This last poem is--
takes about 10 minutes, I think.
It's called "Songs to Survive the Summer."
It's written in a series of fragments
and also written out of the impulse
to let the poem wander and accumulate
and find its own way.
So it moves through some disparate material.
I've always wanted to be Chekhov,
so I wrote a Chekhov short story and put it in the poem.
[LAUGHTER]
There's-- let's see, the only references in it that might be
a trouble are-- you have loquats in Tucson, the orange--
the little yellow fruit.
They're not Steller's Jays.
One of the Blue Jays of California
is a Black-headed Jay named for a botanist.
Steller Jay-- named--
Wilhelm Steller.
And he shows up in this poem.
It wanders.
The occasion of it was--
my daughter's death fears.
She was at that age when she gets afraid about death.
And she was asking me questions about it.
I responded by getting more panicky about it than she was.
[LAUGHTER]
Tried to do this.
So long as to survive the summer,
it has an epigraph from the a funeral
at the end of The Brothers Karamazov when one of the boys
turns to Alyosha and says, it's funny, isn't it, Karamazov?
All this grief, and pancakes afterwards.
[LAUGHTER]
"These are the dog days unvaried, except by accident.
Mist rising from soaked lawns, gone world, everything rises
and dissolves in air.
Whatever it is would clear the air, dissolves in air
and the knot of days unties invisibly like a shoelace.
The gray-eyed child who said to my child, let's
play in my yard.
It's OK.
My mother's dead.
Under the loquat tree, it's almost a song,
the echo of a song.
On the bat's back, I fly merrily towards summer.
Or at high noon in the outfield clover
guzzling Orange Crush, time endless examining a wooden coin
I'd carried all through summer without knowing.
The coin was grandpa's joke, carved from live oak,
Indian side and Buffalo side.
His eyes lustered with a mirth so deep and rich,
he never laughed as if it were a cosmic secret that we shared.
I never understood.
It married in my mind with summer.
Don't take any wooden nickels, kid.
And gave me one under the loquat tree.
The squalor of mind is formlessness, informis,
the Romans said of ugliness.
It has no form.
A man's misery, bleached skies, the war
between desire and dailiness.
I thought this morning of Wallace Stevens walking equably
to work and of a morning to Julys ago on Chestnut Ridge,
wandering down the hill when one rusty elm
leaf earth-skin peeling wafted by me on the wind.
My body groaned toward fall.
And preternaturally a heron lifted from the pond.
I even thought I heard the ruffle of the wings 300 yards
below me rising from the reeds.
Death is the mother of beauty.
And that clean-shaven man smelling of lotion
lint-free walking toward his work of pure exclusive music
in his mind.
The mother of the neighbor child was 31, died,
at Sunday breakfast, of a swelling in the throat.
On a toy loom, she taught my daughter how to weave.
My daughter was her friend and now she cannot sleep
for nighttime sirens, sure that every whale is someone dead
Should I whisper in her ear, death is the mother of beauty?
Wooden nickels, kid?
It's all in shapeliness, give your fears a shape?
In fact, we hide together in her books.
Prairie farms, the heron knows the way, old country songs,
herbal magic, recipes for soup, tales of spindly orphan girls
who find the golden key, the darkness at the center
of the leafy wood.
And when she finally sleeps, I try out Chekhov's tenderness
to see what it can save.
Maryushka, the beekeeper's widow, though three years mad,
writes daily letters to her son.
Semyon transcribes them.
The pages are smudged by his hands,
stained with the dregs of tea.
'My dearest Vanushka, Sofia Agrippina's ill again.
The master asks for you.
Wood is dear.
The cold is early.
Poor Sofia Agrippina, the foreign doctor gave her salts,
but Semyon says her icon candle guttered St. John's Eve.
I am afraid, Vanya.
When she's ill, the master likes to have your sister flogged.
She means no harm.
The rye is gray this time of year.
When it is bad, Vanya, I go into the night,
and the night eats me.'
The haiku comes in shapes with the virtue of brevity.
What a strange thing, Isa says, to be
alive beneath plum blossoms?
The Black-headed Steller's Jay is
squawking in our plum, thief!
Thief!
A hard, indifferent bird, he'd snatch your life.
[PAPER RUSTLES]
The love of books is for children
who glimpse in them a life to come,
but I have come to that life and feel
uneasy with the love of books.
This is my life, time islanded in poems of dwindled time.
There is no other world.
But I have seen it twice.
In the Palo Alto marsh, sea birds rose in early light
and took me with them.
Another time, dreaming river birds
lifted me swans, small angelic terns,
and an old woman in a shawl dying
by a dying lake whose life raised men from the dead
in another country.
Thick nights, and nothing lets us rest.
In the heat of mid-july, our lust is nothing.
We swell and thicken.
Slippery, purgatorial, our sexes will not give us up.
Exhausted after hours and not undone,
we crave cold marrow from the tiny bones
that moonlight scatters on our skin.
Always morning arrives, the stunned days, faceless,
droning in the juice of rotten quince, the flies, the heat.
Tears, silence.
The edified generations eat me, Maryushka.
I tell them pain is form and almost persuade myself
they are not listening.
Why should they?
Who cannot save me any more than I,
weeping over Great Russian Short Stories in summer,
under the fattened figs, saved you.
Besides, it is winter there in the future.
They're trying out a new recipe for onion soup.
Use a heavy-bottomed three- or four-quart pan.
Thinly slice six large yellow onions and sauté in olive oil
and butter until limp.
Pour in beef broth.
Simmer 30 minutes.
Add red port and bake for half an hour.
Then sprinkle half a cup of diced Gruyere
and cover with an even layer of toasted bread
and shredded Samsoe.
Dribble melted butter on the top and bake
until the cheese has bubbled gold.
Surround yourself with friends, huddle in a warm place.
Ladle.
Eat.
Weave and cry.
Child, every other siren is a death,
the rest are for speeding.
Look, how comically the jay's black head
emerges from the swath of copper leaves.
Half the terror is the fact that in our time speed saves us,
a whine we've traded for the hopeless patients
of the village bell which tolled in threes--
weave and cry and weave.
Wilhelm Steller, form's hero made a healing broth.
He sailed with Bering and the crew despised him,
a mean impatient man born low enough to hate the lower class.
For two years, he'd connived to join the expedition
and put his name to all the beasts
and flowers of the north.
Now, Bering sick, the crew half-mad with scurvy,
no one would let him go ashore.
Panic, the maps were useless.
The summer weather almost gone.
He said, there are herbs that can cure you.
I can save you all.
I didn't give a damn about them, and they knew it.
For three years, he'd prepared.
Bering listened.
Asleep in his bunk, he'd seen death writing in the log.
On the island, while the sailors searched for water,
Steller gathered herbs and looking up he
saw the blue, black-crested bird, shrilling in a pine.
His mind flipped to Berlin, the library,
a glimpse he'd had an Autobahn, a blue-gray crested bird
exactly like the one that squawked at him.
Carolina jay, unlike any European bird,
he knew then where they were, America. we're saved.
No one believed him or, sick for home,
he didn't care what wilderness it was.
They set sail west.
Bearing died.
Steller's Jay, by which I found Alaska.
He wrote it in his book.
Saved no one.
Still walking in the redwoods, I hear the cry, thief, thief,
and think of Wilhelm Steller.
In my dream, we are all saved.
Camping on a Clement shore in early fall, a strange land,
we feast most delicately.
The swans are stuffed with grapes, the turkey with walnut
and chestnut and wild plum.
The river is our music-- unalaska--
to make bread from acorns, we leech the tannic acid
out-- this music, child, and more, much more!"
Let me try a final time.
"When I was just your age, the war was over and we moved.
An Okie family lived next door to our new house.
That summer Quincy Phipps was saved.
The next, his house became an unofficial Pentecostal church.
Summer nights-- hidden in the garden,
I ate figs, watched where the knobby limbs rose up
and flicked against the windows where they were.
Oh, Jesus.
Kissed and put to bed, I slipped from the window to the eaves
and nestled by the loquat tree.
The fruit was yellow-brown in daylight.
Under the moon, pale clusters hung like other moons,
oh, Jesus, and I picked them.
The fat juices dribbling down my chin.
I sucked and listened.
Men groaned.
The women sobbed and moaned, a long unsteady belly-deep
bewildering sound half pleasure and half pain that ended
sometimes in a croon, a broken song--
oh, Jesus, Jesus.
That is what I have to give you, child, stories, songs,
loquat seed, curiously shaped.
They are the frailest stay against our fears.
Death, in the sweetness, in the bitter
and the sour, death in the salt, your tears, this summer
ripe and overripe.
It is a taste in the mouth, child.
We are the song death takes its own time singing.
It calls us, as I call you, child, to come myself.
It is everything touched casually, lovers,
the images of saviors, books, the coins
I carried in my pocket till it shone.
It is all things lustered by the steady thoughtlessness
of human use."
Thank you.
Very much.
[APPLAUSE]