It's the anniversary of the Mosaic Readings.
Mosaic Readings are held at Bentley's Coffee House
on Speedway, and the readers this week
will be Barbara Kingsolver, Richard Shelton, and Demetrius
Davis.
That's at 7:30 Sunday evening.
7:00.
I can't read.
It says here 7:00.
Yes.
7:00.
Come at 7:30, you won't get a seat.
Our next reading will be one week from tonight
at 8:00 in the Terrace Lounge.
We have five students reading, Andrew Crockett,
Michael Knisely, Matt Sikorski, Suzanne Wade, and Gale Walden.
That's Wednesday the 6th.
And two weeks from tonight we'll have a fiction reading
by Lawrence Clark Powell in this auditorium.
Hope you can stay after the reading and have,
punch and cookies, talk to Stephen Dunn.
Many of you have heard him read before
and we have a treat tonight.
Steve's teaching at Stockton College in New Jersey now.
His books of poetry are Not Dancing, Work and Love,
A Circus of Needs, Full of Lust and Good Usage--
I love that title--
Looking for Holes in the Ceiling, Five Impersonations.
His newest book has just been selected in the National Poetry
Series.
It will be out in the spring, called Local Time.
Very happy to introduce Stephen Dunn.
[APPLAUSE]
I've been making a habit of late in the last six months or so at
readings to read the poem I've most recently written as a,
I think, a kind of minor act of existential bravery.
Those of you who write know.
So here goes.
This is called "Under the Black Oaks."
"Because the mind will defend anything
it has found the body doing, I tell my family
I'm out here because the house is cold,
because it's Saturday, because I feel like it.
The rock hard acorns are falling and I've
placed my chair where one has just fallen,
the beginnings of a theory.
The family points out there are places
I could sit where nothing but the sun could hit me,
but of course, I know about them.
It's one of those mornings when there seems so much time
to fill, so many correct ways to fill it,
the tedium of virtuous leisure.
The white sky above the oaks displays its familiar open
mockery.
When the wind comes up, the acorns fall like hailstones.
I sit in my chair listening to how they brush leaves
on the way down, a natural jazz, thud and silence, then
another thud.
My family shouts, 'come in, come in,' but I'm out under
the black oaks and will not budge."
I'm going to read some from my new book, the one
that Lois mentioned.
A good many of the poems in it to do with long term
relationships and especially about arguing and making up
and the rituals therein.
Every couple has its own way of doing that.
This is called "After the Argument."
"Whoever spoke first would lose something,
that was the stupid unspoken rule.
The stillness would be a clamor, a capo on a nerve.
He'd stare out the window, she'd put away dishes,
anything for some noise.
They'd sleep in different rooms.
The trick was to speak as if you hadn't
spoken, a comment so incidental it
wouldn't be counted as speech.
Or to touch while passing, an accident of clothing,
billowy sleeves against rolled up cuff.
They couldn't stand hating each other for more than one day.
Each knew this, each knew the other's body would begin
to lean, the voice yearn for the familiar confluence of breath
and syllable.
When?
Who first?
It was Yalta, always on some level
the future, the next time.
This time there was a cardinal on the birdfeeder; one of them
was shameless enough to say so, the other pleased to agree.
And their sex was a knot untying itself,
a prolonged coming loose."
From the looks of the audience, at least a good part of you
might have experienced something like this
of being invited to dinner at friends,
only to find that they've been hating each other all day long
and not hiding it particularly well.
"The Dinner."
"At dinner, because our hosts had been quarreling
and couldn't hide it, we felt the old need to charm,
to literally enchant, which also means subdue.
And they allowed us to charm them with stories
from our day, which had been full of small affections
and a separateness of bringing from and so meant closeness.
They were kind to allow us to charm them,
feeling as they were those ember like resentments, subterranean,
which come from unfinished quarrels.
But finally, charm wasn't equal to what they were feeling,
and words slipped out, tones.
Then the terrible polite talk of pass this, pass that,
thank you.
One year earlier we were them and knew
what it would be like after we left,
how evenings like this end in separate rooms
over the violent, not quite cathartic lovemaking.
We said goodbye as soon as we could,
leaving them to what must be played out,
essential as breathing.
In the car, talked about it, not without pleasure.
There was a low fog, and as we drove
it parted and kept parting.
What else could it do?
All the way home."
Women argue differently than men, as you all know.
Which, of course, means the opposite is true as well,
that men argue differently than women.
And I think for as long as I've been an adult or a semi-adult,
whatever I am, this has been a major issue.
This is a poem about that and it's called "He/She."
He slash she.
"Brought up never getting punched in the mouth
for saying more than the situation can bear.
She argues beyond winning, screams indictments
after the final, and has skewered him
into silence, if not agreement.
The words she uses mean she's feeling
something large which needs words,
perhaps the way Pollock needed paint.
Next day the words are unimportant to her,
while all he's thinking about are
the words she used, if recovering from them
is possible.
Years ago the schoolyard taught him one word too many
meant broken fingers, missing teeth.
You chose carefully or you chose war.
You were the last word you let live.
She was in the elsewhere.
Girls were learning other lessons,
the ones men learned too late or not at all.
You took in, cared for.
Without keeping score, you shaped a living space
into a kind of seriousness.
Retract those words, he says.
But she is only sensing his reserve, his inability
to perceive that her wrong words meant so much hurt and--
[AUDIO OUT]
"Long Term."
"On this they were in agreement; everything
that can happen between two people happens after a while
or has been thought about so hard
there's almost no difference between desire and deed.
Each day they stayed together, therefore,
was a day of forgiveness, tacit, no reason to say the words.
It was easy to forgive, so much harder to be forgiven.
The forgiven had to agree to eat dust in the house of the noble
and both knew this couldn't go on for long.
The forgiven would need to rise; the forgiver
need to remember the cruelty in being correct.
Which is why, except in crises, they
spoke about the garden, what happened
at work, the little ailments and aches
their familiar bodies separately felt."
A couple more of these.
This has an epigraph from the science writer, nature writer
Lewis Thomas, which of whom you know, I'm sure.
It goes, "animals, even plants, lie to each other all the time.
What is it that enables certain flowers to resemble
nubile insects or possums to play dead?
What about those animals that make their livings
by deception, the biological mimics, the pretenders?
Just fascinated.
There was so much to lie about.
So many advantages to changing a story,
rearranging an afternoon, that to tell the truth
was un-Darwinian, destructive as having no fear.
This is what he told her, trying to be as honest as he could.
Weren't people happier with something to believe than
the confusions of truth could be smoothed away?
How natural to behave like an opossum, a chameleon,
the fox with good reasons, setting another false trail.
She listened to him, amused he had picked such small animals
as examples.
Honesty was what she couldn't help, as unchosen as a blush.
Her face was a public radar screen, even now
it was registering disdain.
Lying as seldom as he had over the years
was an accomplishment.
Besides, he added, honesty is the lie that always reveals.
She was smart enough to know all such discussions
on some level were about sex, that this had little
to do with the nuances of lives or truth.
Tell me what you're really talking about, she said.
He was just fascinated with how natural it was.
Even some plants do it, he said.
It's all these myths of the physical world.
So interesting."
This is called "All That We Have."
It was written to a friend of mine, John Jay Osborn.
"It's on ordinary days, isn't it,
when they happen, those silent slippages.
A man mowing the lawn, a woman reading a magazine,
each thinking it can't go on like this.
Then the raking, the turning of a page.
The art of letting pass what must not be spoken,
the art of tirade, explosion, are the marital arts,
and we, their poor practitioners,
are never more than apprentices.
At night in bed the day visits us, happily or otherwise.
In the-- the words 'good morning'
have a history of tones; pray to say them evenly.
It's so easy, those moments when affection is what the hand
and voice naturally coordinate.
But it's that little invisible cloud in the living
room, floating like boredom.
It's the odor of disappointment mixing
with kitchen smells, which asks of us all that we have.
The man coming in now to the woman.
The woman going out to the man."
Do you all get Prairie Home Companion here?
Does it reach you guys?
Thank you.
Well, he's a wonderful storyteller.
And last year--
I lived near Philadelphia and we also,
on Thursday nights-- let's say he's on Saturday night,
then Thursday nights he was reading chapters
of Russell Baker's book Growing Up for a half hour around 7
o'clock.
I grew up in a family where my grandfather was a storyteller
and told the stories.
I hadn't realized how much I missed that, I think,
and found myself doing what is certainly unique to most of us.
Pulling up a chair in front of the radio with a drink
and listening to the story.
I think because of that, for a while,
it keyed some storytelling, some more narrative in my own work.
I'll read you a few poems that came after that.
And this, in fact, is called "Stories."
I suppose it's about television as much as it is about stories,
the advent of television.
"It was back when we used to listen
to stories, our minds developing pictures
as we were taken into the elsewhere of our experience
or to the forbidden or under the sea.
Television was wrestling: Milton Berle, believe it or not.
We knelt before it like natives in front
of something sent by parachute.
But when grandfather said, I'll tell you a story,
we stopped with pleasure, sat cross legged
next to the fireplace, waited.
He'd sip gin and hold us, his voice
the extra truth beyond what we believed without question.
When grandfather died, it changed what an evening meant.
It was 1954.
After supper we went to the television, innocence
in a magic land getting more innocent,
a thousand years away from Oswald and the shock,
the end of our enormous childhood.
We sat still for anything, laughed
when anyone slipped or lisped or got hit with a pie.
We said to friends, what the hey?
And punched them in the arms.
The television had arrived and was coming.
Throughout the country, all the grandfathers
were dying, giving their reluctant permission
like Indians."
We've tried to bring our children up
in as secular of a way as possible,
with more or less success.
This poem about my youngest daughter and church of sorts,
as you'll see.
"At the Smithville Methodist Church
it was supposed to be arts and crafts for a week.
But when she came home with the Jesus Saves button,
we knew what art was up, what ancient craft.
She liked her little friends, she
liked the songs they sang when they weren't twisting
and folding paper into dolls.
Be so bad.
Jesus and good men was what we had
to do to stay this side of cynicism, that other sadness.
OK, we said, one week.
But when she came home singing Jesus loves me,
the Bible tells me so, it was time to talk.
Could we say, Jesus doesn't love you?
Could I tell her the Bible is a great book certain people use
to make you feel bad?
We sent her back without a word.
It had been so long since we believed,
so long since we needed Jesus as our nemesis and friend
that we thought he was sufficiently dead,
that our children would think of him like Lincoln or Thomas
Jefferson.
Soon it became clear to us you can't teach disbelief
to a child, only wonderful stories,
and we hadn't a story nearly as good.
On parents' night there were the arts and crafts
all spread out like appetizers.
They were seats in the church and the children
sang a song about the Ark and hallelujah,
and one in which they had to jump up and down for Jesus.
I can't remember ever feeling so uncertain about what's comic
or what's serious.
Evolution is magical, but devoid of heroes.
You can't say to your child, evolution loves you."
[LAUGHTER]
"The story stinks of extinction and nothing exciting
happens for centuries.
I didn't have a wonderful story for my child
and she was beaming.
All the way home in the car she sang the songs,
occasionally standing up for Jesus.
There was nothing to do but drive, ride it out, sing along
in silence."
[APPLAUSE]
Well, maybe I'll read, since you're in that mood,
a poem about my oldest daughter.
This is called, "The Substitute."
And we know how badly we've treated substitute teachers
over the years, or maybe have even been substitute teachers
and know it from the other side.
This is about something, as you'll see,
that she tried to get away with.
"The Substitute."
"When the substitute asked my eighth grade daughter
to read out loud she read in cockney,
an accent she'd mastered listening to rock music.
Her classmates laughed, of course,
but she kept on, straight faced until the merciful bell.
Thus began the week my daughter learned it takes more than
style to be successfully disobedient.
Next day her regular teacher didn't return,
she had to do it again.
She was from Liverpool.
Her parents worked in a mill, had sent her to America
to live with relatives.
At night she read about England, looked at her map to place
and remember exactly where she lived.
Soon her classmates became used to it,
just a titter from Robert who'd laugh at anything.
Friday morning, exhausted from learning the manners
and industry of modern England, she
had a stomach ache, her ears hurt.
There were pain, she said, all over.
We pointed her toward the door.
She left bent over like a charwoman,
but near the end of the driveway we saw her right herself,
become the girl who had to be another girl, a substitute
of sorts, in it now for the duration.
[APPLAUSE]
"Corners."
"I've corner bars, lived in corner houses.
Like everyone else, I've reserved corner tables
thinking they'd be sufficient.
I've met at corners perceived as crossroads,
loved to find love leaning against a lamppost
but have known the abruptness of corners too,
the pivot, the silence.
I've sat in corners at parties hoping
for someone who knew the virtue of both distance
and close quarters, someone with a corner person's
taste for intimacy, hard won, rising out
of shyness and desire.
And I've turned corners there was no going back to,
corners in the middle of a room that led to Spain or solitude.
And always the thin line between corner and cornered,
the good corners of bodies and those severe bodies that
permit no repose, the places we retreat to, the places we
can't bear to be found."
This one's called "Desire."
I probably should mention that one
of my first jobs in my early 20's was
in New York City working on Park Avenue in one
of those big buildings.
And this is a big enough city, but I
think perhaps the climate doesn't change
as much as it does there.
So there's something incredibly sexy about springtime
at noon coming out of your office building in New York.
I don't know.
I'm sure there are sexy things everywhere,
but this is a poem about that particular kind of sexiness
and it's the kind of perception of sexiness, I think.
And the poem is about how that changes to a certain degree
because of circumstance.
"Desire."
"I remember how it used to be at noon, springtime, the city
streets full of office workers like myself let loose
from the cold glass buildings on Park and Lex,
the dull swaddling of winter cast off,
almost everyone wanting everyone else.
It was amazing how most of us contained ourselves,
bringing desire back up to the office
where it existed anyway, quiet like a good engine.
I'd linger a bit with the receptionist,
knock on someone else's open door,
ease myself, by increments, into the seriousness
they paid me for.
Desire was everywhere those years, so enormous
it couldn't be reduced one person at a time.
I don't remember when it was, though closer to now than then,
walked the streets desireless, my eyes fixed on destination
alone.
The beautiful person across from me on bus or train
looked like effort, work.
I translated her into pain.
For months I had the clarity the cynical survive with,
their world so safely small.
Today, walking 57th toward 3rd, it's all come back,
the interesting, the various, the conjured life
suggested by a glance.
I praise how the body heals itself.
I praise how, finally, it never learns."
I grew up having just a brother as a sibling, which,
of course, seemed normal to me most of my life.
I think it was only 10 or 12 years ago, rather late, that it
struck me that not having had a sister was
some kind of irrevocable loss that, had I had one,
I'd be different, for better or worse.
The speaker of this poem is conjuring
the sister he never had.
It's called, "Sister."
"The sister I never had enters my wife
when I'm sleeping next to her.
So many times I've watched my sister
come from her separate room, the room that
long ago in a house of brothers was an extra room down the hall
from where I would dream her alive.
She climbs into bed on my wife's side
and I touch my wife, for now my sister
and she are the woman I must talk to about
incompleteness and love.
Awake, she doesn't know my sister is in her.
She doesn't know why my embrace has so much gratefulness in it,
why my questions are all whispered
as a father could overhear us.
She thinks I want to make love but I remove her hand
and hold it, ask another question
about high school and loss, the kind of loss that
repeats itself every day like being born without a leg.
I watch my sister leave as my wife takes me in her arms,
says hush you've been talking again, sleep now,
and I curl into her as if it were possible
she could be everything to me, alone
like this, just ourselves."
When I was 11 or 12, my mother did something what seemed to me
extraordinary, or certainly in retrospect seems extraordinary.
And I knew ever since I've thought of myself as a writer
that I would write about it and tried lots
and this is the final version, I think.
"The Routine Things Around the House."
"When mother died I thought, now I'll have a death poem.
That was unforgivable, yet I've since forgiven myself,
as sons are able to do who've been loved by their mothers.
I stared into the coffin knowing how long she'd live,
how many lifetimes there are in the sweet revisions of memory.
It's hard to know exactly how we ease ourselves back
from sadness, but I remembered when
I was 12, 1951, before the world unbuttoned its blouse.
I had asked my mother--
I was trembling-- if I could see her breasts.
And she took me into her room without embarrassment
or coyness and I stared at them, afraid to ask for more.
Now years later, someone tells me
Cancers who've never had mother love are doomed.
And I, a Cancer, feel blessed again.
What luck to have had a mother who showed me her breasts when
girls my age were developing their separate countries,
what luck she didn't doom me with too much or too little.
Had I asked to touch, perhaps to suck them,
what would she have done?
Mother, dead woman who I think permits me to love women
easily, this poem is dedicated to where we stopped,
to the incompleteness that was sufficient,
and to how you buttoned up, began doing the routine things
around the house."
A couple of poems from this book, Work and Love.
The book has an epigraph from Rilke, which I'll read you.
"For one human being to love another,
that is perhaps the most difficult
of our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof,
the work for which all other work is but preparation."
I'd been working on those twin themes of work and love
before I found that quote, and it cooperated nicely.
I suppose it's related in some way to the book's discovery--
though I don't mean for this to sound as a profound discovery
of simply the discovery of the book--
which was how important it is for good work
to precede loving, how it's almost impossible the other way
around and that we need to work well in order to love well.
I'll read a few of the work poems.
This first one is called "My Brother's Work."
My brother is someone who doesn't work well,
who has a poor job background.
"My Brother's Work."
"My brother who knows the indignity of work rides home
with the taste of it turning peptic,
that odor of swallowed pride rising
into his breath, his wife waiting
for the kiss that's so full of the day she can't bear it.
My brother who hears the shout of bosses,
who is no boss himself, only shouts at home, thinks shouting
is what permits the bosses to move
with the easy self-fulfilled gait of leopards who've
eaten all they've killed.
My brother who will not leave his job
wonders how Gaugin left the world
and found himself on the other side of it.
'What balls,' he says; 'braver than a suicide.'
My brother who is no less than anyone circumstance
made to do its bidding, who wants
to rise one morning against all odds
and slip into his leopard body.
My brother is coming home now and his wife
is waiting for the kiss."
"Hard Work."
This is dated in 1956.
"At the Coke plant toting empties and large crates
to the assembly line, I envied my friends away at camp.
But the money was good and hard work, my father said,
was how you became a man.
I saw a man, for no special reason, piss into a Coke bottle
and put it back onto the line.
After a while, I, too, hated the bottles
enough to break some deliberately
and smile and share with the other workers,
a petty act of free will.
When I came home at night, my body hurt with that righteous
hurt men have brought home for centuries, the hurt
that demands food and solicitation, that
makes men separate, lost.
I quit before the summer was over, exercised
the prerogatives of my class by playing ball all August,
and spent the money I'd earned on Barbara Winokur, who
was beautiful.
And now I think my job must be phased out.
A machine must do it, though someone for sure
still does the hard work of boredom,
and that person can't escape.
Goes there each morning and comes home each night
and probably has no opportunity to say
who he is through destruction.
Some big mechanical eye watching him
for some time in motion man or just something
hesitant, some father or husband in himself."
This is one of the love poems.
Most of the love poems are, what I would call,
difficult love poems.
Maybe that's the only kind there are.
I know many of you may know this essay.
If anyone remembers who wrote it,
you should tell me afterwards since I've forgotten.
But it's an essay about the digger wasp
being the natural enemy of the tarantula
by a wonderful writer.
It's terrifically detailed.
I've always wanted to do something
with it since it's rather bizarre, as the poem will
articulate.
And when I tried to write it straight on,
it never quite turned out.
Though one day I wanted to write a poem about a friend of mine,
a woman friend whose habit it is to fall in
love with the wrong man over and over again.
She's remarkably consistent.
And I started writing about her and the tarantula story
came in.
"Essay to a Friend In Love with the Wrong Man Again."
"It was never meant to be sensible, fully understandable.
The digger wasp, for example, goes up
to the tarantula like a friend and the tarantula
freezes, allows itself to be inspected.
Then it digs the tarantulas grave
while the tarantula watches.
You, I bet, would have guessed with a name like tarantula,
the tarantula would have been the villain.
But it is we who named the tarantula
and made the digger wasp sound honest, hardworking.
And, of course, there is no villain, only the scheme
of things, only horror, and occasionally
the strange birth of a butterfly and
its short, gorgeous, utterly careless season.
I should have mentioned the digger
wasp doesn't kill its victim, but stuns it, drags it
to the grave, lays one egg on its stomach, and closes up.
You see, the instinct is maternal.
The newborn wasp feeds off the tarantula for weeks,
digs itself out at the right time,
and enters the odd, wonderful world.
I've no advice for you, my friend.
You, who would take it-- as all of us would--
and offer it up to the heart, like a sacrifice."
I don't know how many of you have
had a chance to go to Aspen.
I've been there a few times, mostly
to do with poetry things.
And if you have a reasonable taste for decadence, as I do,
you can have a lot of fun there.
Though everyone seems to be between 18 and 30
and beautiful and handsome, so the likelihood
is that you feel out of place.
There's a bar there, a hotel and a bar, Hotel Jerome.
And in the back, a Middle Eastern
restaurant where they have belly dancers.
Some of the belly dancers are a little more authentic than some
of the other belly dancers.
It's about one of them.
"Belly Dancer at the Hotel Jerome."
"Disguised as an Arab, the bouzouki player
introduces her as Fatima but she's blond, Midwestern,
learned to move, we suspect, in Continuing
Education, Tuesdays, some hip college town.
We laugh, this is Aspen, Colorado,
cocaine and blue valium, the local hard liquor, and we
with snifter of Metaxa in our hands,
part of the incongruous that passes for harmony here.
But she's good.
When she lets her hair loose, beautiful.
So we revise; summer vacations, perhaps in Morocco
or an Egyptian lover, or both.
This much we know; no Protestant has moved like this
since the flames stopped licking their ankles."
[LAUGHTER]
"Men rise from dinner tables to stick dollar bills
where their eyes have been.
One slips a five in her cleavage.
When she gets to us, she's dangling money
with a carelessness so vast, it's
art, something perfected, all her bones floating in milk.
The fake Arabs on bongos and bouzouki are real musicians,
urging her, whispering 'Fatima, Fatima,' into the mike.
And it's true, she's--
mockery out of that wrong name in this unlikely place.
She's Fatima and the cheap, conspicuous dreams
are ours, rising now, as bravos."
"Two Women."
"This time I wasn't looking to look.
I was waiting for a friend and for all I chose to see,
the park could have been an immense, desolate beach.
A wedding party was taking place near the fountain.
I noticed it at first, heard it, but I was tired of celebrations
not mine.
I turned away, blue sky, the discipline whirling.
To my left was a small building, a powerhouse,
and two young women from the wedding party
had come to pee behind it.
They didn't see me.
It was the redness of their dresses that caught my eye.
They pulled down their panty hose, squatted in unison,
all the while talking.
It was like watching Degas' ballerinas resting languidly
at a rehearsal.
I was careful not to move, careful to keep the scene as I
wish to remember it because by now it had become mine,
and I saw their wrist corsages and that one's dress was
ruffled where the others was plain.
15 seconds, 16, they must have drunk
the same amount of champagne, raised the glasses
to their lips at exactly the same time.
I think it was Apollinaire who said
it's necessary to see, to drink, to piss as well as crickets
in order to sing like them.
Two women practicing to be crickets.
I was sorry to see it all end, the hitching
up of the pantyhose, then each of them touching their hair out
of habit as if the air were a mirror and beauty
something conscious again.
They returned to the party, my friend arrived.
The rest of the day was bright yellows, greens,
every little thing coming out of its hiding place to be seen."
That's another one of the poems in my story
section of the new book.
This is another one.
Again, more narrative than my poems usually are.
"On the Greyhound."
"On the Greyhound from Paducah to Memphis,
a blonde woman asked the driver to stop
so she can call her little boy.
He may be kind of worried since his father got all burnt up
in a fire last week and died.
Against the rules, we stop at the home diner,
wait while the boy is assured his mother's coming home.
'It was my ex-husband, she says to us,
'so I didn't care, but the boy kind of worries.
You know?' None of us knows, but we hear and the bus starts up
again, taking us deeper into the foreign country our country can
be.
The landscape is autumn pale, hog farms
and white shingled houses, billboards as we're
approaching a big town.
If the blond woman were traveling the Jersey turnpike,
smokestacks and absence of life suggestive of some final error,
no doubt she'd wonder, where am I?
What caused this?
No doubt someone on that bus would
be talking to himself, more crazy than different, too lost
in his own world to be considered regional.
We pass Ripley and Hopewell, Glimp, Mumford.
The woman is silent now.
All this is familiar to her, she just
wants to get home to her little boy.
Just outside of Memphis, a man sitting across from her leans
her way, says, 'You know, during Elvis' death week this year I
never saw it so crowded.'
And they talk about the weeping, from how far the people came."
This is a bit longer than the poems I've read so far.
It's in seven parts.
It's called "Round Trip," and in many ways,
it's companionable with those early poems I read
about long term relationships.
This is a poem about home and what
that means, what coming home, leaving home, all of that
means.
I grew up in the east and lived mostly an urban life
near New York.
And my first teaching job at age 30
was in Southern Minnesota on the prairie.
I lived in a town of 717 people and was undergoing
that enormous cultural change and shock, much of which
was pleasurable and lovely, but nevertheless, different.
And the poem begins leaving there
after having been there for a few years, and it's about--
at least the logistics of the poem--
are moving back eastward.
It's in seven parts.
One, "Round Trip."
"I watched the prairie repeat itself
until it got beautiful, the geometry of farms,
the flatness that made interesting
the slightest undulation.
Never had the sky touched so far down.
Then because mood invents landscape,
the flatness turned irredeemable.
I felt it go on and on, something lush and vacant in me
wished for an edge again, a city, an ocean.
I returned east, began to revise my childhood,
wanted women with sharp tongues, my evening
walk shadowy and open to possibility.
And because the mind gets what gets
what it wants but rarely the way it wants it,
I got mugged on a street corner, fear
brought home in a real cold sweat
on a real November evening.
And city life began to insist, like jazz, like dream,
it would be nothing but what it was.
In a rented cabin up north, Christmas vacation,
I closed the door and gave whatever
in me wanted to be alone and pitied
its hard, uncomfortable chair.
But after a while, the light I didn't believe in shone
in anyway through the windows.
The walls I'd pulled in closer and closer
returned to their proper places.
One day I opened the doors and quite overcast little pieces
of sun reached the tip of my shoe,
and it was if I touched a breast for the first time
and touched it and touched it until having touched it enough
I finally saw the blue vein."
Two.
"Ever since I've been trying to build a house of cards
amid a house of--
[AUDIO OUT] to do, and so be pleased with each card I
add, each moment short of collapse."
Three.
"There's been a cricket in the living room.
A male, because only the male is built
to sing, or to produce what passes for song.
It's a mating call, high sound that
comes from rubbing forewing against forewing, plaintive,
like someone scared blowing a little whistle in the dark.
Day and night it's been making that sound
from somewhere in the room.
I've opened drawers, I've pulled chairs
away from the wall, ready with two paper cups
to catch it and take it outside.
It came in, I suppose, in a confusion of warmth,
doomed to sing its song to those who wouldn't understand.
Now the song grows more faint.
Why care?
The end of summer when crickets die and come
back in great anonymous force.
And pulling back the rug, listening
for what it withholds when anyone gets close."
Part four has an epigraph, at the risk
of being insufferable about saying too many things
about my children, from something my daughter said
when she was 10.
We were playing a little imagine game.
And I asked her, I think, where the dark comes from.
And she said real fast, or wrote,
the dark comes from the weakness of the infinity of numbers.
[LAUGHTER]
She's never said anything nearly so smart since.
I don't know what that means, but I know it's very smart.
"How to Leave and Come Back."
"The school bus instructs my daughter it's easy,
and that for now is good.
She's off again into numbers, words,
all the necessary confusions.
History, she believes, is what happens to others.
Biology is what she lives with, but hasn't had.
I'm watching from the window, the father who
knows education is all about departures,
who knows when things are right, nobody comes home the same.
The school bus has left a hole in the landscape.
Air fills it now, the line we don't call sky for some reason.
How to paint a landscape where children once
played, swirls and smudges.
My daughter knows where the dark comes from and I believe her.
She's growing breasts, she closes the door to her room.
I paint the trees blue because the low sky is in them.
I paint the area white where she once
did a cartwheel, maybe with a hint of yellow in it
for the school bus.
Off to the side, lots of red seemingly out of control,
yet orderly like wildflowers."
Five.
"Nothing's happening but the wind, the ferry rocking its way
toward Delaware, and Delaware Bay full of big tankers
that anchor, seemingly poised.
It's two hours across the talk to give one night away then two
hours back, the kind of minor traveling which tests nothing
at home, nothing in self.
Travel is the saddest pleasure, a friend once said.
He meant all those hours that exist outside of work and play
and love.
The boredom of sailors must be enormous, as great
as the boredom of those on land who hope for weather
to change their lives.
We're bored too, the few of us making this trip
off season, the specter of necessity evident in how
we sit and stare.
Later I'm thinking each of us will
have a story to tell about the bay and the ships.
We'll leave out all we can, all that's travelers life
for a sailor's life.
We'll make our friends wish they were us.
We'll replace experience with what we say."
Six.
"This is one of those stories, Minnesota to New Jersey,
a return home in search of home, regular departures
to find the limits of home, impulses finding reasons.
The great decisions that change a life, hardly decisions
at all, a wild hunch or avoidance, the unknown agent
X coursing through the body like a bastard gene.
I'm only sure that collapse waits just
beyond standing still, the next complacency.
Even now, my day off, I'm thinking I'll get in my car
and get out of here, no rhyme accept internal rhyme,
the clicks and bells that go off when the body has hurt itself
and acted.
I know where I'll go, ballfield, casino, deserted beach,
some not home place where I can pivot at suppertime,
make my way back as if I'd made a choice."
Seven.
"Last week at this time, Canada geese
flapping overhead heading south, impossible to warn them
of hunters up since dawn.
A few hours later, three separate phone calls
told me the same person was dead.
By the third, my voice had nothing in it.
It was days before the letting go.
I watched the jays in the yard chasing smaller birds,
taking all the seed for themselves.
That's where the dark comes from, I thought, some weakness
in the motive or of the heart, a bunch of jays exercising
their muscle, and poof.
Nothing is left but jays.
I should have called the dead man's wife.
I should have reread his poems, made him
a good ghost and myself sorrow's perfectly correct man.
I put on my running shoes, ran the full circle of the park,
showered, turned on the important game.
The whole season was on the line, the announcer said,
and it was.
In a nearby room, the noise of others, a child's whine,
my wife saying no, mixed with my noise to form the familiar.
For a while, nothing tumbled down."
I'll read two more.
Since I know so many of you are writers in the audience
or if not writers, maybe even people who just think of making
things, this a poem, I think, about making things,
which those of us who write do.
It's called "Parable of the Fictionist."
"He wanted to own his own past, be able to manage it
more than it managed him.
He wanted all the unfair advantages of the charmed.
He selected his childhood, told only those stories
that mixed loneliness with rebellion, a boy's
locked heart with the wildness, inside a playing field.
And after he invented himself and those he wished to know him
knew him as he wished to be known,
he turned toward the world with the world that was within him
and shapes resulted, versions, enlargement.
In his leisure he invented women, then spoke to them
about his inventions, the wish just slightly ahead
of the truth, making it possible.
All around him he heard the unforgivable stories
of the sincere, the boring, and knew his way was righteous.
Though in the evenings, alone with the world he'd created,
he sometimes longed for what he'd dare not alter
or couldn't, something immutable or so lovely
he might be changed by it, nameless
but with a name he feared waits until you're worthy,
then chooses you."
I'll finish with this.
This is called "Instead of You."
It's a love poem.
I'm sorry.
It's one of those poems that you begin with a different motive
and turns out to be a love poem or a different kind of poem.
"Instead of You."
"I place a dead butterfly on the page.
This is called starting with an image from real life.
It is gold and black and, as if in some embalmer's dream,
a dusting of talc on its wing.
I have plans for these wings.
I'll not let them slip through my hand.
And if anyone is worried about how the butterfly died,
I'll tell them my cat swatted it out of the air,
I just picked it up and brought it to this page
with a notion of breathing a different life into it.
And I confess; the cat's gesture was more innocent than mine.
The wings suggest nothing I want, they're so lovely.
I like the way they distract, how my eye turns away
from the living room, and the mind
spins into the silliness of spring.
I don't want much.
Just for certain private places to remain open to me,
that's all.
But this is no time to get ethereal.
Already, in a far corner of the page,
something dark is tempting me to pull it into the poem.
One tug and it's a bat trapped in sunlight, rabid with fear.
There's no way to keep the ugliness out, ever.
Drops of blood, beautiful, say, on the snow,
always lead to a wound.
Can this still turn out to be a love poem?
Can I still pull you from the wreckage
and kiss your bruises, so black and gold?
Is it too late to introduce you who
were always here, the watermark, the poem's secret?
From the start all I wanted to explain
was how things go wrong, how the heart's an empty place
until it's filled, and how the darkness is forever
waiting for its chance.
If I have failed, know that I was
trying to get to you in my own way,
know that my cat never swatted a butterfly.
It was I who invented and killed it, something to talk about
instead of you."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]