Little Shelford, May 24, the evening.
"The color of coffee, highwire, desire, soft glint
of the English twilight, had again this morning
the experience of going out dazed
from riding to the bus stop in a mild rain
and standing against the chalky moss-veined stone wall.
Three girls came by on bicycles, and they
spoke in high chirping voices.
And I thought, that's right.
I'm in England.
Orange flower in a contemporary design on the coffee cup,
lace under the typewriter, patient, intricate, medieval.
The Pre-Raphaelites thought the Middle Ages were very sexy.
And we read no more of that day, pages
of a book turning in the wind, green lawn blurry
in the background, gourd like belly of a lute,
delicate feet raised.
Feet of the girl being fucked in the white dunes at Big Sur.
Such a comic sweetness and the spasms of her toes.
And I looked away feeling both shy and voyeuristic,
would have liked to climb the dune and watch,
but watched brown pelicans hovering and flap, flap,
beating heavily along the coast under a thrust of tidal rock.
Anemones, small green crabs, as if my not looking
conferred a blessing.
Jeffers thought the pelicans looked like bombers, B-29,
Second World War, the first layer of childhood
and romantic and movies long afterwards.
Despite the wars, we got Korea, Vietnam.
Korea associated in my mind with the beginnings of television.
Gray, the Lone Ranger in my aunt's house in Green Beret
and the wonderful oak forest below her house.
We walked in silvery glint of the oak trees.
My aunt, so ridiculous, and we were so dependent on her
at scary times for affection, felt such craven gratitude
for her bourgeois ideas.
You must remember high-pitched voice
that look of utter sincerity whereby a child knows
instinctively that he will be told
something important and untrue.
You must remember that it's not your mother's fault.
It's a terrible illness, and she can't help it.
Sanitarium, the word mixed in my mind
with crematorium so that I actually
believed for the first time that my mother had been
taken away and burned alive.
And my aunt's quavering voice, the condescending way
she talked about my mother and remembered it
later at Stanford.
As the tone of women in 19th century novels
who did sewing for the deserving poor.
But I remember also a guileless and absolute gratitude,
children being terrific opportunists or fatalists
or whatever, as she let us watch the masked man
and his faithful Indian companion
ride across the screen in a blur of the first blue-gray snow
to the sound of the William Tell Overture
and set out for us gruesomely decorative hard candies
in a cut glass bowl."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]