Thank you, all-- well, thank Laynie especially.
Thank you all for being here.
It's a pleasure to be here, especially coming from snowy
and freezing Rhode Island.
I mean, it's amazing that you have this poetry center.
I mean, it's great.
I want to read from this new book "Driven to Abstraction."
And I want to read from two different sequences in it.
The first is called "Time Ravel,"
and it's sort of about memory.
And--
Oh, not right.
Is this better?
Good, good.
--it's about memory and about, also,
explorers who travel to America and elsewhere.
So it's pretty straightforward.
"Time Ravel."
"With the mind's eye, we see against the light.
The way we see the dead--
my father, reading at his desk.
Read, road, door.
Remains unclear how my brain chose
to store this image rather than another,
or how it veers toward the surface.
Ulysses fights his way back to an Ithaca
with four-lane highways, where serfdom has been replaced
by alienation, enemy anxiety.
Returns, reverts, replies.
A borrowed book, a sword to it scabbard,
in recompense, response.
Two.
The assumption is that the sirens
have drowned in the alphabet and been replaced by warnings, war,
warp.
My father stopped reading to watch
a magpie rising black and white against the sky.
Memories are many.
Glitter in the brain, ready to be pilfered.
Does this fit my image of the real--
--where the norms of social interaction have multiplied
and spontaneous acts come back as a mistake?
A combustion?
Natural feeling, temperament, disposition, impulse, energy--
all lashed fast to the mast.
The rubrics of the dictionary, meaning business.
Three.
Columbus Crew were afraid that they would not
come back, unable to close the loop time won't permit.
But sometimes, a ghost or shifting winds--
or the memory of a big slab of ice
that a man with leather mittens split across the middle
to reveal the time hidden within where I might not
find my body for the cold.
Until my mother wraps the slab in a rag
before putting it in the icebox, it would not
warm me enough to have a self.
Same, identical, interest, confidence, esteem, reliance,
respect.
Skin.
So it takes pains to remember caresses is marked by the roads
that pain takes.
Four.
Color of fables, the Indies, scarves, curves--
every island Columbus found was a wild kept to the map
with no elsewhere.
High spirits and cloud theory reflect in the sea
and stitch coordinates toward a flight of gulls--
of stairs.
America becomes a continent where
numbers pass through the air, soar out of bounds.
Or run from danger, flicker of fear.
How can I remember my parents if I
need to run my hand over my body to make sure it is there?
Or lean forward to brace against our element,
deflect its head on force into a more general time?
While God, for love of us, wears clothes.
Five.
I can't hear my father's voice, moored as if among antibodies.
Articulation, hindered by head hanging down
and a spill of oceans--
spell, sperm, spatter, splash.
If the mechanisms of subjectivity are disturbed,
it requires total restructuring of the world.
As when I first learned that the Earth turns on its axis,
that spleen (noun) is a highly vascular ductless gland,
which serves to produce certain changes in the blood.
Merriment, obsolete, caprice, spite, anger, malice,
moroseness, melancholy.
Most marked in complex civilizations, where
the pace of events and cordless voices
exceeds all the running one can do just to stay in one place.
So silver on clear days is the light.
Six.
In haste, we now blast ourselves beyond the clouds
and get lost in skies behind the sky.
It's hard to rescue time from such a sight.
Until they cast a shadow, perspective
has no power over clouds.
Bodies without surface.
They vanished, the moment before the move into abstraction.
The way my mother's large body evaporates
before I can ask her to show me the breast I did not take.
Columbus, though-- Magellan, Vasco,
in the name of Christ and King, took firm hold of new markets.
A mirror for a parrot, scissors for cinnamon,
a playing card for a girl naked to the waist,
a kingdom for a horse, and dust in everyone's eye
for private purchase and sale.
What does it mean to recall the past if I have
little sense of the present?
Seven.
Names multiplied in the wake of caravels, clippers,
communicating vessels.
The spelling capricious, (see spleen) as the winds.
Track itineraries, track vanished and erased,
track how many pages between Circe's island and Charybdis.
It is not that our sensations need to match images
in the brain, but that the brain needs
a body for frame of reference.
No matter if it be square or can, short, squat--
parts fitted together to enclose a window, door, picture,
or disposition of the mind.
Just as emotion shows if we are ready for the future hovering
at the edge of our eye.
Eight.
Great beginnings, too, can end up a small world--
whirl old.
Set sail on the power of imagination
for hearsay, geographies, and real dangers.
With greed, a secret motor, it drove them back home
to cities crazy for spices and gold.
In between, waves and more waves.
When I think of my mother, I am heavy in the pelvis
with the children she wanted and begin to sing.
A complex song of if and so--
I never had a voice to introduce an exclamation, condition,
stipulation, untenable argument, or wish.
On condition, in the event that allowing that these long term
memories are abstractions--
a different mode of thought from the short term ones.
And that their difference shapes my sense of time.
A violet's blue, as a sign of distance.