Maybe a longish poem to draw things to the close.
Again a suite, which is mixed up, and in small parts.
This is from the lead poem in my new book, which
is coming out in January.
Somewhere in New York Harbor isn't
clogged with giant squid or any other emergencies
of such nature.
It opens with a quote from Apollinaire,
a poet I've always cherished.
And if you haven't read Apollinaire, you should.
Guillaume Apollinaire.
He said once, let us open together
the last but of the future.
It's called "Outlyer, in Interims."
He halts, he haw, plummets.
The snake in the river is belly up,
diamond head caught in crotch a branch.
Length wavering yellow with the force of water.
Who strangles is this taste of present?
Numen of walking and sleep.
Knees of snow as the shark's back is gristle.
And if my sister hadn't died in an auto wreck
and had been taken by the Indians,
I would have something to do, go into the mountains
and get her back.
Miranda, I have proof that when people die they become birds.
And I've lost my chance to go to see or become a cowboy.
Age narrows me to this window and it's three weeks snow.
This is Russia and I a clerk.
Miranda throws herself from the window,
the icon clutched to her breast into the snow over and over.
A world of ruminants, cloven-hoof summit.
Is that less worthless for being in front?
There are the others ignorant of us to a man,
says Johnson to Lowell who wouldn't come to tea, who's he
son bitch.
And he knows armaments and cattle like a Renaissance
Prince, knew love and daggers and faintly knew
of Dante or Cecco, it is a world that belongs to Kipling.
What will I die with in my hand?
A paint brush for houses?
An M15?
A hammer or ax?
A book or gavel?
A candlestick tiptoeing upstairs.
What will I hold?
Or will I be caught with this usual thing
that I want to be my heart, but it is my brain
and I turn it over and over and over.
Only miracles should apply.
We have stones enough, they steal all the heat
and trip everyone, even the weary throw stones
away into tricky way of saying something unnecessary
will not do.
I have sort of a major grass fire up here.
I mean a--
[LAUGHTER]
a cool fire, cool filter fire.
This isn't going to be distracting
because the next part is sort of captious.
The girl standing outside the bus station in Muskegon,
Michigan hasn't noticed me.
I doubt she reads poetry or if she did would like it at all,
or if she liked it the affection would be casual and temporary.
She would anyway rather ride a horse than read a poet,
read a comic rather than write a poet.
Sweetie, 15 minutes in that black alley bent
over the garbage can with me in the saddle
would make her affections equal, let's be fair.
I love my dear daughter whose skin is so warm
and if I don't hurt her she'll come to great harm.
I love my dog Missy, her skin is so warm.
I love my cat Stanley's fur so warm.
I love all my friends their skins are so warm,
my dear mother, dead father, life sister, dead sister,
two brothers their skins are so warm.
I love my lovely wife her skin is most warm
and I love my dear self, my skin is so warm,
I come to great harm, I come to great harm.
I want to be told the children's story that will stick.
I'm sorry I can't settle for less some core of final delight
in the funeral parlor my limbs are so heavy, I can't rise.
This isn't me in this nest of silk
but a relative bearing my face and name.
I still wanted to become a cowboy
or bring peace to the Middle East.
This isn't me, I saw Christ this summer
rising over the Absaroka Mountains.
Of course, I was drunk, I carry my vices to the wilderness.
That faintly blue person there among the nasturtium was,
among crooning relatives and weeping wife however isn't me.
Where we are born dead our minds can taste the sauce
and tell that other death.
Along rain and we are children, and a long snow
sleeping children in deep snow.
As an in grams all journeys end in three steps
with the mirrored door behind it a closet and a closet wall.
And he wants to write poems to resurrect a God,
to raise all buried things the eye buries
it the heart and brain, to move wild laughter
in the throat of death.
A new ax, a new ax I'm going to play with my new ax.
Sharp blue blade, handle of ash then
exhaust to listen to my new record Johnny Cash.
Nine dollars in all, two lovely things
to play with far better and more lasting than a nine dollar
whore or two bottles of whiskey, a new ax and Johnny Cash,
sharp blue blade, and handle of ash
all the stream of your blood runs as black as the coal.
Saw ghosts not faintly or wispy, loud they
were raising on Burly arms at midday
which sun day and full light, murder in delight,
all former dark things and noonlight all light things
love we perform at night and fuck
as war wounds rub, and sigh as others side blind
and delight to the world outside the window.
When I begin to make analogies, false analogies between animals
and human then countries, Russia's
like America and America like Russia,
the universe is the world and the world a university,
the teacher is a crayfish, the poem is a bird
and a housefly, a pig without a poke, a flame and an oil can.
A woman who never menstruates, a woman without glands who makes
love by generalized friction.
Then I went to the country to think of precision.
Oh, the moon is the width of a woman's thigh.
The Mexican girl about 14-years old in the 1923 National
Geographic found in the attic when
we thought the chimney was on fire, and I stood on the roof
with the snow falling looking down into the black hole where
the fire roared at the bottom.
The girl, lying in the Rio Grande
in a thin wet shift smiling, water covering back
between breasts and buttocks but then isolate
the buttocks and the muddy water,
two graceful melons from the deep in the Rio Grande
to ride them up to the river's source or down to the sea,
it wouldn't matter, or carry her like a pack
into some fastness like the sawtooth mountains
and the melon butter of her and water,
myself in the cloudy brown water as a fish beneath her, finely.
All falseness flows you would rust in jerks, hobbles,
they the dewlap sniff eglantine and in mint cleared voices
not from dark, but in puddles over cement,
an eighth inch deep of watery mud,
all falseness flows comes now where should it rest?
Merlin as Merlin, the cri de Merlin.
Whose shores are never watched as women have no more than one
mouth staring at the ground.
Repeat now from what cloud, or clouds, or country,
countries in dim sleep, pure song mouthless,
as if of a church buried beneath the sea, one bell tower
standing.
And one bell, staring for whom at ground's length.
Elbows and ground, stare at me now.
She grows from the tree half vine and half woman,
and haunts all my nights as music can
that uses our tendons as its chords,
bowels to hurtle her gifts.
Myths as Arcturus, Aldebaran.
Picture is colored in with blood.
Her eyes were bees.
And in her hair, I seem to glisten.
Drawn up as plants, the snake wrapped
around the crucifix nose, glass nose.
And oh, song, meal is made of us not even
for small gods who wait in the morning.
Dark pushes with no to and fro over and under we
who serve her as canticles, for who falls deeper and breaks
away knows praise other than our own.
Sing.
Merely land and heavily drawn away from the sea.
Long before us, green has begun.
Every crevice, kelp, bird dung, froth the sea,
foam over granite wet sea rose and roar
of Baltic, who went from continent to island as wolves
or elk would at night.
Sea ice, assaulted glass, slight lid, mirror over dark.
As old and least of all, gods with pine smell
of dark and animals crossed in winter
with whales butting shores, dressed without heat and skins.
Said Christ, who came late, nothing to be fond her here,
lovers of wood, not stone.
North goes over and down, furthest from the sun.
Allowed in the distance, white wolf and whiter
bear with red mouth.
They can eat flesh and nothing else.
White winter, white snow, black trees, green boughs over us.
Arctic sun.
One wild flower in profusion.
Grasses blue.
Sterile, fishless lake and rock.
And northern lights shimmering, crackling.
As a child in mourning, mourned for knows.
How short and bittersweet, not less for sane again.
The child singing knows near death.
It is so alive.
Songs made of her.
How large is hawk or tree?
Only a stone lives beyond sweet things.
So that the sea raises herself, not swallows,
but pushed by wind and moon, destroys them.
Only dark gives light.
Apollo Christ.
Only a blue and knotted Earth broken by green,
as high above God see us in our sleeping end.
We know no other, curled as we are here.
Sleep over Earth.
Tongues fog.
Thunder wars.
Christ raises islands from the sea.
Sea people come.
Clear your speech.
It is all that we have allowed in here and now.
Thank you.
That's about-- that's--
[APPLAUSE]