAUGHTER]
You need to know there are two kinds, Ursis arctos horribilis,
or grizzly, and Ursis americanus,
the smaller black said to be somewhat less likely to attack.
Alas a small horribilis is difficult to distinguish
from a large americanus.
[LAUGHTER]
Although there is no guaranteed life-saving way
to deal with an aggressive bear some ploys
have proved more successful than others.
Running's a poor choice.
Bear can outrun a racehorse.
Once you're face to face, speak softly, take off your pack,
and set it down to distract the grizzly,
meanwhile back slowly toward a large sparsely branched tree.
But remember black bears are agile climbers in which case
a tree may not offer escape.
As a last resort you can play dead.
Drop to the ground face down.
In this case, wearing your pack may shield your body
from attack.
[LAUGHTER]
Courage.
Lie still.
Sometimes your bear may veer away.
If not bears have been known to inflict only minor injuries
upon the prone.
Is death by bear to be preferred to death by bomb?
Under these extenuating circumstances,
your mind may make absurd leaps.
The answer's yes.
Come on in.
Cherish your wilderness."
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
Well, as it happens, the next poem is also about bears.
And it picks up where that one leaves off.
The hero of this poem is the man who has been attacked
and has lived to tell his story.
Unfortunately he does not know the difference between lie
and lay in common with many of us.
And there is a little reference to that in the poem too.
This poem is called "In the Park."
"You have 49 days between death and rebirth
if you're a Buddhist.
Even the smallest soul could swim the English Channel
in that time or climb, like a 10-month-old child, every step
of the Washington Monument to travel across, up, down, over,
or through.
You won't know till you get there which to do.
He laid on me for a few seconds, said
Roscoe Black, who lived to tell about his skirmish
with a grizzly bear in Glacier Park.
He laid on me not doing anything.
I could feel his heart beating against my heart.
Never mind lie and lay.
The whole world confuses them.
For Roscoe Black, you might say all 49 days flew by.
I was raised on the Old Testament.
In it, God talks to Moses, Noah, Samuel, and they answer.
People confer with angels.
Certain animals converse with humans.
It's a simple world full of crossovers, heavens and airy
somewhere, and God has a nasty temper when provoked.
But if there's a hell, little is made of it.
No long-tailed devil, no eternal fire, and no choosing
what to come back as.
When the grizzly bear appears he lie/lays down
on atheist and zealot.
In the pitch dark, each of us waits for him in Glacier Park."
Well I will take advantage of your hospitality
and read one more bear poem.
This is an actual--
This is not a metaphoric bear.
The poem has a little epigraph from John McPhee, an essayist
whose work I admire greatly.
And he's done a wonderful essay on the black bears
of Western Pennsylvania.
And in that essay he says, "Black bears
are not particularly interested in flesh.
They have been seen in the fields eating string beans."
And that's where this poem is going to take off.
And I suppose I should say here in Arizona where you might not
know it, the Kentucky wonders are pole beans.
It's called "Encounter in August."
"Inside the teepee that admits sunlight to the under part,
he stands eating my Kentucky wonders, downs pod after pod,
spilling the beans, the ones I'd saved for shelling out
this winter, thinking soup when he'd gone deep, denned up.
This is not Eden, which ran unfenced
and was not intercropped, Eden where frost never
overtook a patch.
We stand 10 yards apart, two omnivores not
much interested in flesh.
I think he ought to smell me through his greed
or hear my heart outbeat his steady chomp.
But nothing interrupts his lunch.
At last he goes the way the skunk does,
supreme egoist, ambling into the woodlot on all fours
leaving my trellis flat and being less.
And yet I find the trade-off fair, beans and more beans
for this hour of bear."
I'm going to go back and read some earlier, some kind
of really early poems.
One I like to read is a poem written in rhyming couplets
that goes back to my adolescent years
when I had a lot of fantasies about becoming
a professional swimmer and I didn't
know I was going to be a poet.
And it's called "Morning Swim."
"Into my empty head there come a cotton beach,
a dock wherefrom I set out oily and nude through mist
in chilly solitude.
There was no line, no roof, or floor
to tell the water from the air.
Night fog thick as terry cloth closed me in its fuzzy growth.
I hung my bathrobe on two pegs.
I took the lake between my legs.
Invaded and invader, I went overhand on that flat sky.
Fish twitched beneath me quick and tame.
In their green zone, they sang my name.
And in the rhythm of the swim, I hummed a 2/4 time, slow hymn,
I hummed Abide with Me.
The beat rose in the fine thrash of my feet, rose in the bubbles
I put out slantwise trailing through my mouth.
My bones drank water.
Water fell through all my doors.
I was the well that fed the lake that met my sea in which I
sang Abide with Me."
A long time ago, I wrote a cycle of poems about a hermit.
And I think there are eight of them.
And they're all written in the male persona which
I did only because I didn't think
the world would take a female hermit seriously enough.
So that in each case, the hermit is me.
And since spring has come to Arizona,
and it's not even too far away in New Hampshire,
I'll read one.
I did wake up this morning to wonderful mockingbird calls.
It was such fun to lie there and hear a variety.
I heard the red-winged blackbird,
a sort of drunken red-winged blackbird.
And then I heard a bobwhite, which
was just a little off the mark, and a little bit of a cardinal,
and then some things I couldn't recognize.
But it really made me long for that to happen in our woods.
And this one is called "The Hermit Wakes to Bird Sounds."
"He startles awake.
His eyes are full of white light.
In a minute the sun will ooze into the sky.
Meanwhile all the machines of morning start up.
The typewriter bird is at it again.
Her style is full of endearing hesitations.
The words, when they come, do so in the staccato rush
of a deceitful love letter.
The sewing machine bird returns to the doddering elm.
Like Penelope, she rips out yesterday's stitches
only to glide up and down, front and back, reentering
the same needle holes.
The bird who presides at the well house primes the pump.
Two gurgles, a pause, four squeaks of the handle,
and time after time a promise of water
can be heard falling back in the pipe's throat.
Far off the logging birds soar into heartwood
with rusty blades.
And the grouse cranks up his eternally unstartable Model T.
And the oil can bird comes with his liquid pok pok
to attend to the flinty clanks of the disparate parts.
And as the old bleached sun slips into position,
slowly the teasing, inept, malfunctioning,
one of a kind machines fall silent."
There's something very seductive about writing a cycle of poems
because you have that enduring hope that what
doesn't fit into one is going to turn up
and be useful in another.
And really on the heels of writing the hermit poems
I wrote a cycle of poems about an old horse.
And the horse's name being Amanda.
And I guess I'll just read this one which
has a rather long pretentious title
and is itself quite small.
It's called "Amanda Dreams She has Died
and Gone to the Elysian Fields."
"This morning Amanda lies down during breakfast.
The hay is hip-high.
The sun sleeps on her back as it did
on the spine of the dinosaur, the fossil bat,
the first fish with feet she was once.
A breeze fans the deerflies from lighting.
Only a gaggle of gnats housekeeps in her ears.
A hay plume sticks out of her mouth.
I come calling with a carrot from which I
have taken the first bite.
She startles.
She considers rising but retracts
the pistons of her legs and accepts as loose-lipped
as a camel.
We sit together.
In this time and place, we are heart and bone,
for an hour we are incorruptible."
Probably a good place to put in this next poem
occurs right after that one.
This was a request.
But I like to read it to an academic audience
because it has a four letter word in it
and I feel I have to do my part to play catch up
with my male colleagues whose poems are littered
with four letter words.
So this is called "The Excrement Poem."
"It is done by us all, as God disposes, from the least
cast of worm to what must have been
in the case of the brontosaur, say,
spoor of considerable heft, something awesome.
We eat.
We evacuate.
Survivors that we are.
I think these things each morning
with shovel and rake drawing the risen brown buns toward me,
fresh from the horse oven, as it were,
or culling the alfalfa-green ones expelled
in a state of ooze through the sawdust bed
to take a serviceable form, as putty does, so as to lift out
and tire from the stall.
And wheeling to it, storming up the slope,
I think of the angle of repose the manure pile
assumes, how sparrows come to pick the redelivered grain,
how inky-cap coprinus mushrooms spring up in a downpour.
I think of what drops from us and must then
be moved to make way for the next and next.
However much we stain the world, spatter it with our leavings,
make stenches, defile the great formal oceans with what
leaks down, trundling off today's last barrel-full,
I honor shit for saying, we go on."
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Well while I'm being scatological,
I'll read another.
This is a kind of an experimental vision.
This was the poem that got me in so much trouble
when I was at the Library of Congress
because I was attacked by the Heritage Foundation
as a pornographic poet.
And since I always got off the elevator on the third floor,
which is where the Poetry Office at the Library of Congress is,
it's a floor labeled attic in the elevator.
And I used to whistle walking down the hall.
The two women who constitute my staff and are
my dear friends would say, aha the whistling pornographer
returns.
This poem this is sort of an anti-animal experimentation
poem called "Heaven as Anus."
"In the Defense Department there is a shop
where scientists sew the eyelids of rabbits
open, lest they blink in the scourge of a nuclear drop.
And elsewhere, dolphins are being taught to defuse bombs
in the mockup of a harbor.
And monkeys learn to perform the simple tasks of draftees.
It is done with electric shocks.
Some mice who have failed their time tests in the maze
now go to the wire unbidden for their jolts.
Implanting electrodes yields rich results.
Alley cats turn from predators into prey.
Show them a sparrow and they cower.
While the white wall labs fill up
with the feces of fear, where calves whose hearts
have been done away with walk and bleat on plastic pumps.
And what is any of this to the godhead?
These squeals, whines, writhings,
unexpected jumps, whose children burn alive,
boobytrap the dead, lop ears and testicles, core and disembowel.
It all ends at the hole.
No words may enter the house of excrement.
We will meet there as the sphincter of the good Lord
opens wide and He takes us all inside."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Well now we've brought God into it.
Yeah, don't tell Jesse Helms OK?
Fortunately I don't-- I'm not facing what the recipients
of this year's grants are facing where they have to sign
a loyalty oath.
That's really true.
I mean, it would be a terrific position to be in, as a writer,
to have to make that decision to give up the whatever
it is, $17,000 or $20,000.
Yeah.
Anyway, I spent six weeks as writer in residence
at a small college in Danville, Kentucky, which
was a wonderful--
You know, Thoreau says at one point in Walden,
which is my Bible, he says, "One need not
go halfway around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar."
Which is now Tanzania.
"Extra vagance!
It depends how one is yarded."
And I found the extra vagance in Danville, Kentucky.
I had never lived in pentecostal country before.
And it was quite a revelation.
This poem is called "The Jesus Infection."
"Jesus is with me on the bluegrass parkway
going eastbound.
He is with me on the old Harrodsburg road coming home.
I am listening to country gospel music in the borrowed Subaru.
The gas pedal and the words leap to the music.
Oh throw out the lifeline.
Someone is drifting away.
Flags fly up in my mind without my knowing
where they've been lying furled.
And I am happy living in the sunlight where Jesus is near.
A man is driving his polled Herefords
across the gleaning of a cornfield
while I am bound for the kingdom of the free.
At the little trestle bridge that has no railing,
I see that I won't have to cross Jordan alone.
Signposts every mile exhort me to Get Right with God
and I move over.
There's a neon message blazing at the crossroad catty corner
to the Burger Queen.
Ye Come with Me.
Is it well with my soul, Jesus?
It sounds so easy to be happy after the sunrise,
to be washed in the crimson flood.
Now I am tailgating and I read a bumper sticker
on a Ford truck full of Poland Chinas.
It says honk if you know Jesus.
And I do it.
My sound blasts out four miles behind the pig squeal.
And it's catching in the front end, in the axle,
in the universal joint, this rich contagion.
We are going down the valley on a hairpin turn.
The swine and me, we're breakneck in.
We are leaning on the everlasting arms."
[APPLAUSE]
Well I know that some of you are aware of the fact
that the late Anne Sexton and I were
very close personal friends and very
close professional friends.
And after her death, although I had vowed I would not do,
I found that I was writing elegies to her name.
What's interesting to me is how these change.
The first several ones are apostrophes,
that is direct address to the absent one.
And then-- So I think I'll read two.
I'm going to read one of these early ones.
And then I'm going to read a recent one.
I think-- Although it may be hard to get into this
since it's so wintery.
It's called "Splitting Wood at Six Above," which
is the best time to split wood.
Once it's below freezing, wood splits much--
more easily.
And it contains a passage about paying
for an expensive long distance call.
It was our habit to talk on the phone every day.
And when one of us was out of town we called after 5:00,
but we still might be on the phone
for 45 minutes or an hour.
And then we would split the phone bill
at the end of the month.
And back then even I can remember paying phone bills
of $250-$300 for a month apart.
That's just background for this.
"Splitting Wood at Six Above."
"I open a tree in the stupefying cold.
Ice on bare flesh a scald.
I seat the metal wedge with a few left-handed swipes.
Then with a change of grips lean into the eight-pound sledge.
It's muslin overhead.
Snow falls as heavy as salt. You are four months dead.
The beech log comes apart like a chocolate nougat.
The wood speaks first in the tiny voice
of a bird cry, a puppet squeak.
And then all in a rush, all in a passionate stammer,
the papery soul of the beech released by wedge and hammer
flies back into air.
Time will do this as fair to hickory, birch, black oak.
Easing the insects until rot and freeze
combine to raise out of wormwood cracks, blue and dainty.
The souls, they are thin as an eyelash.
They flap once going up.
The air rings like a bell.
I breathe out drops, cold morning ghost
puffs like your old cigarette cough.
See you tomorrow, you said.
You lied.
We're far from finished.
I'm still talking to you.
Last night's dream, we'll split the phone bill.
It's expensive calling from the other side.
Even waking it seems logical, your small, round,
stubbornly airborne soul, that sun-yellow daisy heart slipping
the noose of its pod, scooting over the tightrope none
the worse for its trip to arrive at the other side.
It is the sound of your going.
I drive into heartwood.
I stack my quartered cuts, bark down, open yellow face up."
There are a number of these poems.
And there's one in the new book, in Nurture.
And I thought I might then read this
because this is the first time in which it isn't a you poem.
This is a very detached third person.
And I have never found it possible to write
a poem to specification, to spec as it were.
And in this case I was asked to write a poem.
And three or four or five months elapsed,
long after the magazine had been published,
and suddenly came the poem.
So it's called "On Being Asked to Write a Poem in Memory
of Anne Sexton."
"The elk discards his antlers every spring.
They rebud.
They grow.
They are growing an inch a day to form a rococo
rack with a 5-foot spread even as we speak.
Cartilage at first, covered with velvet, bendable, tender
gristle yet destined to ossify.
The velvet sloughed off hanging in tatters
from altars and scrub growth.
No matter how hardened it seems there was pain.
Blood on the snow from rubbing, rubbing, rubbing.
What a heavy candelabrum to be borne forth,
each year more elaborately turned.
The special issues, the prizes in her name.
Above the mantel the late elks antlers gleam."
And just because I think it's interesting to follow
the thread, you know, of--
Someone once said, oh the poet has one song
and sings it over and over.
And there's really a lot--
an enormous truth to that.
So I thought I'd kind of display this poem, which is too
new to have been collected yet.
And it's called "The Green Well."
It's very elegiac.
"June 5:00 AM, before the sun retakes its dips and humps,
light rims the field with an aura.
Gnats form an ectoplasmic cloud over the bruised bathtub,
over the salt lick hollowed out by tongues
like medieval stairs petitioners' feet have
worn looking for the truth.
I hold truth in a nine lives can twice
weekly for the cats whose paws explore the lips
and sills of stalls so deftly that they never need encounter
the grounded dogs.
Today a newly dead red squirrel hugs
the top of the feed bin, recompense, exact.
Thanks Abra.
Thank you, Kadabra for doing God's work.
Fledglings, field mice, shrews, moles, baby rabbits,
else why would He have made so many?
I bury what I deplore in the manure pile,
deep in that warm brown digester to be
flung next fall on the meadow, then
let myself down rung by rung into the green well of losses.
A kitchen midden where the newly dead, layer by layer,
overtake the long and longer vanished.
Gone now to tankage, my first saved starveling
mare and the filly we tore from her in the rain.
After the lethal pheno barb, the vet exchanged my check
for his handkerchief.
Nine live foals since and I'm still
pocked with grief, with how they lay on their sides, half-dry,
half-wet.
Grief, sir, is a species of idleness, a line
we treasured out of bellow.
My suicided long-term friend and I, all these years
I've fought somehow to bless her drinking in of the killer car
exhaust.
But a coal of anger sat and winked
its live orange eye undimmed in my chest,
while the world buzzed gossiping in the hive.
That mare, a dangerous runaway, her tongue thickly
scarred by wire, my friend too fleeing her wolves,
her voices that those voodoo doctors could not still
nor save her from.
It does not end with us though end it will.
A hapless swallow lays another clutch
of eggs in the accessible nest.
The cats elaborately clean themselves after the kill."
[APPLAUSE]
Well I think we need something a little lighter after that.
And I'll read a couple of what I call my tribal poems.
This is really my sex misinformation poem.
I wrote this poem for my mother's 82nd birthday.
It's just called "Birthday Poem."
"I am born at home, the last of four children.
The doctor brings me as promised in his snapshot black leather
satchel.
He takes me out in sections, fastens limbs
to torso, torso to neck stem, pries mama's navel open
and inserts me head first.
Chin back I swim upward up the alimentary canal,
bypassing mouth and nose holes, and knock
at the top of her head to be let out,
wherefore her little bald spot.
Today my mother is 82, splendidly
braceleted and wigged.
She had to go four times to the well to get me."
And I'll read--
I'll read another one out of this group.
This one is called "Sunbathing on a Rooftop in Berkeley."
"Eleven palm trees stand up between me and the bay.
A quarter turn and I'm in line with Campanile Tower.
The hippies are sunbathing too.
They spread themselves out on the sidewalks
with their ingenious crafts for sale and their humble puppies.
We are all pretending summer is eternal.
Mount Tamalpais hovers in the distance.
I pinch myself that this is California
but behind my light-struck eyelids
I am also a child again in an amusement park in Pennsylvania.
And 40 years blow in and out adapting as the fog does
to conditions in the bay.
My daughter has gone to her class in criminal procedure.
She pulls her hair back in a twist.
Maybe she will marry the young man she lives with.
I take note how severely she regards
the laws of search and seizure.
She moves with the assurance of a cheetah.
Still marriage may be the sort of entrapment
she wishes to avoid.
She is all uncertainties as I am in this mothering business.
Oh summers without end.
The exact truth is we are expanding sideways
as haplessly as in the mirrors of the funhouse
we bulge toward the separate fates that await us,
sometimes touching as sleeves will
whether or not a hug was intended.
Oh summers without end.
The truth is no matter how I love her,
death blew up my dress that day while she
was in the egg unconsidered."
And again I guess this will illustrate
what I said about the one song.
This is a different daughter.
And it's called "We Stood There Singing."
This takes place in just outside of Geneva, Switzerland
in the French Alps where we are going,
climbing up to one of the stud farms for a horse which
has been for, I guess, since the Middle Ages,
the prime and unspoiled breed of the Swiss army.
And it's sort of a light draft animal.
They ride them.
And they drive them.
They use them to pull.
Le Bon Roi Dagobert is a children's song in French.
It's all about this the good King Dagobert who's
not quite all there and the good Saint
Louis who looks after him.
In the very first stanza of the King
has put his pants on backwards and, you
know, in succeeding stanzas he does other ridiculous things.
And Saint Louis kind of bails him out.
"We Stood There Singing."
"On a gray day in March in his first year,
we drove up out of orderly Geneva, mother and daughter,
and the daughter's child, up the hairpin
turns of the Chasseral in search of the horses
of the Franches-Montagnes with feathered fetlocks
and manes blown wild, each splashed-white face the same,
the same kind eye said to persist unchanged
since Charlemagne.
The baby slept tipped sideways in his chair,
slept through sudden snow squalls that
blanked the alpine road like a stage scrim
and woke up cranky in Les Breuleux where
at the village's one store we stopped to take our bearings.
When he howled, the aproned woman
invited us back past vats of sauerkraut and wheels of cheese
into their bedroom.
I remember that plain space of rough white plaster
and crucifix, oak beams overhead,
runner of tattered lace on the chest of drawers.
I remember the lambskin she unrolled on the bed,
motioning you to lay him down.
And after he was done up sweet with powder,
she opened her arms and bounced him chortling around the room
singing him bits of Le Bon Roi Dagobert.
We stood there singing.
I remember that moment of civility among women."
The beginning of my brief stay here,
I read one poem which came from a series I wrote when
my brothers--
the next in line to me, and we were--
there were four of us in the family--
died of ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, which
was a long and terrible dying.
And I read one poem at that time.
And I'd like to read a different one tonight.
You do need to know that when you get to these L words,
these flowers that all have L's in them,
that what we're looking at is more L's than the word needs.
OK?
The poem is called "The Man of Many L's."
"My whole childhood I feared cripples
and how they got that way, the one-legged lavender
man who sold his sachets by St Mary's steeple,
the blind who tapped past, humming what they knew.
Even the hunchback seamstress, a rag doll
who further sagged to pin my mother's hems had once been
sturdy, had once been whole.
Something entered people.
Something chopped, pressed, punctured,
had its way with them.
And if you looked, bad child, it entered you.
When we found out what the disease would
do, lying like any council's stalwarts, all of us
swore to play our parts in the final act at your command.
The first was easy.
You gave up your left hand and the right grew wiser,
a juggler for its king.
When the poor dumb leg began to falter,
you took up an alpenstock for walking once flourished Sundays
by our dead father.
Month by month the battleground grew thinner.
When you could no longer swallow meat,
we steamed and mashed your dinner and bent
your straw to chocolate soda treats.
And when you could not talk, still you
could write questions and answers on a magic slate,
then lift the page like laundry to the wind.
I plucked the memory splinter from your spine
as we played at being normal, who
had eased each other in the cold zoo of childhood.
Three months before you died I wheeled you
through the streets of placid Palo Alto
to catch spring in its flamboyant tracks.
You wrote the name of every idiot flower I did not
know, yucca rained, mimosas shone,
the bottlebrush took fire as you fought
to hold your great head on its stem.
Lilac you wrote, magnolia, lily, and further oleander,
delphinium.
Oh man of many L's, brother, my wily resident ghost,
may I never spell these crowfoot dogbane words again,
these showy florid words again, except I name them
under your spell."
One-- I think maybe one last of the tribal group.
This is quite a bit lighter.
It's a little lyric called "Appetite."
"I eat these wild red raspberries
still warm from the sun and smelling faintly of jewelweed
in memory of my father.
Tucking the napkin under his chin
and bending over an ironstone bowl of the bright droplets,
awash in cream, my father with a sigh of a man who
has seen all and been redeemed, said time after time
as he lifted his spoon, men kill for this."
And this is a moose poem.
It's also about Thoreau.
The word camelopard was an early word in our language
that was used to describe the giraffe.
That's the only thing that needs to be glossed.
And it's called "My Elusive Guest."
"Thoreau loved the grayness of them,
homespun with leafy horns, like lichen made of bone.
God's own horses, poor timid creatures,
he said in 1846 in the Maine woods,
and then went on to wonder why they
stood so high at the shoulders, why so long a head, no tail
to speak of.
How like the camelopard, he said, rolling the archaic word
on his tongue.
High before and low behind and stayed admiring them upwind.
A hundred years later the widow Blau, whose rockbound farm
I now inhabit, broomed a moose out of her kitchen garden,
thinking it the neighbor's brown cow,
marauding among the vegetables at dawn,
then looked up to behold those rabbit
ears, that wet nearsighted eye, that
ferny rack of gray on a still-gray sky and none since.
Spring mornings at first light sometimes through fog,
some heavy weight shifts and wavers
against the line of trees and wanting it in my blood,
like a spray of musk, I beckon the elusive guest,
willing it close.
My wild thing, my moose."
And I think I'll go back to the new book
and perhaps read a couple of these animal poems.
This is a poem about a dog who is no longer among the living,
a wonderful dog however.
It's called "Custodian" and this is really a biographical, very
accurate picture.
Every spring when the ice goes out,
black commas come scribbling across the shallows.
Soon they sprout four legs.
Slowly they absorb their tails.
And by mid-June, full-voiced, announce themselves.
Enter our spotted dog.
Every summer, tense with the scent of them,
tail arced like a pointer's but wagging in anticipation,
he stalks his frogs 200 yards clockwise around the perimeter
of this mucky pond, then counterclockwise,
an old pensioner happy in his work.
Once every 10 or so pounces he succeeds,
carries his captive north in his soft mouth,
uncorks him on the grass.
And then sits head cocked, watching the slightly dazed
amphibian hop back to sanctuary.
Over the years the pond's inhabitants
seem to have grown accustomed to this ritual of capture
and release.
They ride untroubled in the wet pocket of the dog's mouth,
disembark in the meadow like hitchhikers,
and strike out again for home.
I have seen others of his species
kill and swallow their catch and then be
seized with violent retchings.
I have seen children corner polliwogs
in the sun-flecked hollow by the green rock and lovingly
squeeze the life out of them in their small fists.
I have seen the great blue heron swoop in time
after wing-slapping time to carry frogs back
to the fledglings in the rookery.
Nothing is to be said here of need or desire.
No moral arises nor is this, probably, purgatory.
We have this old dog, custodian of an ancient race of frogs,
doing what he knows how to do and we too,
taking and letting go, that same story."
This one is of course, as you'll hear,
inspired by watching one of those television
documentaries on Africa.
It's called "Catchment."
"When the she-leopard stalks and pounces on an infant antelope,
which one am I rooting for?
The newborn I saw slip, moments ago, free from the birth canal,
struggle to its feet, stagger against its mother's teat
and begin to nurse, both nervously twitching tail stubs
in the heat and flies of the equator, or the big cat,
in whose camouflaged lair three helpless youngsters wait
so starved for meat that she dares venture out
to hunt by daylight?
I watch this living-color film unfold with a friend,
whose English bull mastiff pup, as if New Hampshire were
the veldt, as if its life depended on the chase,
leapt up last month to snatch a newborn doe kid from her arms
and snapped its neck with one good shake.
Later, watching the after-afterglow
flush the whole sky pink then darken,
we can almost discuss it, good and harm.
Nature a catchment of sorrows.
We hug each other.
No lesson drawn."
One more from that group.
I wanted to call this Nurture book Sleeping With Animals.
But Viking is a very timorous publisher
and they thought that sounded too kinky.
And we also had a big argument about this cover,
which I think belongs on a personal hygiene product.
But I lost that battle too.
So I want, especially, to read this poem "Sleeping
with Animals."
"Nightly I choose to keep this covenant
with a wheezing broodmare who, 10 days past due,
grunts in her sleep in the vocables
of the vastly pregnant.
She lies down on sawdust of white pine,
its turp smell blending with the rich scent
of ammonia and manure.
I in my mummy bag just outside her stall,
observe the silence louder than the catch in her breathing,
observe gradations of the ancient non editorial dark,
against the open doorway looking south,
observe the paddock posts become a chain gang, each one
shackled leg and wrist.
The pasture wall a graveyard of bones
that ground fog lifts and swirls.
Sleeping with animals, loving my animals too much,
letting them run like a perfectly detached statement
by Mozart through all the other lines of my life,
a handsome family of serene horses glistening
in their thoughtlessness, fear ghosts
me still for my two skeletons, one stillborn
foal eight years ago.
One, hours old, dead of a broken spine.
Five others swam like divers into air,
dropped on clean straw, were whinnied to,
tongued dry, and staggered, stagey drunkards,
to their feet, nipped and nudged by their mothers to the teat.
Restless, dozy, between occasional coughs
the mare takes note of me and nickers.
Heaves herself up, explores the corners of her feed tub.
Sleeps a little, leg joints locked.
I shine my light across the bar to watch the immense contours
of her flanks rise and fall.
Each double-inhale is threaded to the life that still
holds back in its safe sac.
What we say to each other in the cold black of April,
conveyed in a wordless yet perfect language of touch
and tremor, connects us most surely to the wet cave
we all once burst from gasping, naked or furred,
into our separate species.
Everywhere on this planet, birth.
Everywhere, curled in the amnion, an unborn wonder.
Together we wait for this still-clenched burden."
I think just two more poems will bring us up to time.
I'll read the title poem and then I'll read one new poem.
And that will be it.
What I wanted on the cover was a wonderful photograph
that was in Smithsonian Magazine of an orphan kangaroo
being nursed, being fed milk out of a doll-sized bottle.
And the scale of the human hand and the little joey
was so terrific.
But Viking rejected it.
They said it was too fetal-looking.
Which is to say, it wasn't pretty.
So that's why we have Bambi on the cover.
There's no Bambi in this book.
This poem is called "Nurture" and I just
want to say about it that it really wasn't a 19th century
romantic notion that there had been a wild child.
There is no actual--
there is no documentation for this,
despite the Romulus and Remus legend
that a she-wolf nursed them, and they went on
to found Rome, and so on.
"Nurture."
"From a documentary on marsupials
I learn that a pillow case makes a fine substitute
pouch for an orphaned kangaroo.
I am drawn to such dramas of animal rescue.
They are warm in the throat.
I suffer, the critic proclaims, from an overabundance
of maternal genes.
Bring me your fallen fledgeling, your bummer lamb,
lead the abused, the starvelings into my barn.
Advise the hunted deer to leap into my corn.
And had there been a wild child, filthy and fierce as a ferret
he is called in one 19th century account, a wild child
to love, it is safe to assume, given
my fireside inked with paw prints,
there would have been room.
Think of the language we two, same and not-same,
might have constructed from sign, scratch, grimace, grunt,
vowel.
Laughter our first noun, and our long verb, howl."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I'm going to close on what I hope
is going to be the title poem of a new book.
It's called "Looking for Luck in Bangkok."
Often at markets I see people standing in line
to walk under an elephant.
They count out a few coins, then crouch
to slip beneath the wrinkly umbrella that
smells of dust and old age and a thousand miracles.
They unfold on the other side, blessed with long life,
good luck, solace from grief, unruly children,
and certain liver complaints.
Conspicuous Caucasian, I stoop to take my turn.
The feet of my elephant are stout as planted pines,
his trunk completes this honest structure,
this tractable, tusked, and deeply
creased endangered shelter.
I squat in his aromatic shade reminded of stale bedclothes,
my mother's pantry shelves of cloves and vinegar,
as if there were no world of drought, no parasites,
no ivory poachers.
My good luck running in as his runs out."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]