I've been writing the same poem all my life,
and it's gone through a variety of stages,
a few versions of what you can find on that table over there.
I'm going to read, for the first time tonight,
an extended portion of the next stage, which
is called "Universe" for a number of complicated reasons.
And this particular section, the first section,
is called "Revelator."
And I found a couple of typos.
Because it's the first time I've ever read this before,
I found a couple of typos practicing it this morning,
and I'm taking my pen out just in case a couple more
jump out at me.
I don't think I need to say any more than that.
"Words torn, unseen, unseemly scene, some far suburb's mall
lot.
Summer's theme-- this year's humid.
To sweat is to know.
Pen squeezed too tight yields ink as blood or pus.
So the phrase scraped, removed, offending thine eye,
'Outsource Bush.'
Against which, insource what?
Who will do it?
Most terrible predicate-- high above mountains snowcapped.
Even in August, in-flight motion picture Eternal Sunshine
of the Spotless Mind infuriates many.
No action, no funny, plot too dense to follow.
Unless-- unless mind's eye gives attention.
First blackbird signals many--
synecdoche.
Bumblebee wonders, am I his flower?
The one-hour shopping, and the vandals fled.
Him, we'll know not, never confront.
So recall the next day.
That anger directed at complexity
as we deplaned in Seattle.
Old battle never won, never gonna.
Sit now, still beside Dungeness River, to spot quail hopping
about this untrimmed garden.
As dog walkers circle back, jet trails in dawn sky thread cloud
wisps, shadows sharp in the mountains.
Pen's cap placed aloft at the far end of the shaft.
Black ink bleeds into yellowy paper, deep in the fiber.
Lines spreading as they dry.
Hours harbor us, hold the body still a while.
Eyes, ears all fading as if to withdraw.
Old ivy hides the fountain.
Mountain half-peeking through cedars
green against the morning's pale blue sky.
My fingernail now etched with a permanent rich lavender.
As a crop smells sweet, but I'm staring west-southwest
as the sun behind me rises.
Cloud catchers, red, pink, then brightens into white.
Clock bangs 10 at 6:00 AM.
Its bell flat.
Quail still at the garden's rim ignores
buzz of red, green hummingbird overhead.
Then, minutes later, clouds dissolve.
The near sky bare, boys by the trampoline
in the dark discuss religion, say belief.
Here the park faces west making that Mount Baker.
Girls run naked through the sprinkler.
Neo-retro-pseudo-hippies mimic the Amish, sans modesty.
Boys in tie-dye skip stones into the bay.
Eternity in the present only.
I shut my eyes, inhale deeply to hear five speakers
simultaneous yatter.
Squirrels up high in the cedars bark.
Dog, golden terrier blend, all taut muscles, sinew or bone
jaw, pauses midair in flight just ahead of the frisbee's
grasp.
Biplane low over the water.
Now you hear its engine.
One sock pulled high, other low about the ankles.
Deliberately I paused two poems three pages before book's end.
First growl of plane's motor.
Sun, higher now, contracts shadow.
Dandelion froth blows over cut grass.
Spotted white tops of clover, something deep purple,
bell-shaped, nameless, at least to me.
I am what i am.
Chewing endlessly until I realize, I'll never swallow.
Whatever.
Jay's bark.
First fog is deepest when trail ends
at first bend in the river.
This in six weeks will all be swollen.
Salmon, frantic in their competition.
Men also.
On the wire-grid door screen, various bugs
alight at dawn, drawn by the interior light.
Something long with wings, something no more than a speck
with legs, I scream, you scream, we all
scream for that which is unnamable, unquenchable,
inconsolable, deep in one's chest, surrounding the heart.
Art is a mode of stalking.
Balk at any configuration, at what's inescapably omitted.
At Monticello I very nearly wept,
to imagine just once the president
as the smartest, most questioning,
most rigorous of all.
No, that's not it either.
Seeing, hands shielding brow, the trail ahead is empty.
The man stops to unleash his dogs.
Mist rises from the river.
Bland competency distributed equally among hundreds
begets only rebellion.
What winnowing from the first book to the next,
the nest mountainside garden fountain, yellowlegs
and killdeer searching the mud for tasties.
My throat, you say, is closing up, but for albuterol.
Take a deep breath, sip tea.
Someone in the forest is walking a miniature poodle.
An old woman, now blind, finds each chore takes longer.
An epic quest to fetch groceries.
Half a day wrecked if the doctor forgets to sign the Rx.
Each walker's gate, pace is so different.
Muscle and skeleton negotiates gravity, years.
Teen girl radiates lust, post-Britney mascara, hooker
look.
Alongside, a second woman, her grandmother,
at the pharmacy pick-up window.
In a town so small, Safeway has the lone Starbucks.
Eventually books oxidized.
Words themselves, learned to resist,
clouds drift in from sea.
Glaciers on Mount Olympus visible from atop Hurricane
Ridge.
Yet the danger is sunburn.
Blue grouse startles up from the reeds.
Reed valleys below as rivers text.
Now forgotten stack of books, half-read
on the table dwindles.
Bald eagle atop cedar rests, just for a moment.
Whirligig puns up Tempest.
Yes, digit, dig it.
Always make mistakes is the program.
Eagle-eye no good for chipmunk future.
Slightest morsel.
Now, blue jay, loud in the garden.
Where we've not yet thought beyond our elders,
but to extract the implicit.
Soar out over Dungeness river seeking what?
My brother's silent amid hardscrabble.
Boyd's circus rambling, shadowy, house atop dry soil.
Rain shadow versus forest's constant precipitation.
Atop Olympus 180 inches per year.
Oatmeal too thick, squirrels smaller.
Haul of moss, coniferous trunk root nurse
new, volunteers merge, clinging, seek light, get lightning.
River grasses ripple.
Apple pecked at by crow.
Store clerk says, I had a schizophrenic roommate
with a pet rat named Crumpet.
Crescent Lake shore so much longer.
Snow melt then midsummer.
Rock face draped with nets.
Children scrambling to ride atop floating log.
Buys a canvas hat, wide-brimmed.
Tip of the hemlock droops.
Not grown for Christmas.
Mute talk of politics, religion.
What's thought, what dream, what half-remembered glimpses
from old afternoon tryst years after more clear,
more intent, if that's possible, absorbed
into the weft of feeling.
The dance unveils the text hidden in space,
whereas architecture, for the most part, blocks it off.
Sea planes rise up off Freshwater lake.
Later river walk encased by mall.
Nearby, the Alamo mute hotels.
Vacant lobbies tell all.
Coke machines, inner light flicker constantly.
The air thick and heavy, cloud scraped,
or flattened landscape.
Who here speaks English?
Who here will hark loud as grackles incessant laugh.
Battle after math's ironic sum.
Economy trumps all.
History, where now teens cluster to mock tourism's earnest gape.
It looks so small, because it is.
Trucks evacuating quarry beep in reverse.
Diner's posture, alert, awaiting omelet, sausages, toast.
Behind whom the sun arises.
White light or Morningside Heights.
Cook hollering to the cashier in Spanish, then English, then
a third language I don't understand.
Cringe before that glare.
Until muted by clouds wisps, monastic New York
hotel room deep within shadows.
What music mocks its maker?
The ropes tug as dad shakes his beard.
Lost daughter found then sold into marriage.
In walks Burt again, crossing into language.
Subway stairs become waterfalls under Ivan,
until flooding halts commute.
What Milton sees the deaf here or knot.
Cashews, pretzels, honey roasted sesame
sticks, the Earth below flat, checkered, not yet
autumn, dry desert heat.
Heart races, arts phases, hard faces.
Heard in place in pink marble plaza,
beyond which red dirt surface of Mars is not more barren.
What on, or in, or about blazes.
Molten edge of the sun spurts.
The plane banks left.
Below Lake Michigan's blue-green sailboat,
speckled in the glare.
Architecture matters when nature lacks features.
Hermes, is it, atop old monkey ward HQ.
Not some other Adonis.
Great breaks of the wings flap rise, indoor heat door frames
height.
Swap, swamp, swells, sells all, tells less.
Nightmare with flashbacks, figures
precognition, people dropping naked from rooftops.
When I saw water pouring in, I knew we were under attack.
Attempt to reconstruct the sequence,
build narrative, bridge.
Classic Bob, air, syntax out.
Neighbor waddles to fetch paper.
Hard copy is old copy.
Cold stone atop which to scoop even colder
cream, white chocolate kisses battered in.
The maple reddens while the oak goes yellow.
All the others already leafless, lifeless on the street,
yellow tarp atop the torso.
Hollow lungs hollers for help and vision,
this all without sound, some deep and glade,
inaudible oriole area as an arch aches,
stretching across its trestle.
Test the trees stand strength before adding tinsel, glass
balls, small ornamentation.
Avoid clusters, clutter, dis in distribute, understood?
But tribute, that is harder.
I hear wheels across the gravel, wet with the dense fog,
hushed, then digging in to turn, then softer.
The newly-paved Goathill Road river makes a natural border.
Already icicles hang in the woods.
Gray is the late autumn forest, reduced to branch and trunk.
I stuck by the plan, as it by me.
Hark as syllables harden to shape-shifters shaken shine.
Consonants lock into crystalline scene.
Saw inch from the trunks base before setting into water.
Upright, encircled with light, you stir much mice in my mouth.
The bed too firm, impossible, and I too tired drift,
books still in my hand, sleep at first sitting.
Green, encased light over the wash
stand, behind which thin pipes tangle into the walls.
Fogs light shadowless, soft.
The day muted.
Llamas in the next field beside the alpaca.
The sound of water and pipes rushing as others waken.
Our bidding, or theirs, again to disturb, invokes the lost root.
I sigh, superfluous lamp, light enlarges
and otherwise dark room.
Winter sun smeared, muted.
Infinite gray scale.
The night before last's luminarias.
Louis, am I weeping?
Lit, now only in the mind.
Deep-set rocker, heavy furnace hum behind the next wall.
Camelot in the pasture turn staring at the man
down hill, gathering patio furniture up
in advance of the forewarned storm.
Or you are being driven along an unfamiliar route
through streets of your own former home.
Whole neighborhoods tinged with emotion.
One still dreams of jets, sliding into houses,
apartment complexes, gone.
One millisecond of stillness and then the heat and burst
and orange ball of flame explodes in the mind's eye,
anxious in your hotel room's great raft of a bed.
For days the networks discover new amateur videos,
waves far greater than one can imagine on the beach.
Bathers not even thinking to run.
Buses floating through the streets of debris.
Banda Aceh, this week's geography
of the public imagination.
Phuket's stream of tourists washed away.
Bulldozers scooping corpses.
Our newscaster, alone in an empty village,
only the battered mosque remains.
Where are the people?
How does this outer-like apocalypse reported
penetrate my dreams?
Three men on the street walking, discussing who will reach 60.
When the way as teens, we spoke of 20.
Not even seeing the homeless woman,
asleep beneath the newspaper racks at Mission and Fourth,
fifth of bourbon warms, warns.
Passed between three beneath the bridge, day is done,
day is the ever-present challenge.
Wake or not.
The painter Jess simply stays asleep.
Paint hardens, even cracks or decades.
Browns grow muddy, greens mute, sky
goes pale in the midst of an abstract field of blue.
Deep blue squiggles, Don Quixote approaches.
What is possible?
Seeing her emotive prosody heart, because it impacts one's
breathing.
Gasp to grasp the truth of what is not even visible,
cannot be heard, red haired setter, deaf to the world,
looks slowly, copes by smell, residual sight.
My eyes shut.
I can taste that I grew up near that train's whistle
in the distance, unmistakable.
In the fireplace, a basket of dried flowers,
green rug echoes couch and chair.
Remotes scattered about.
Even my eyes adjust gradually to the light, well before dawn.
My lens, instead of an onion, unions dwindled now
to 8% in the commercial sector.
Stairs, doors groan, the slightest touch.
If at night I wake by eastern time,
street lamp just visible through the web of the plum trees
branches, casting shadow, more than light.
OK, what's next?
Small plane audible in the night sky,
even before first trucks, first train.
But if you listen, here now is a second ceramic frog
atop silent piano.
Not frog, but a turtle.
Describe how shoes scatter pattern
from happenstance, the way books stacked towards the pyramid
always or else topple.
Game, Jenga.
Crickets for the gecko, biscuits for the dog.
Page skipped is discovered blank then filled.
Each word after the other asserts connection.
Conniption, my grandma loved to say, was something one has,
not does.
Already the fourth train shushes past.
Dear Krishna, it's 6:11 AM.
Upstairs a faucet turns briefly, Lily is grown now,
Allen's hair thinned at last, Melissa's perfect smile
still shines, but no sign of Lulu.
Time erodes what dear, what's near.
Is past too soon to grasp fully the consequence?
Dawn threatens a new day constantly.
Sun as vicious as dusk, or rather, simply uncaring.
Birds disinterested in the infant's corpse.
It's language that introduces emotion, or the other way
around.
My old street, so narrow to boys throwing a football,
would find my world unimaginable.
And I'm sure theirs likewise will amaze them, how quaint
that first home network seems already.
Norma says of Barbara, she's there and then not.
Mimicking consciousness more slowly now.
So that others can see you feel the heat's lack,
but not the wind.
Wind up an old clock.
Airplane, I realize, is now tracking
the traffic, the early commute.
First train, best train.
Still no hint of sun, but now all the trees,
houses visible in silhouette.
The dog audible by its collar, paws over hardwood.
Then a sigh, over the street windows emerge porches,
no longer just outlines.
Details, a larger jet now, a few cars, than many.
My penmanship more ornate today.
No sign of the trembles.
An instant ago, I sat in Elliott's kitchen,
then taped words cut from the paper above the dog's
white bowl.
Good dog.
The last I'd ever live with, I didn't know then.
I dream you, floating, not plummeting, from high
off that bridge.
Birds finally begin to twitter.
Color floods, merging day.
The sun still behind the hills, face west
toward whichever future comes.
Mockingbird mimics dog caller.
Another bird's three note peep.
Discern now, which jet is which.
Pinks streak the high sky.
I rise, eyes blink, shaking sleep away.
757 angles in fog, bay at the runway's rim.
Engines raring, waiting, ready, poised, and flaring to race
forward up over the salt ponds, half hidden in the mist.
Silhouette of the city piercing cloud,
but the bridges are hidden.
Inner ear, particularly trumpet, displays pressure,
cottony wisps soon scatter.
Valleys revealed green and gold.
I hold the fluted glass.
To cleanse the palette, mango ice
cream, or the sauce hot and sweet, spicy, smoked, eggplant,
rice absorbs the broth.
Breath, breadth, bread, a head too big for hats.
Hands, likewise large, grasped the ball with ease.
To please herself she walks on her palms
then flips upright, smiling, sees more than we know.
Teases younger brother, mother, dad, bad dogs?
Never.
Invariably doses, wags.
What tale undisclosed in aggregate,
fatal to those who unsuspecting choose service.
Falls in Fallujah, winter in Chester County.
Ice will do it, branches and jammed.
Snap lights connection, cloud woosh.
Gives wind voice.
Chip film, like glass from the walk.
Watch the car struggle uphill.
My hands shaking the line, shaking airplane audible,
but out of sight, dusk's light alone, by which to write,
weight.
Weight will snap the limb.
The line gone limp now, hang waist-high, wood raw
at the wound, sun but streaks reflected to the west.
Pink-orange fading, blue light behind snow's
powder blows harsh right in the eyes.
Sinuses season soon follows.
Nest high atop power grid's tower
reveals streaked eye, white head, beak built for killing.
Osprey stretches to observe her world.
Water, low below great Conowingo dam, the far sides of lake.
But here, what swims beneath water surfaces easily caught.
No boating beyond this point sign in the water, post 9/11.
But we drove right over Highway One, south toward Darlington.
County store, a few churches, the firehouse, brand new,
but all volunteer.
What else, but sell antiques.
Old world's evaporating, not yet new commuters and a Walmart
to transform these farms into subdivisions,
demanding better schools, a non-laughable cop
to stop emergent crime.
Stone said to contain its own sculpture thwarts choice.
To voice vowels languidly moist lips purse their part.
There's an art to it, intuitive aforethought.
Thinks drone to the fan in the bathroom, refrigerators rumble,
casting ice.
Fluorescent bulb whines and the lamp, damp, day, fox ,
the glass, razor wire rings, the rooftop.
The young woman rises to shake my hand.
The helicopter, green, just hangs
high over the gallery floor.
The persistence of memory, smaller than I'd imagined.
The pinks of the women of Avignon, too bright.
I hear morning as the first siren.
Trucks cough, paused at an intersection,
not visible from here.
The blue of a perfect spring morning,
unimaginable above this high.
Above this great crush of apartments.
Who here owns the slightest yard.
Young man alone in Chipotle, chewing thoughtfully
his large burrito, not talking, taking it all in,
eyes absorbing all.
Could have been, had this taqueria been there
then, myself in 1964.
What little I knew then, but could learn by doing,
earn just enough to eke by.
Barking for the Cafe Wha?
Dime for each new customer.
I lack the huckster's flair, lone feather by a gravel road.
All one needs by which to fabricate the tale.
Each to each, not beach exactly, but stones against the water
piled up to the dock beyond which or whc mockingbird hops
to the front confront a robin, squirrel
rears up to eat some morsel in the clover.
Each page would blow wild, but for the binding stitch
deep into the notebook spine.
Dog barking emerges from barn, but won't approach.
Such boundaries, visible to the mind, but not physical at all.
Swam with the broken wing, adopts
a small town pond, adapts, adept at avoiding all unleashed dogs
as they pass.
As [INAUDIBLE] less, far less permanent than this giant oak,
not topple the top, which lone raven stalks wind.
Rendered visible by the trees, two cardinals
buffeted in flight.
Red messengers, they're floating,
text peeps by, I spy, eyes, pie.
Turns skim over water, pre-dusk glare over the Chesapeake,
blue heron, solitary, standing still.
Ospreys nest looks huge.
Hum means mosquito right at ear.
Rubber soles atop hardwood, screech, scratch, itch, each
to, common turns atop a post, implies a pairing.
Jack Russell terriers underfoot, but Jasmine,
sad-eyed black poodle, plays fetch.
Hard rubber chew toy wet with success.
Ice tea season is upon us.
Tall, slender glass, but the waiter
wears his baseball cap to accent eastern shores, southern drawl.
He recommends black-eyed pea cakes.
I think the chutney-spiced marmalade, weight
to range drainpipe syncopation.
To make love at dawn then drift back to sleep.
To rise again still early enough for breakfast,
push window up for air.
Deep throats and elderly embittered bureaucratic hack
is this week's top story.
To do right for wrong reasons complicates the tale.
Today Fox News wouldn't even notice.
Language, language, Allen said.
Wichita tape recorder rolling where Pound decries,
you sewer of white lies, lethal, but legal, perhaps add up.
A long road to Baghdad airport from the green zone's
barricades, improvised explosive device, homemade, goes up
rendering hillbilly armor, just so much shrapnel,
splayed organs reduced to meat, flowering as consciousness
ebbs slow motion.
Vices become distance, instantly echoing unimaginable in head.
Language, language, all the unknown knowables known.
Not to spark action, but the barn
at Wades Point in watercolor, behind white rocker, mocks
times friction.
Mrs. Kemp, buried somewhere by the barn, but with no stone
marker visible through the reeds.
Dog from the red barn barks.
Empty warning, not even rising onto all fours.
For force, fill in all fields completely.
Fasting, blood fills vial, deep, dark, rich, red, almost black.
Blank stares, clinic waiting room.
Time as emulsion, withhold motion.
The nurse has her script before dawn
in the night woods, one imagines, Ponge one imagines,
anything.
The steady shrill scream of the cicadas,
clocks second hand ratcheting stiffly around,
dog in the distance barks once then is silent.
Once it's not barking, but just to clear his throat.
Fridge groans on, its hum balancing
the insect-laden woods.
How many words have I left?
Use them wisely, sparingly, each could outlast me
to what purpose.
But this compulsive record forward
from the age of a small, mid-century lad sitting
cross-legged on my bed, scribbling anything to be free.
Anything to make sense.
Peel cellophane from a new tea carton.
No indication where it's grown.
Argentina.
No record, no sense of the map.
Heywood calls his first book Cartographers.
Was there ever a second?
A sense now, over half a century, intricate puzzle.
Grandmother reduced to ash, grandfather, no more silent
than ever just for being dead, sip today's first tea.
The warmth is half of it.
My throat first craves table, narrow in the kitchen alcove,
West Virginia, A-frame cabin, clock with a different birdsong
for every hour, sans kids.
What have you to etch these words into time, applause.
Once we crossed the border, my 47 state family myths
arc over generations.
John Franklin Townsley could not have
known, telling any who would listen,
that yes the explorer, yes his own grandfather, yes,
but the grandson Richard goes back a century later, looks up,
finds the marriage record.
Yes, John Franklin.
Yes, Mary Jane.
But instead a fishmonger married a weaver's daughter.
X marks the signature.
How soon technology catches you out.
These keys, an act surveillance that will only
sink deeper over time.
What you think about that from comma to coma to commerce
to con, versus subjugation.
The root marks language as route across form.
Surname in the family now, just four generations, but literacy
no more than six.
So the arrogance am I then enacting, weaving ink
into paper stains of a history already blanching and the light
up above.
I hear you stirring, rising, at least to sit up then slowly,
quietly coming downstairs to use the bathroom.
Dawn just starts to be visible through the blinds,
soft glow, neither blue nor gray.
Sun not yet visible.
They're distinct, sun and the dawn.
One recurs while the other stretches.
Fans swirl slowly, high overhead.
But the wind chime is still.
A stack of new books await on the table,
yet this blue one's a poem, 3,700 years old.
I search for a tooth sword.
Voices carry up the mountain, but the rooster is late.
Woodpecker is rigorously insistent.
Oak tree hall fell, but was caught by the larger oak.
Jays scream, a cluster though I see no hawk.
Lone, natural lake in the state is, in fact, a sinkhole,
barely visible in summer.
What is to be said for of Lost River Valley?
Towns without stores, theaters, two schools shut for
want of students.
Chimes, still for lack of wind.
The part that didn't secede is today punished for that.
I remember the last veterans, centenarians in the 1950s,
then the last widows.
The very last just now passed on.
In war between the cusp always of the next one.
Hummingbird sense of time, red at the throat is that.
Humans appear in slow motion, even
the galloping gray mare, as if through emulsion,
history is anxiety, breed here.
Futures merge, mock, migrate, mesh,
markets, more powerful than Marx imagined.
New forests for old, scattered brick, metal.
You can see where the garage exploded.
Compost everything.
At the end of the age of man, gender intended.
Drive, he said, breed palimpsest of loss
versus circus of denial.
Ice floes melting southward to the drain.
Illumination alters color.
We need it, but wish it neutral.
Imagine night visitors, not in green, but the muted real.
Breathe deeply, air's cold flavor, rich in the throat.
The pulse varies.
Here more compacted, there gentle, constant throb.
Each years this graphs shifts entropically,
here steps down on the stairs.
Coming down, I think of Doctor Williams carrying his mother up
to bed.
I wake cold yet covered in sweat.
This curious organism, a shock to see it reflected.
Night windows mock mirrors, our fears never very far,
first require the new park to evict 465 families,
an eye to preservation.
Along the long drive, overlook upon overlook, tunnel through,
head toward the stone wall, not three feet high.
Stonewall Jackson dragged his troops up and then
over the ridge down to greet his doom.
A death by friendly fire.
Thank you.