And I'm going to finish by reading a few newer poems.
I usually have more witty banter.
But tonight my only witty banter is
a memory of previous witty banter, for which I apologize.
My daughter has some knock-knock jokes, but frankly,
they don't make any sense--
which is why I like them so much.
5-year-old jokes, why do they tell them?
I wonder that.
It's because we laugh.
I'm going to stop laughing at my daughter's jokes.
I'm making that vow publicly.
In some ways, I don't quite know what
to say about the poems I'll finish with tonight.
They're filled with all sorts of things
that aren't mine, but are in ways mine.
And I think, more important ways, all of ours.
In this poem, it ranges from Plutarch,
to Tang Dynasty Chinese sculpture, to Marcel Duchamp,
to old goddess Venus figurines, to Shakespeare,
to Wallace Stevens, to "Caedmon's Hymn."
And an eerie night when, as a two-year-old,
I was putting my daughter to sleep--
that sentence came out poorly.
When I was putting my daughter to sleep
when she was a two-year-old is more accurate.
And I thought she had fallen asleep.
And then she said twice, a cricket in the desert.
A cricket in the desert.
I spent a couple of weeks poring through every children's book
that she had, but I couldn't find the source.
And this poem is titled "Poem, or The Artifacts."
"It was the day after the stories had been told.
Impossible details scattered on the shore.
Inscribed turtle shell.
The inner ears' bones.
Nets abandoned in the foam.
A green crown the sun dropped on the horizon.
The sun's abdicated throne.
A ringing in the air.
A wooden stick circling a bronze bowl's rim.
Did the planet still work above the haze?
Sitting on a stone, a man tonelessly spoke rumors.
The air is stamped with the form of articulated speech.
I listened.
Who am I to judge, I asked myself aloud.
The camels had broken off at the neck brayed soundlessly.
Only the glaze bled.
Only the gaze bled.
Green lines tracing paths, the animals
wandered among the stones.
Nothing could be lost.
The salt in my mouth, the same salt in the air.
A kind of stress crystallizing into song.
The stripped bride stood.
A body, wholly body, her feet in foam.
The ionic disruption of the veil.
Lightning occurred in everyone's face.
I watched.
A bird carried a shingle in her mouth.
A lantern buried in sand gives shadow
given the illuminating gas.
I remembered without wanting memory.
Birds that nested in hollows.
The waterfall carved a falling veil in stone as it fell.
A tendril in the labyrinth.
The thistle amazed the arbor.
Thinnest green vine enmeshed in burr, an intimate script
illegible.
Little riddles in the ruins.
What do you carry that you never held?
The foam, still foam, on her feet.
She stood, gazing at plastic bags, cotton branches.
Thank you stamped in cursive on a sphere full with wind.
Another globe, green with algae, the water suspended overhead.
Worlds with worlds inside.
I held her to me.
Beneath her navel, her vulva's pronounced lips.
Thumbs rubbed away her nipples.
The old goddess on her back in the sand.
The eye's habit convinces the mind that fog is imprecise.
To open and to see.
Wakefulness was that other life.
Cricket in the desert spoken from cloud.
Cricket in the desert in a child's voice.
When I opened my mouth, I tasted the cloud.
So I've learned I live here too.
My mouth was another scrap in the fog.
Now let me praise the keeper and his thought.
If I could calm myself down to my animal life,
if dust on old hymns, if weather is song.
Rumor prefaced history.
The son stole the crown.
Hooves in blueshift.
Infantry.
An ear listening for a tremor in the ground."