[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
It's such a pleasure and honor to be here this evening.
And I just wanted to thank Diana, Tyler, Katherine
for the introduction, everyone connected with the Poetry
Center--
staff and board members.
And thank you all for being here.
In the time that I have, I'm going
to read a series of short poems and then the long final poem
from this latest book, Sight Lines.
Can you hear me back there?
This is fine?
OK.
"Black Center."
"Green tips of tulips are rising out of the Earth.
You don't flense a whale or fire at beer cans in an arroyo
but catch the budding tips of pear branches
and wonder what it's like to live along
the purling edge of spring.
Jefferson once tried to assemble a mastodon skeleton
on the White House floor but, with pieces missing,
failed to sequence the bones.
When the last speaker of a language dies,
a hue vanishes from the spectrum of visible light.
Last night, you sped past revolving and flashing red,
blue, and white lights along the road--
a wildfire in the dark.
Though no one you knew was taken in the midnight ambulance,
an arrow struck a bull's eye and quivered in its shaft.
One minute, gratitude rises like water from an underground lake.
Another, dissolution gnaws from a black center."