And my new book is called Flood Song.
And yeah.
It's fun.
It's a book that took a while.
And I carried it around with me in my back pocket,
until it grew into several manuscripts
all over the country.
And it finally was ready to be published in October
of the previous year.
And so this is a journey inside someplace that wants a name,
but it's also a flood.
tó tó tó tó tó
tó tó tó tó
I bite my eyes shut between these songs.
They are the sounds of blackened insect husks folded
over elk teeth in a tin can, they
are gull wings fattening on cold air flapping in a paper suck
on the chlorine-stained floor.
They curl in corners, spiked and black-thatched,
stomp across the living room ceiling,
paint our stems with sand in the kitchen sink.
They speak a double helix, zigzag a tree trunk,
bark the tips of its leaves with cracked amber--
they plant shouts-- they plant whispers where
shouts incinerates into hisses.
Stepping through the drum's vibration,
I hear gasoline trickle alongside
the fenced-in panorama of the reed we climbed in from
and slide my hands into shoes of ocean water.
I step onto the gravel path of swans paved across lake scent,
wrap this blank page around the exclamation point
slammed between us.
The storm lying outside its fetal shell
folds back its antelope ears and hears its heart pounding
through powdery earth underneath dancers flecking dust
from their ankles to thunder into rain.
I am unable to pry my fingers from the axe unable to utter
a word without grandfather's accent rippling
around the stone flung into his thinning mattress.
Years before, he would have named this season
by flattening a field where grasshoppers
jumped into black smoke.
A crow snaps its beak over and over again--
the past is a blurry splotch of red crosshatched with neon
light; on the drive south, windows pushed down,
you scoop pellets of canned air and ocean across sand dunes,
across the waning lick of moonlight on the dashboard
to crease the horizon between petals of carved snow.
A red-tail hawk scrapes the sandstone wall with its beak.
A shower of sparks skates across the morning sky.
You think this bottle will open a canyon wall
and light a trail trampled by gloved hands
as you inhale earth, wind, water, through the gasoline
nozzle at trail's end, a flint spear driven
into the key switch.
You think you can return to that place where your mother held
her sleeves above the rising tides saying 'We are here again
on the road covered with television snow;
we are here again the song has thudded.'
Flicking off the light switch.
Lichen buds the curved creases of a mind pondering
the mesquite tree's dull ache as it
gathers its leaves around clouds of spotted doves--
calling them in rows of twelve back from their winter sleep.
Doves' eyes black as nightfall shiver on the foam
coasts of an arctic dream where whale ribs clasp and fasten you
to the language of shifting ice.
Seeing into those eyes you uncoil their telephone wires,
gather their inaudible lions with plastic forks, tongue
their salty ribbons, and untie their weedy
stems from your prickly fingers.
You stop to wonder what like sounds like when held under
glacier water, how Ná ha kos feels under the weight of all
that loss.
I cover my eyes with electrical wires,
and see yellow dawn eclipse Stop signs,
turn green and screech into phosphorescence.
Each flickering finger-- a memory of a flashing
yellow sign, blinks between charcoal sheets of monsoon rain
then slices through the thawing of our hunger
with the cracked eaves of a shattered house.
Its autobiographical muscle-- stringing trees into a forest,
convulses, only to be flattened under its metallic leaves
and sold as bricks for its basement of fire.
What land have you cast from the blotted-out region
of your face?
What nation stung by watermarks was filmed out of extinction
and brought forth resembling frost?
What offspring must jump through the eye of birth
to be winked at when covered with brick sweat?
What ache piled its planks on the corner pier,
now crumbles onto motionless water,
sniffed at by forest smoke?
What season cannot locate an eye in the dark of the sun gyrating
into red ocher after I thought you noticed my language was
half wren, half pigeon and, together,
we spoke a wing pattern on the wall that was raised to keep
'us' out, there where 'calling' became
'culling,' 'distance' distanced, in a mere scrape of enamel
on yellow teeth?
What father woke, turned over his wife, she didn't want to,
but he pushed until the baby leapt
through, now, now, now, strummed into a chorus
of burn marks on ceilings where police sirens fruit
magpie skulls on trees of monsoon lightning?
What, what, what-- is how the song chimed in the wilderness.
And I compare my hands to what I imagine
thought might look like when suspended in fossilized amber,
release the captured mosquito from my close hands,
string dimming gas lamps between rain and fall,
and insert into the knife's pale origin--
a twig warming the clutching hand.
This windowless house marrows my veins with thinking.
Scraps of venison leaf the picture frame.
A stoplight dangles from the sunbeam
of a birth song billowing from stratus to cumulus
to nimbus to drought, as the ache of ten trees silences
the dull ax.
You should have seen the shrew torn tendon, snout, fur,
claw by the mountain stream under bright moonlight,
small as a baby's fist--
it spiraled in the crashing waves.
The luminous wander cornfields without husbands;
their wooden faces splinter the owl's nest;
their tongues scraped bone smooth with cartilage,
speak the gray language of black stones.
They throb in the cornfield.
They quake out of silence bleating across engine growl.
They will trail us.
They will wake with eagle whistles in their mouths.
And I sensed the knife in your past, its sharp edge shanked
by the canyon stream--
A silver trickle between the book jacket,
nihízaad peeled open inside a diabetic mouth.
The waters of my clans flash flooded--
I fell from the white of its eyes--
our fathers had no children to name their own no baby's cry
to place between argument and arguments.
The commercial flashed a blue path
across the lakes of our veins the bluest glint,
a rock in the ear told our tongues entwined,
that I was reaching for the corn field inside you,
that I was longing to outlive this long, terrible whisper
pointing toward my skull damp in a desert canyon,
white-washed by the ache of fog lights reaching
to unravel my combed hair.
And I wanted to swallow the song's flowers,
swim diagonally its arched back, its shadows stinging my hands
with black pollen.
We were on the same surgical table waiting for the surgeons
to carve us back into shape.
The drum pulsed somewhere in the dark
and I heard a woman unbraiding her hair.
I felt morning songs leave from the hooghan's smoke-hole
and curl outward from the roof of the sky,
gliding through us like rain.
I sang, sang until the sun rose.
The shadows of my face grew into a swallow with folded wings
and darted into the fire.
The cloud became a skull and crushed
to the earth above Black Mesa.
The cloud wanted to slip through the coal mines
and unleash its horses.
It wanted to crack open bulldozers
and spray their yolks over the hills
so that a new birth cry would awaken the people who
had fallen asleep.
It wanted to push their asymmetrical ramblings
into the weft of a storm blanket, dye it hazel
and sink it into the rising waters.
A city dragged its bridges behind it
and finally collapsed in a supermarket
asking for the first apple that was ever bitten.
And no one questioned the sand anymore.
No one un-tucked themselves from their bodies
and wandered the streets without knowing their clans.
Everyone planted corn in their bellies
and became sunlight washing down plateaus
with deer running out of them.
The phone was ringing through it all.
The line was busy when I picked the axe
and chose the first tree to chop down."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.