This collaboration was done with the poet Olga Broumas,
as Lois mentioned.
Olga, if you don't know her work,
is from the Mediterranean.
She's a Greek poet and has written several books of poetry
and also has translated very beautifully the--
What I Love: The Selected Poems of Odysseas Elytis.
And I had the great pleasure of traveling to the Mediterranean
with Olga.
We spent a year there, during which time
we wrote these prose poems.
Actually, we started out to write
something quite different.
We were away from our own language,
our own English language.
And one day, we went for a walk.
It was dusk, and we weren't quite writing.
We weren't doing anything.
We thought, my God, we should do something.
What should we do?
And she turned, and she looked straight at me.
And she said, well, let's make a lot of money.
Let's write a porn novel.
And well, anyway, this is not that.
It's a far cry from that, I hope.
And I thought all the way, I decided I couldn't possibly
collaborate with someone.
Oh.
I'm an artist.
I couldn't possibly do that.
And anyway, it's not as hard as you think.
It can be very rewarding.
I enjoyed it very much.
Some of these passages are very lyrical,
and others are more narrative.
And I've selected a couple of each.
"She liked to be in the middle.
One of them was taken by how close her heart beat
to the surface like a robin's and how
she landed with a light touch.
If the sheets were white, and the sun glanced on them,
blonde had more red.
Another was olive with almond eyes, who liked to wake slowly
and fall back.
She lay beside the row of windows
and rolled out into the night on their long, wooden oven spoons.
Sometimes they came for her and woke her,
kissing the corners of her mouth.
The long hairs in the bed-- the very curly, the weighty,
and the subtle--
lit in arabesque.
When they were wet, they were very, very wet.
And when they were dry, they were funny.
Excited, the candle burned like cry breath, who called out
and where answered and when became thirsty.
She reached for the lucky pitcher sailing across the sky.
Tissue, tissue, kiss you."