And I have just one other poem.
It's a long poem.
It's the last poem to the book.
It's called "The Glass Constellation."
And I need to give you a few background notes about it.
In East Indian philosophy, there's
this image called Indra's net.
And the idea is that, oh, East Indians being
very philosophical and cosmological,
have this idea that everything that occurs in the universe
is like a piece of hanging glass in an enormous chandelier.
So as I read the poem, you can't track or prioritize
one event over another.
But maybe the way to sort of listen
to it is to hear these events as they unfold and imagine
each one is like a piece of hanging glass.
An idea in Indra's net is that when
light shines into this vast chandelier,
each hanging piece reflects and absorbs every other.
And the last structural thing I want to say is I like to use,
or refer to, myths.
And one of the layers to the poem
is the Egyptian Weighing of the Heart ceremony.
When someone died, the heart was supposed
to be weighed against a feather to see if you
had lived a virtuous life.
And if you did, you earned your way into the afterlife.
And if you didn't, your heart was devoured.
[LAUGHTER]
So here it is, "The Glass Constellation."
"Apple branches whiten in moonlight.
No god with an ibis head and human body
writes on a papyrus scroll here.
In daylight, snow has accumulated
on flagstone and fence posts.
For days, masons cut bricks on the patio.
The sound of a circular saw echoed in your ears,
but now, scattered husks of silence lie on the ground.
In a bowl-shaped fountain, water rises and brims.
If all time brims at this threshold,
a man tosses a beer can out of a car, then wrist flicks a match.
A brush fire ignites, fans east, across a field
toward a house and barn.
As the stench of smoke permeates your clothes and hair,
you lean on a shovel.
Brush crackles then bursts into flame.
Shoveling snow off a patio, you spot ice crystals,
run your eyes along the glinting--
a varied thrush swallows a juniper berry.
From the air, we track migrating caribou,
and their shifting bodies make visible the magnetic lines
of the moment.
A magpie hops onto an apple tree stump, flies to a fence post,
up to a branch.
You want that absorption, that vitality, when you turn
a key at the door, step inside.
You consider what you've botched.
Once you shortened a one by eight
so that you could level sand on a portal.
But the foreman stopped and screamed,
'You just sawed off my straight edge!'
Heat waves ripple up from a highway
outside a grapefruit farm near Salton Sea--
the road dissolves into shimmering sand.
You resume shoveling snow off the walkway
and tingle at the hot and cold.
Once, in the dark, a large doe stood behind you.
A woman begs outside the bakery.
When he unlatched the gate, fawns appeared in the orchard.
A temblor torqued the dining room and silenced the laughter.
A spotted towhee lands on a nest and feeds her fledglings--
gazing into the vortex of the white page.
No jackal-headed god needs to weigh your heart
against an eagle feather.
At sunrise, you divert water from the ditch
to sprinklers that swish, spray the grass.
A soldier on point pauses.
Who knows the path of a man on crutches
begging at a stoplight?
From the underground uranium mine,
a shock wave shattered windows in the village above.
In the dictionary, you open to "cochlea," then "pungent."
A thinning membrane, the Earth's atmosphere.
You write "respire," then listen.
Nibbling dandelion stalks, a cottontail.
As peonies unfold in a vase, you smell the back of her neck.
Researchers trained honeybees tagged with microtransmitters
to track TNT and locate landmines in fields.
Sun Tzu wrote, 'To win 100 victories in 100 battles is not
the acme of skill.'
In the boiler room, a plumber replaced a zone valve
but inadvertently let air into the water line.
At midnight, in a house with no heat, you restart the boiler,
but on the concrete floor, rat shit
is scattered like rice, though you
set a trap with peanut butter.
You recall a coyote munching an apple core,
gazing through the kitchen window, unblinking in sunlight.
A magpie lands on a buck and eats ticks.
Sun Tzu wrote 'Musical notes are only five in number,
but their melodies are so numerous,
one cannot hear them all.'
Nasturtium and lobelia planted in pots.
In the silence, a pipa twangs.
A cougar stalks neighborhood dogs in the dark.
You walked up to the acequia but finding no water,
fingered the silt. A sniper fires
from a second-story window.
Fingers start rolling and halting on strings.
Where did I put my car keys?
I'm pissed-- late.
What's this fucking-- note under the door?
Behind on my rent?
That sound of a truck coming down the street.
I need a shot--
not yet-- ugh-- that sound of glass breaking.
Now, piss me off.
I have to wait until that truck's done.
Maybe I'll move to Denver--
to back out.
When the caribou arrive, flowering herbs are starting
to wilt. When you type, 'I have taken too little care,' you
step out on a glacial lake at 10 below.
Ice crystals singe your eyelashes.
You mark the forking branches of a tree in the darkening air.
Minute by minute, your sight shrinks and shallows
until the glass panes of the door shift from window
to mirror.
At that moment, grief and joy tip the ends of a scale.
Earlier, you did not know you would
live to see a blue gentian flower out of air.
So often, you knew the page before it burst into flame.
Staring at the snowy field of the page,
you tense when an Arctic fox slips
past the black trunks of trees.
You blink, and nothing is there.
The blinking cursor marks a pendulum
swinging from a vaulted ceiling over a marble floor.
Though no god fingers your nerves,
you write "tingle" and tingle as sleet turns to rain.
In the white space, a poppy buds.
He runs his fingers through her hair.
The spray of mock orange streams by.
At a fountain, a spotted towhee sips.
Clenching his hand, he tugs the roots of her hair.
A fisherman unspools a line back and forth, relaxes his grip.
A fly drops onto a stream, and a cutthroat snags it--
unfolds a sky blue poppy.
She is rubbing oil on his chest and nipples,
staccato lightning to the west.
Swimming in the Pacific, they look at two lines
of dolphins undulating below--
encircling, one suddenly flips into the air then plunges
into the depths.
Sound of a car shifting gears.
Out of PVC pipes, water gushes into the orchard.
Women are rinsing indigo-dyed yarn in a river.
He sees the zigzag blue lines in tiles above the fireplace
as he has never seen them before.
She sees June light slanting through glass into the hallway.
Before his ashes are scattered at sea,
you stare at a dead apricot tree in moonlight.
What was it like to hear a commotion
in the street and glimpse the last emperor leave
the Forbidden City?
Years later, in West Virginia, coal miners
armed with sticks of dynamite rolled on cots
into mine openings and then back out.
Detonations in the past are laced in garlic now.
Sniffing the air and leaning his head back and forth,
a coyote trots by the glass door.
Last night, coyotes howled before tearing apart a rabbit.
At 4:00 AM, a baker slides dough into an oven.
The aroma rises from the basement kiln.
And as you inhale, it drizzles on deck.
Three miles from the coastline, you scattered ashes.
And swirling on waves, they formed
a gray, black-speckled cloud before sinking.
At the beach, you screwed an umbrella pole
into the sand, heard cry and cry but saw nothing.
Then a piping plover skirting toward the water
revealed behind rocks four speckled eggs.
After replanting the pole, sitting under an umbrella,
you felt how a skin separated you from death,
how death contoured the pause between exhale and inhale,
how it flowered inside the bougainvillea blooming
by a glass door and sparked the white page into light.
And as glass molecules slow as the temperature cools yet never
lock into crystal patterns, you feel
how once never locks, how it vibrates, quickens inside you.
Then you level with a taxi driver swerving between trucks,
level with a potter who smashes a bowl back into a ball, level
with a magpie that congregates and squawks
with other magpies over a corpse before flying off.
And when you hike up the ridge, dew rising into the morning,
you ride the flex of your muscles as you lift the gate."