WEBVTT

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This last poem is--

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takes about 10 minutes, I think.

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It's called "Songs to
Survive the Summer."

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It's written in a
series of fragments

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and also written
out of the impulse

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to let the poem
wander and accumulate

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and find its own way.

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So it moves through
some disparate material.

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I've always wanted
to be Chekhov,

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so I wrote a Chekhov short
story and put it in the poem.

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[LAUGHTER]

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There's-- let's see, the only
references in it that might be

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a trouble are-- you have
loquats in Tucson, the orange--

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the little yellow fruit.

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They're not Steller's Jays.

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One of the Blue
Jays of California

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is a Black-headed Jay
named for a botanist.

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Steller Jay-- named--

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Wilhelm Steller.

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And he shows up in this poem.

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It wanders.

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The occasion of it was--

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my daughter's death fears.

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She was at that age when
she gets afraid about death.

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And she was asking me
questions about it.

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I responded by getting more
panicky about it than she was.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Tried to do this.

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So long as to
survive the summer,

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it has an epigraph
from the a funeral

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at the end of The Brothers
Karamazov when one of the boys

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turns to Alyosha and says, it's
funny, isn't it, Karamazov?

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All this grief, and
pancakes afterwards.

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[LAUGHTER]

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"These are the dog days
unvaried, except by accident.

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Mist rising from soaked lawns,
gone world, everything rises

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and dissolves in air.

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Whatever it is would clear
the air, dissolves in air

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and the knot of days unties
invisibly like a shoelace.

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The gray-eyed child who
said to my child, let's

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play in my yard.

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It's OK.

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My mother's dead.

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Under the loquat tree,
it's almost a song,

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the echo of a song.

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On the bat's back, I fly
merrily towards summer.

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Or at high noon in
the outfield clover

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guzzling Orange Crush, time
endless examining a wooden coin

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I'd carried all through
summer without knowing.

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The coin was grandpa's
joke, carved from live oak,

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Indian side and Buffalo side.

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His eyes lustered with a
mirth so deep and rich,

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he never laughed as if it were
a cosmic secret that we shared.

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I never understood.

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It married in my
mind with summer.

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Don't take any
wooden nickels, kid.

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And gave me one under
the loquat tree.

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The squalor of mind is
formlessness, informis,

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the Romans said of ugliness.

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It has no form.

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A man's misery,
bleached skies, the war

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between desire and dailiness.

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I thought this morning of
Wallace Stevens walking equably

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to work and of a morning to
Julys ago on Chestnut Ridge,

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wandering down the
hill when one rusty elm

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leaf earth-skin peeling
wafted by me on the wind.

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My body groaned toward fall.

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And preternaturally a
heron lifted from the pond.

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I even thought I heard the
ruffle of the wings 300 yards

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below me rising from the reeds.

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Death is the mother of beauty.

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And that clean-shaven
man smelling of lotion

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lint-free walking toward his
work of pure exclusive music

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in his mind.

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The mother of the neighbor
child was 31, died,

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at Sunday breakfast, of
a swelling in the throat.

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On a toy loom, she taught
my daughter how to weave.

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My daughter was her friend
and now she cannot sleep

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for nighttime sirens, sure that
every whale is someone dead

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Should I whisper in her ear,
death is the mother of beauty?

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Wooden nickels, kid?

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It's all in shapeliness,
give your fears a shape?

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In fact, we hide
together in her books.

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Prairie farms, the heron knows
the way, old country songs,

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herbal magic, recipes for soup,
tales of spindly orphan girls

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who find the golden key,
the darkness at the center

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of the leafy wood.

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And when she finally sleeps,
I try out Chekhov's tenderness

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to see what it can save.

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Maryushka, the beekeeper's
widow, though three years mad,

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writes daily letters to her son.

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Semyon transcribes them.

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The pages are
smudged by his hands,

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stained with the dregs of tea.

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'My dearest Vanushka, Sofia
Agrippina's ill again.

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The master asks for you.

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Wood is dear.

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The cold is early.

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Poor Sofia Agrippina, the
foreign doctor gave her salts,

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but Semyon says her icon
candle guttered St. John's Eve.

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I am afraid, Vanya.

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When she's ill, the master likes
to have your sister flogged.

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She means no harm.

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The rye is gray
this time of year.

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When it is bad, Vanya,
I go into the night,

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and the night eats me.'

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The haiku comes in shapes
with the virtue of brevity.

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What a strange thing,
Isa says, to be

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alive beneath plum blossoms?

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The Black-headed
Steller's Jay is

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squawking in our plum, thief!

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Thief!

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A hard, indifferent bird,
he'd snatch your life.

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[PAPER RUSTLES]

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The love of books
is for children

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who glimpse in them
a life to come,

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but I have come to
that life and feel

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uneasy with the love of books.

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This is my life, time islanded
in poems of dwindled time.

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There is no other world.

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But I have seen it twice.

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In the Palo Alto marsh, sea
birds rose in early light

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and took me with them.

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Another time,
dreaming river birds

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lifted me swans,
small angelic terns,

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and an old woman
in a shawl dying

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by a dying lake whose life
raised men from the dead

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in another country.

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Thick nights, and
nothing lets us rest.

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In the heat of mid-july,
our lust is nothing.

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We swell and thicken.

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Slippery, purgatorial, our
sexes will not give us up.

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Exhausted after
hours and not undone,

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we crave cold marrow
from the tiny bones

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that moonlight
scatters on our skin.

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Always morning arrives,
the stunned days, faceless,

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droning in the juice of rotten
quince, the flies, the heat.

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Tears, silence.

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The edified generations
eat me, Maryushka.

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I tell them pain is form
and almost persuade myself

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they are not listening.

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Why should they?

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Who cannot save me
any more than I,

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weeping over Great Russian
Short Stories in summer,

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under the fattened
figs, saved you.

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Besides, it is winter
there in the future.

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They're trying out a new
recipe for onion soup.

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Use a heavy-bottomed
three- or four-quart pan.

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Thinly slice six large yellow
onions and sauté in olive oil

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and butter until limp.

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Pour in beef broth.

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Simmer 30 minutes.

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Add red port and bake
for half an hour.

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Then sprinkle half a
cup of diced Gruyere

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and cover with an even
layer of toasted bread

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and shredded Samsoe.

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Dribble melted butter
on the top and bake

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until the cheese
has bubbled gold.

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Surround yourself with friends,
huddle in a warm place.

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Ladle.

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Eat.

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Weave and cry.

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Child, every other
siren is a death,

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the rest are for speeding.

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Look, how comically
the jay's black head

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emerges from the swath
of copper leaves.

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Half the terror is the fact
that in our time speed saves us,

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a whine we've traded for
the hopeless patients

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of the village bell
which tolled in threes--

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weave and cry and weave.

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Wilhelm Steller, form's
hero made a healing broth.

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He sailed with Bering and
the crew despised him,

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a mean impatient man born low
enough to hate the lower class.

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For two years, he'd connived
to join the expedition

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and put his name
to all the beasts

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and flowers of the north.

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Now, Bering sick, the
crew half-mad with scurvy,

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no one would let him go ashore.

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Panic, the maps were useless.

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The summer weather almost gone.

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He said, there are
herbs that can cure you.

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I can save you all.

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I didn't give a damn about
them, and they knew it.

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For three years, he'd prepared.

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Bering listened.

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Asleep in his bunk, he'd seen
death writing in the log.

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On the island, while the
sailors searched for water,

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Steller gathered herbs
and looking up he

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saw the blue, black-crested
bird, shrilling in a pine.

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His mind flipped to
Berlin, the library,

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a glimpse he'd had an Autobahn,
a blue-gray crested bird

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exactly like the one
that squawked at him.

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Carolina jay, unlike
any European bird,

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he knew then where they
were, America. we're saved.

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No one believed him
or, sick for home,

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he didn't care what
wilderness it was.

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They set sail west.

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Bearing died.

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Steller's Jay, by
which I found Alaska.

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He wrote it in his book.

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Saved no one.

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Still walking in the redwoods,
I hear the cry, thief, thief,

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and think of Wilhelm Steller.

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In my dream, we are all saved.

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Camping on a Clement shore in
early fall, a strange land,

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we feast most delicately.

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The swans are stuffed with
grapes, the turkey with walnut

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and chestnut and wild plum.

00:11:31.630 --> 00:11:34.120 align:middle line:84%
The river is our
music-- unalaska--

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to make bread from acorns,
we leech the tannic acid

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out-- this music, child,
and more, much more!"

00:11:41.305 --> 00:11:44.900 align:middle line:90%


00:11:44.900 --> 00:11:46.160 align:middle line:90%
Let me try a final time.

00:11:46.160 --> 00:11:49.310 align:middle line:90%


00:11:49.310 --> 00:11:53.600 align:middle line:84%
"When I was just your age,
the war was over and we moved.

00:11:53.600 --> 00:11:57.140 align:middle line:84%
An Okie family lived next
door to our new house.

00:11:57.140 --> 00:11:59.780 align:middle line:84%
That summer Quincy
Phipps was saved.

00:11:59.780 --> 00:12:04.460 align:middle line:84%
The next, his house became an
unofficial Pentecostal church.

00:12:04.460 --> 00:12:07.070 align:middle line:84%
Summer nights--
hidden in the garden,

00:12:07.070 --> 00:12:10.430 align:middle line:84%
I ate figs, watched where
the knobby limbs rose up

00:12:10.430 --> 00:12:13.190 align:middle line:84%
and flicked against the
windows where they were.

00:12:13.190 --> 00:12:15.620 align:middle line:90%
Oh, Jesus.

00:12:15.620 --> 00:12:19.430 align:middle line:84%
Kissed and put to bed, I slipped
from the window to the eaves

00:12:19.430 --> 00:12:21.620 align:middle line:90%
and nestled by the loquat tree.

00:12:21.620 --> 00:12:24.230 align:middle line:84%
The fruit was
yellow-brown in daylight.

00:12:24.230 --> 00:12:27.470 align:middle line:84%
Under the moon, pale clusters
hung like other moons,

00:12:27.470 --> 00:12:30.350 align:middle line:90%
oh, Jesus, and I picked them.

00:12:30.350 --> 00:12:33.020 align:middle line:84%
The fat juices
dribbling down my chin.

00:12:33.020 --> 00:12:34.790 align:middle line:90%
I sucked and listened.

00:12:34.790 --> 00:12:36.020 align:middle line:90%
Men groaned.

00:12:36.020 --> 00:12:40.310 align:middle line:84%
The women sobbed and moaned,
a long unsteady belly-deep

00:12:40.310 --> 00:12:44.270 align:middle line:84%
bewildering sound half pleasure
and half pain that ended

00:12:44.270 --> 00:12:48.230 align:middle line:84%
sometimes in a croon,
a broken song--

00:12:48.230 --> 00:12:51.190 align:middle line:90%
oh, Jesus, Jesus.

00:12:51.190 --> 00:12:58.330 align:middle line:90%


00:12:58.330 --> 00:13:04.540 align:middle line:84%
That is what I have to give
you, child, stories, songs,

00:13:04.540 --> 00:13:08.320 align:middle line:90%
loquat seed, curiously shaped.

00:13:08.320 --> 00:13:12.820 align:middle line:84%
They are the frailest
stay against our fears.

00:13:12.820 --> 00:13:15.970 align:middle line:84%
Death, in the
sweetness, in the bitter

00:13:15.970 --> 00:13:21.160 align:middle line:84%
and the sour, death in the
salt, your tears, this summer

00:13:21.160 --> 00:13:24.010 align:middle line:90%
ripe and overripe.

00:13:24.010 --> 00:13:27.370 align:middle line:84%
It is a taste in
the mouth, child.

00:13:27.370 --> 00:13:32.830 align:middle line:84%
We are the song death
takes its own time singing.

00:13:32.830 --> 00:13:38.830 align:middle line:84%
It calls us, as I call
you, child, to come myself.

00:13:38.830 --> 00:13:42.790 align:middle line:84%
It is everything touched
casually, lovers,

00:13:42.790 --> 00:13:46.360 align:middle line:84%
the images of saviors,
books, the coins

00:13:46.360 --> 00:13:50.530 align:middle line:84%
I carried in my
pocket till it shone.

00:13:50.530 --> 00:13:55.300 align:middle line:84%
It is all things lustered by
the steady thoughtlessness

00:13:55.300 --> 00:13:56.170 align:middle line:90%
of human use."

00:13:56.170 --> 00:13:59.710 align:middle line:90%


00:13:59.710 --> 00:14:00.280 align:middle line:90%
Thank you.

00:14:00.280 --> 00:14:00.880 align:middle line:90%
Very much.

00:14:00.880 --> 00:14:04.230 align:middle line:90%
[APPLAUSE]

00:14:04.230 --> 00:14:28.000 align:middle line:90%