So I'm going to begin with a poem,
a strange poem called "On Earth" from Blue Hour,
and I want to read after that new poems,
give you a new poems.
"On Earth" is the bardo in alphabetical order.
It's a poem that I wrote a few summers ago
in a kind of white heat of writing,
and I realized that it was someone
dying and their life passing before them
and flash, flash, flash.
And so I found this form, which was
alphabetized all the way in.
The lines were alphabetized.
Makes it difficult to revise because you can't move things
around if they're in alphabetical order,
for one thing.
And I discovered when I finished the poem
that there were actually hymns from Central Asian desert
from the fourth century that were written in this form,
so to be mnemonic.
And so I decided to take credit for knowing that,
and I put a note in the back saying,
well, fourth-century hymns, that's the form.
But on the day I finished the book, I finished this poem.
It turned out to be 42 pages.
In the beginning, it was 80 pages, and when I finished it--
I have a practice with my students of buying used books
and then drilling into them and cutting into them
and making things out of them, making art objects out of them,
and playing with them.
And I had bought such a book in the women's farmers market
in Montgomery County, where I live.
I paid $2 for it, and it was called something
On Death or something.
And the day that I finished this poem,
this book committed suicide.
It just jumped off the shelf and landed flat open on my floor.
So I went over and picked it up, and it
was flat open to this page.
And it was written by George Burgess in 1850.
"The recollections of a whole life, the consciousness
of spiritual existence, and all which is mightiest
and deepest in our nature become brighter even in opposition
to extreme bodily languor in the immediate vicinity of death.
The mind enters on an unaccustomed order
of sensations, a region untrodden
before from which few, very few travelers have returned
and from which those few have brought back
but vague remembrances sometimes accompanied
with a kind of homesickness for the higher sphere of which they
had then some transient prospect.
Here, amidst images, dim images of solemnity or peace,
of glory or of terror, the pilgrim
pursues his course alone and is lost to our eye."
George Burgess, 1850.
So I thought, oh my god, that's the epigraph for the poem,
and so I didn't drill into the book
or saw it in half or anything.
I decided to spare its life and kept it,
so I still have this book.
And I'm going to give you excerpts
of this poem from the beginning, from the As
through approximately the Ts.
You won't get to hear the whole thing,
but it'll give you a sense of it.
And so I selected these passages for you
so that you'll be able to move through the dream of the life
passing through itself.
And I began to feel these aren't just
remembered events from my life.
It feels to be a collective dreaming.
"A barn loft of horse dreams with basin and bed clothes,
a bit of polished quiet from a locked church, a corpse broken
into many countries, a cup of sleep,
a desire to live as long as the world itself.
A field of birds roasted by the heavens,
a goodness that must forget itself, a grave
strewn with slipper flowers, a groundskeeper's knowledge
of graves.
A hurried life, a knife on newsprint,
a lace of recent snow, a litany of broken but remembered
events.
A memory through which one hasn't
lived; a parcel of copper wire, plastique, and a clock;
a parrot learning its language from a ghost;
a random life caught in a net of purpose;
a recordkeeper of human and earthly life."