"'Neotoma albigula.
Western White-throated Woodrat.'"
And sometimes I think it's just saying that 10 times is--
western white-throated woodrat.
I love those sounds.
"what do you carry and are you fast enough
to disappear with your belongings what do you sing
and does your voice throw open notes into a dark room
can you spare a moment to walk in the desert, will you
be silent can we just watch each other come to terms
with the light
whose west this is whose white this
is in the throat of woods in the throes of words, rat tat
tat on wood I do not know, amid the middens
we share an attic or room enough to breathe
within pinched spaces within a cloud that
consumes us new books, paper domes written always
by artificial light always bejeweled
light prancing toward white pages
and western spaces burned white-hot and choke-throat
blackened wood fragments scatter the birds
scatter the rats the insects the leaves we all depend on
in the books we write by decreasing
light in the words that threaten more in the semper fidelis
maniacal charge of untended fields
tomes and domes, open and closed in the untended fields
the white-throated woodrat utters a cry in fear
and we hear and hear our own voices echo
progress belongs to history which
goes the way of the unwanted rat in the maze of the dying light
the eye-trembling lack of light we can neither read nor eat
in the death books with their black pages we consume but do
not stand under green leaves or blue skies
but crawl with those under siege those under the breathing
room in the sinking western sun
the wood rat waits for us all to be gone,
the survivor in all of us waits, too
we might be wood rats, moving scavenging, watching,
waiting we might be alive in the middens
we might be breathing in the room"
[APPLAUSE]