I'm going to read you two kind of this book, The Two Trees.
Very helpful my publisher.
They put two trees on the cover.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't really see the world in terms of stories.
Writing narrative, poems are something
I had to teach myself extremely actively and self-consciously
how to do.
But it's a very useful thing to know.
Just the use of that narrative structure because it provides
momentum and then you can use it for all kinds of other things
even if you don't have --
What was it O'Connor said?
You have to have at least two things that
happened right to make a story.
Only one thing happens is not a story.
Something like that or braiding of events or actions.
That happen over the course of time and have consequences.
So even if you don't see the world that way,
it's a useful structure that you can
use for other sorts of meditation,
and imagination, and fantasy even.
So this is one of those bars, that structure although not
much happens.
This is a poem called "Woman Who Leaps."
"Up from the Valley, 10 children working the fields
and three in the ground plus four
who'd slept like fish from a faulty she wept to the priest.
'Father I saw the virgin on a hill.
She was a lion, lying on her side grooming her blond
shoulders with her tongue.'
Six months weeping as she hold the corn gathered late fruit
and milk the goats, planted grain and watch the hill side
blossom.
Before she went to the bishop, kissed his ring.
Father, I saw our lady in a tree swaddled in black,
she was a raven on one leg on one bent claws.
She hunched in the tree, but she was the tree charred
trunk and a thicket of green.
After seven years of weeping not as others stunned,
old women weep.
She baked flatbread, wash the cooking stones cut a staff
from a sapling by the road.
The Holy Father sat in a gilded chair,
father I saw Christ's mother in a stream, she was a rock.
The water parted on either side of her from one stream
she made two.
Two tresses loosened across her collarbone
until the pouring water melted her breast
and made a single stream again.
Then from the marketplace from the busiest stall,
she Stole five ripened figs and carried her weeping back
to the countryside.
With a cloth sack, with a beggar's cup,
village to village, and into the smokey huts.
Her soul a welled an eye, an open door."