WEBVTT

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I'm going to read
you one more poem,

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this is an old
fashioned love ode.

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It happens to be to an
extraterrestrial, the only

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unusual element in it.

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I was asked to do it by a
friend and this turned out

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to be quite a
challenging poem to write

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for a descriptive
poet, I have no idea

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what this extraterrestrial
is going to look like.

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So instead I decided that
I would write a poem really

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to all things in
life that are alien.

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And as you'll discover
the extraterrestrial

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in the poem and all alien
things is addressed as beast.

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And I think in part, that's
because I assume whatever

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this entity will look like it
will appear beastly to us as we

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will appear beastly to it.

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And probably also
because I've seen

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Cocteau's Beauty and the
Beast, that film, 11 times.

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Often enough to be
able to read the Latin

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on the back of the
Beast's chair, which says,

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all men are beasts when
they don't have love.

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It's quite wonderful.

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"Ode To The Alien"

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Beast, I've known you
in all love's countries,

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in a baby's face knotted
like walnut meat,

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in the crippled obbligato
of a polio stricken friend,

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in my father's eyes,
pouchy as two marsupials,

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in the grizzly radiance
of a winter sunset,

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in my lover's arm, veined
like the Blue Ridge mountains.

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To me, you are beautiful
until proven ugly.

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Anyway I'm no cosmic
royalty either.

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I'm a bastard of
matter, descended

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from countless rapes
and invasions of cell

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upon cell upon cell.

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I crawled out of

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slime; I swung through
the jungles of Madagascar;

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I drew wildebeest on
the caves at Lascaux;

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I lived a grim life
hunting peccary and maize

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in some godforsaken
mud hole in the veldt.

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I may squeal from the
pointy terror of a wasp

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or shun the breezy
rhetoric of a fire,

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but whatever your
form, gait, or healing,

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you are no beast to me,

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I who am less than a
heart-flutter from the brute,

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I who have been beastly so long.

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Like me, you are that pool
of quicksilver in the mist,

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fluid, shimmery,
fleeing, called life.

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And life, full of
pratfall and poise,

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life where a bit of
frost one morning

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can turn barbed wire
into a string of stars,

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life aromatic with red hot
pizzazz drumming hachacha

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through every blurt, nub, sag,
pang, twitch, war, bloom of it,

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life as unlikely as a
pelican, or a thunderclap,

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life's our tour of duty
on our far flung planets,

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our cage, our dole, our reverie.

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Have you art?

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Do waves dash over your
brain like tide-rip

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along a rocky coast?

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Does your moon slide into the
night's back pocket just full

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when it begins to wane so
that all joy seems interim?

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Are you flummoxed by that mill
pond deep within the atom,

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rippling out to every star?

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Even if your blood is
quarried I pray you well,

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and hope my prayer your tonic.

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I sit at my desk now like a tiny
proprietor, a cottage industry

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in every cell.

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Diversity is my middle name.

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My blood runs laps.

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I doubt yours does, but
we share an abstract fever

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called thought, a
common swelter of a sun.

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So beast, pause a moment:
you are welcome here.

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I am life, and life loves life.

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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