Allow me to find you another poem to read.
I'm so tempted to read "Horses" but it's just too dang long.
I've got this very long poem that I never read.
I've been reading this poem about my mother lately,
and I thought maybe I'd read that.
I'd get away with that one I think.
I wrote this book--
poetry's my first and dearest love
and I wrote this book merely for myself as some sort of exorcism
but also a celebration of people that I knew and situations
that I knew.
And I never expected it to be published.
And I certainly never expected it to win the Western States
Book Award.
So it was a very great surprise and gift for me.
We talked about this in one of the workshops
but I've been living in Boulder pretty much the last few years.
And the reigning, I think, literary philosophy in Boulder
is kind of a post-modernist, very dry, super intellectual,
semi-language poetry aesthetic with a bunch of guys that
think they're living in Manhattan
but they're up there with the elk.
[LAUGHTER]
So I thought, what the hey?
I was doing this book anyway and I
decided that the best way to tweak
them would be to write a long poem about my mom
because I thought that was pretty unhip.
And I worked on it with Lorna Dee Cervantes
and this poem came out.
It's another semi-longish poem so bear with me.
It's called "And The Wind to Blow Us On."
"They put my mother and me, both of us, in a cage.
I had arranged with the zoo for this one day:
a tour, a treat for her in her retreat from her loneliness
and my retreat to New England's tiny
falls, Walden Pond the size of my rippling dreams.
My mother's solitude hammered her into
shapes I could not fathom.
Strange new fears, hair as thin as late summer's long grass
on Concord's great meadow, burned by first frost's slyest
licks, grayed, and dried, and thin on the ground of her head.
Zookeepers led us from cage to cage.
Backdoor gates swayed wide for us and in we
strolled, the couple she always hoped we could be.
And in each cage, a new creature fierce in its feathers and fur.
There and not there.
Submitting to our tentative palms, yet gone.
Running on landscapes that whispered inside
from their blood.
My mother's sad hands were hard in mine
and I too was gone running inside.
This, a poem she wrote.
Nearing 70, coming into harbor after a stormy crossing, blown
before the wind, hatches battened down,
fires banked or out.
Now swinging gently at anchor.
All fear and sadness washed away, pain and sorrow too.
Good memories remain.
Time now to enjoy a book, the color in a glass of wine,
comfort in a purring cat waiting serenely and unafraid
for the tide to turn and the wind to blow us on.
The first cage was large and an emu strode in.
Feathered dinosaur, gaunt and eager to eat my mustache.
She thinks it's a worm, said the zookeeper.
My mother scolded, you bad bird.
The second cage held a wallaby, small and hunched, sad as a fur
coat.
You sweet thing, my mother said.
The third cage had a violent, small dog red from the veldt,
afraid of me, afraid of men.
In the fourth cage, a cheetah, one long yellow orange muscle.
His tail imperious tufted bade us enter.
Along his flank, dark mouths gaped open
as if to eat the wind.
Give him your hand, the zookeeper said.
Palm flat to his mouth.
Don't offer him your fingers or he might eat them.
And my mother, fearless now, after all,
this was just a cat, scratched him like a tabby.
And like a tabby, he lay over on one side, licked her hand,
and purred and purred.
This, one of five times in her last five
years I ever saw her happy.
My mother's journal.
September 29th.
Don't know why.
Just can't seem to get it together.
Feel I won't live much longer.
Papers, things, clothes, et cetera all need working on.
House needs a good cleaning and waxing.
Yard, horrible.
I can't do it.
Cough, very bad.
Heart, very irregular.
Wake up with head and face aching every day.
My life is hell.
Surely there won't be another one in the next world.
I'm ready to leave this one now.
Alone in her bed for quiet days, the pale box of the house
pulled tight.
Soft, clear window shaft perfect, still,
searched out her dreamy frown against the feather pillow.
Beside her, a cookbook and a Bible.
Each night pulled close around her a blanket of stars
cooling her skin.
No sound in the house but the panicked cat
at the end of her bed calling, calling, stupidly
calling her to awake.
They broke in, caught her in the earliest drift of her terminal
dream, right hand curled around her last breath.
And today, we feed her to the flames.
Caged by everything she hated.
35 years exiled to California's dread sun.
She escaped, got away at last.
Cape May, New Jersey, in a box 8 inches high by 8 inches
wide by 8 inches long.
My mother, just five pounds of seashells.
Mother, please forgive the days alone,
the empty rooms where you waited, the harbor calm, silent.
Journey over and do not be afraid.
Tomorrow on the stormy coast, the Atlantic waves
that called from girlhood's beach will take you out.
The charging cheetahs in the waves
will run you through the gates past the shorelines rocks
to Africa, beyond the Cape of Good Hope.
You must go alone among that restless surf.
But soon enough, my wind comes too and turns and blows me on."
[APPLAUSE]
Another cheerful poem from the Urrea Boutique.