I'm going to read you one more poem,
this is an old fashioned love ode.
It happens to be to an extraterrestrial, the only
unusual element in it.
I was asked to do it by a friend and this turned out
to be quite a challenging poem to write
for a descriptive poet, I have no idea
what this extraterrestrial is going to look like.
So instead I decided that I would write a poem really
to all things in life that are alien.
And as you'll discover the extraterrestrial
in the poem and all alien things is addressed as beast.
And I think in part, that's because I assume whatever
this entity will look like it will appear beastly to us as we
will appear beastly to it.
And probably also because I've seen
Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, that film, 11 times.
Often enough to be able to read the Latin
on the back of the Beast's chair, which says,
all men are beasts when they don't have love.
It's quite wonderful.
"Ode To The Alien"
Beast, I've known you in all love's countries,
in a baby's face knotted like walnut meat,
in the crippled obbligato of a polio stricken friend,
in my father's eyes, pouchy as two marsupials,
in the grizzly radiance of a winter sunset,
in my lover's arm, veined like the Blue Ridge mountains.
To me, you are beautiful until proven ugly.
Anyway I'm no cosmic royalty either.
I'm a bastard of matter, descended
from countless rapes and invasions of cell
upon cell upon cell.
I crawled out of
slime; I swung through the jungles of Madagascar;
I drew wildebeest on the caves at Lascaux;
I lived a grim life hunting peccary and maize
in some godforsaken mud hole in the veldt.
I may squeal from the pointy terror of a wasp
or shun the breezy rhetoric of a fire,
but whatever your form, gait, or healing,
you are no beast to me,
I who am less than a heart-flutter from the brute,
I who have been beastly so long.
Like me, you are that pool of quicksilver in the mist,
fluid, shimmery, fleeing, called life.
And life, full of pratfall and poise,
life where a bit of frost one morning
can turn barbed wire into a string of stars,
life aromatic with red hot pizzazz drumming hachacha
through every blurt, nub, sag, pang, twitch, war, bloom of it,
life as unlikely as a pelican, or a thunderclap,
life's our tour of duty on our far flung planets,
our cage, our dole, our reverie.
Have you art?
Do waves dash over your brain like tide-rip
along a rocky coast?
Does your moon slide into the night's back pocket just full
when it begins to wane so that all joy seems interim?
Are you flummoxed by that mill pond deep within the atom,
rippling out to every star?
Even if your blood is quarried I pray you well,
and hope my prayer your tonic.
I sit at my desk now like a tiny proprietor, a cottage industry
in every cell.
Diversity is my middle name.
My blood runs laps.
I doubt yours does, but we share an abstract fever
called thought, a common swelter of a sun.
So beast, pause a moment: you are welcome here.
I am life, and life loves life.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]