Well, I'll say the obvious, it's an enormous pleasure
to be back here, extremely strange in its way,
familiar, alien, and I'm nervous.
Thank you, Alison, for that introduction.
Generous cruelty, was that it, that I was practicing?
Yes, that sounds like me.
I'm going to read first from Wise Poison.
And I think basically I'm going to read
in a chronological order, rather than jumping around.
This one's called Self-Portrait.
I live my life in ways entirely forgotten or never even known
by this hornet, this dead since summer
yellow jacket, its bronze husk resting on the windowsill.
A secret and clever recklessness has always
helped me, the sort that, in 1953, drove
a Hungarian recording engineer to bootleg his favorite bebop
in R & B. The outlawed tunes were pressed on top of X-ray
sheets, the X-rays stolen from a Budapest hospital
so a diamond tipped stylus could glide the bluesy decrescendos,
the riffs and splintered eighth notes of jawbone and hip socket,
songs from the year I was born, a cunning that sounded something
like my own.
By the time I turned 20, my birthday, the spring
night, I shoved a friend's VW van down an embankment
and into the estuary.
It was our plan to cop her insurance
and finance a trip to Mexico.
After the splash, a rustling in bayberry and cottonwood,
lapping waves, mosquito silence.
When she heard the police sent down divers,
searching for bodies, she cried.
If after placing my hand on her cheek and touching those tears,
I'd raised my fingers to my lips,
their saltiness might have humbled me.
I didn't.
I kept my own counsel, always acting generous and satisfied,
an impersonator of the helpful, my plots and schemes disguised.
The other hornet knows how, the slyer one,
the one who spotted a hole in the screen and dared
to squeeze through.
He flew off to join the next dance around a branch
of overripe pears.
He was a daydreamer and easily distracted
by a day-old smear of ketchup, by sweat-dampened hair,
dreaming of sailing downstream on a chip of cedar bark,
wings folded back, lost but canny enough not
to give the feeling a name.
I'm available afterwards for advice about insurance fraud,
so please feel free.
My rates are very cheap.