[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much, indeed.
It's a great honor for me to be here,
particularly on a day when there's
a bit of snow in Tucson, makes me feel, when Snow was general
[INAUDIBLE] over Tuscon.
Makes me feel very much at home.
I'm going to read for about 15 minutes or so.
I'm going to read from, right the way through these eight
books that Allison mentioned in her wonderfully
generous introduction.
I'm going to read a few new poems on [INAUDIBLE]..
And I begin with a new one.
In fact, the one that's there and then a little brochure
for the Poetry Center.
And this is a poem set in New Jersey, where I live
for the most part these days.
In a house built-- well, part of it
was built in 1750 or thereabouts.
Part of it in 1810 or 20.
And in New Jersey, anyhow, I'm not
sure about this part of the world, when we're
building a house then they often used horsehair in the plaster
to give it a little bit of, well, what?
Body.
And in some-- I use the word body there in a strange way.
Being inside this house I've thought once or twice
is a little bit like being inside the body of a horse,
though that doesn't really quite come into this poem,
so I'm not sure why I mention it.
[LAUGHTER]
But it's certainly-- it's a poem about looking out
through a hole in a wall of this house.
But looking, seeing, smelling, the various senses.
The house overlooks a canal built in the 1830s
by thousands of Irishmen, many of whom
died in the process of building it.
And they get a mention along the way.
And this poem is a strange little refrain.
On the edge, perhaps, between sense and nonsense.
I'm sure going over the edge once or twice.
So "The Loaf."
When I put my finger to the hole they've cut for a dimmer
switch, in a wall of plaster stiffened with horsehair,
it seems I've scratched a two-hundred-year-old itch,
with a pink and a pink and a pinkie-pick.
When I put my ear to the hole, I'm
suddenly aware of spades and shovels turning up
the gain all the way from Raritan to the Delaware,
with a clink and a clink and a clinky-click.
When I put my nose to the hole, I
smell the floodplain of the canal after a hurricane,
and the spots of green grass where thousands of Irish
have lain, with a stink and a stink and a stinky-stink.
When I put my eye to the hole, I see one holding horse dung
to the rain, in the hope, indeed, indeed,
of washing out a few whole ears of grain, with a wink
and a wink and a winkie-wink.
And when I do at last succeed in putting my mouth
to the horsehair-fringed niche, I
can test the small loaf of bread he baked from that whole seed,
with a link and a link, and a linky-lick.
People come into this house, and there's
a painting on one of the walls.
And they say, who on Earth is that?
It's a painting of a very stern woman whose eyes seem
to follow one around the room.
Very, very frightening creature.
And we, of course, say that is the ancestor.
"The Ancestor."
The great-grandmother who bears down on us,
as if beholding the moat in our eye
from a nineteenth-century Hungarian portrait
on our library wall is no relation.
Not even remote.
The straw-hatted man in a daguerreotype.
Though he and I may share the trait of putting two fingers
to the little carbuncle on our right chin,
is no more of my blood than I am consanguineous with Cromwell.
Our Webster's is inscribed "Philip.
Best uncle."
Our napkins bear an unfamiliar monogram.
Yet how familiar all become.
Shaving mug, gymkhana rosette, five
charms from a charm bracelet--
all those heirlooms to which we're now the heirs
are at once more presentable and more present than our own.
This great-grandmother with folded arms
who lurches and looms across the library
may not be so unreasoning in her reprimand.
Let me go back and read a few poems
set in the area where I was brought up.
And this, in fact, I'll read the poems
from which the titles of these books came along the way.
And this first one, which I wrote when I was a teenager,
I suppose was influenced by Robert Frost in a way
that I wasn't quite conscious of, I think, I was writing it.
A poem of his called "Tree At My Window," which
the one which ends up with your head being so full
of your ardor, with inner weather.
So that part of that lurking about there.
Also, an Irish triad, one of those three,
you know, a series of three witty sayings in Gaelic.
It went [SPEAKING GAELIC] It had a little internal rhyme.
Two thirds of sickness happens at night.
Two thirds of wind happens around trees.
The third bit of it I could never remember.
[LAUGHTER] [INAUDIBLE]
You only remember two thirds [INAUDIBLE]..
[LAUGHTER]
"Wind and Tree."
In the way that most of the wind happens where there are trees,
most of the world is centered about ourselves.
Often where the wind has gathered the trees together
and together, one tree will take another in her arms and hold.
Their branches that are grinding madly together and together,
it is no real fire.
They are breaking each other.
Often I think I should be like the single tree,
going nowhere, since my own arm could not and would not
break the other.
Yet by my broken bones, I tell new whether.
Here are a few poems.
I mentioned Frost.
These are a few poems set on the Homer Noble Farm, which
was the farm that Frost lived on,
of course, between 1939 and the end of his life, where
he spent the summers.
I do a little teaching for the Bread Loaf school of English,
which is connected to Middlebury College.
One of the perks is to get to live on the Homer Noble Farm
for six or seven weeks in the summer, which
for me is a great perk, because I'm just so fond of Frost.
So these are a few little snapshot haiku-like.
I was-- I met somebody, who was it,
the other day in New York, the president of the Haiku
Society of America.
And I was talking about these haiku.
And I was saying, unfortunately, I said, mine rhyme.
[LAUGHTER]
Anyway, I read them nonetheless.
They're a little--
I was reminded of someone today, actually had the great pleasure
to go out with Adam Childs to the Museum of the Desert,
or the Desert Museum.
Had a great time out there.
Little hummingbirds and all, shrugging their,
you know, gathered into themselves.
So these are little snapshots, mostly of the fauna
there in Vermont.
And I think you'll recognize many of them
in this part of the world.
It's called "News Headlines from the Homer Noble Farm."
I've been thinking actually, and it should perhaps
be called "Deep Thoughts."
Some of them.
[LAUGHTER]
Anyway, that number.
I'm not going to read them.
I'm not going to give you the numbers.
But this is number one.
That case-hardened cop.
A bull moose in a bog hole brought him to a stop.
From his grassy knoll, he has you
in his crosshairs, the accomplice mole.
Here's a deep one.
This sword once a share.
This forest a fresh-faced farm.
This stone once a stair.
The birch crooks her arm, as if somewhat more
inclined to welcome the swarm.
He has, you will find, two modes only, the chipmunk--
fast forward, rewind.
The smell, like a skunk, of coffee about to perk.
Thelonious Monk.
They're the poker work of some sort of woodpecker,
these holes and the bark.
My new fact checker claims that pilus means "pestle."
My old fact checker.
This poem appeared in The New Yorker.
And you can imagine how they went to town on that.
The Rose and Thistle.
Where the hummingbird drops in to whet his whistle.
Behind the wood bin a garter snake
snaps itself, showing us some skin.
[LAUGHTER]
Like most bits of delf, the turtle's seen at his bed--
at its best on one's neighbor's shelf.
Riding two abreast on their stripped-down souped-up bikes,
bears in leather vests.
[LAUGHTER]
I discovered as I was writing this
that the shrike is a bird, which many of you will know,
as many of you will know, impales
its victims on its beak.
So the middle line of this is a great tabloid headline.
The eye shaded shrike.
BIRD BODIES BURIED IN BOG'S a headline he'll spike.
Steady, like a log, riding a sawmill's
spillway, the steady coydog.
The cornet he plays was Bolden's, then Beiderbecke's,
this lonesome blue jay.
Some fresh auto wreck.
Slumped over a horn.
Sump pool.
The frog's neck-braced neck.
Brillo pads?
Steel wool?
The regurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgitations,
what, of a long-eared owl?
The jet with the jot.
The drive-in screen with the sky.
The blood with the blot.
How it all seems to vie, not just my sleeping
laptop with the first firefly.
Here's the title poem of the second book I did,
and it began with a documentary film, some sort of footage
from Korea.
It's about mules.
Should they not have the best of both worlds?
Her feet of clay gave the lie to the star
burned in our mare's brow.
Would Parsons' jackass not rest more assured that cross
wrenched from his shoulders?
We had loosed them into one field.
I watched Sam Parsons and my quick father tense
for the punch below their belts, for what was
neither one thing or the other.
It was as though they had shuddered
to think of their gaunt, sexless foal, dropped tonight
in the cowshed.
We might yet claim that it sprang from earth,
were it not for the afterbirth trailed like some fine, silk
parachute, that we would know from what heights it fell.
And it seemed for a long time that if one was even dreaming,
you know, even remotely hoping to write a poem in Ireland,
that poem almost certainly had to do with pig killing.
[LAUGHTER]
There's a whole genre of stuff, I was about to say a subgenre.
But I think it's a genre.
[LAUGHTER]
Often.
But as Alison was saying in her introduction,
you have to break the mold.
So this is a poem about pig gelding.
[LAUGHTER]
Ned Skinner was a 'barbaric yawp', if you took Aunt Sarah
at her word.
He would step over the mountain of a summer afternoon
to dress a litter of pigs on my uncle's farm.
And Sarah would keep me in, taking me on her lap
till it was over.
Ned Skinner wiped his knife and rinsed his hands
in the barrel at the doorstep.
He winked and gripped my arm.
'It doesn't hurt, not so's you'd notice,
and God never slams one door, but another is lying open.
Them same pigs can see the wind.'
My uncle had given him five shillings.
Ned Skinner came back while my uncle was in the fields.
"Sarah,' he was calling, "Sarah.
You weren't so shy in our young day.
You remember yon time in Archer's loft?'
His face blazed at the scullery window.
"Remember?
When the hay was won.'
Aunt Sarah had the door on the snib.
"That's no kind of talk to be coming over.
Now go you home.'
Silence.
Then a wheeze.
We heard the whiskey-jug tinkle, his boots diminish in the yard.
Aunt Sarah put on a fresh apron.
It's a newish poem, and it has to do--
it mentions along the way AEW Mason's novel, made
into a film at least once, called The Four Feathers.
In fact, I think his book was remade quite recently,
some star of the moment in it.
[INAUDIBLE] Do you know it?
I don't know, was it made recently or remade?
I think it was.
I think I saw it.
I think it went straight to video.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't even know why they bother
remaking these things, because it was such a great movie
to begin with.
Anyway, anyway, anyway.
The Four Feathers, about Harry Faversham.
And Harry is given a feather by four of his--
well, three of his army, British army colleagues,
and one from his beloved, accusing him of cowardice.
And in the course of the novel cum film,
the feathers are returned to him.
He saves their lives serially, as it were, and gives
the each feather back in turn.
So that's mentioned along the way.
I saw this film on a Saturday night
on television when I was a kid.
And the next morning, I set--
I went out and built myself--
well, I should say that the film is
full of great wonderful footage of tribes persons from North
Africa riding around on camels.
And I went out on Sunday morning and built
myself a camel in the backyard.
[LAUGHTER]
I also mentioned along the way two hotels in Las Vegas.
It's a sustainer, for those of you
with an interest in these things.
What else should I mention?
Nothing.
"The Turn."
In those days when the sands might shift at any moment, when
his mother might at any moment lay into him,
he thought nothing of getting up halfway
through a story about the Sahara, the one
about the tribesmen following the scent of water
to a waterhole, thought nothing of getting up and going out
while he was still halfway through a sentence,
going out and taking a turn about the house,
sometimes not bothering to return for an hour, two hours,
a week, a year perhaps, perhaps not until the sands of time
had run out, not until his favorite guinea
hen had brought herself to lay a double-yoked egg,
or the double scent of the sand-pile and the dunghill made
a Sahara of the yard, through which Ned Skinner had moaned,
'Saahaara, Saahaara.'
The yard in which after seeing The Four Feathers,
he'd taken it upon himself to turn
a stack of pear boxes still redolent of the scent of pears
into a bolster-humped camel that carried him
across the endless sands to where
Harry Faversham and himself lay in wait in a gully for the last
of those out-and-out cowards and scoundrels,
the yard in which he'd not only learned
to spout most, if not all, of the main languages
of the Sahara, but had such a grasp of the lay of the land,
every twist and turn of the ergs and regs which
looked for all the world like featureless sands,
had so mastered following the scent of water to a waterhole,
shielding his eyes from the hen house's fluorescent strip
of light, under which he could make out a couple making out
in a featureless room in the old Sands, or a featureless room
in the Sahara.
A light by which he could make out every twist
and turn in what would have seemed to a layperson
a featureless hotel room, a room which offered him
an instant replay of the old bolster
and pear-box scent rising from the camel under him,
a scent powerful enough to turn him around, reminding him
that he'd already been out for an hour,
two hours, a week, a year, perhaps,
Having him turn back through the Sahara
in which so many and perished, back through the sands on which
lay the bones of thousands of his countrymen,
through the sand pile that was not
at all reminiscent of the Sahara,
having him turn back inside to pick up his own sentence,
to hear himself out.
Title for the next book, which came out in 1980.
It's a little snapshot, again, of a couple
of horses standing in a field, a half-plowed field attached
to a ply.
Why Brownlee left, and where he went is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content--
[DOOR OPENS]
I'm not sure if he's coming or going.
[LAUGHTER]
Why Brownlee left, and where he went, is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content, it was him.
Two acres of barley, one of potatoes,
four bullocks, a milker, a slated farmhouse.
He was last seen going out to plough on a March morning,
bright and early.
By noon, Brownlee was famous.
They had found all abandoned, with the last rig
unbroken, his pair of black horses, like man and wife,
shifting their weight from foot to foot,
and gazing into the future.
Let me read a little poem set in the school that I went to,
the primary school, grade school.
My mother was one of the teachers in it,
which meant that I was required to go to school.
But there were people around who seemed to have
made other arrangements.
[LAUGHTER]
This is a poem about one of them, about his life.
Excuse me.
About his life then, and more recently.
And Joseph Mary Plunkett, whom I mentioned here,
was an Irish poet, if you recall,
who took part in the 1916 rising in Dublin,
and was shot for his part in it.
So the poem is an Irish word, a Gaelic word as a title.
"Anseo."
When the master was calling the roll
at the primary school in Collegelands,
you were meant to call back Anseo, and raise your hand
as your name occurred.
Anseo meaning here, here and now, all present and correct,
was the first word of Irish I spoke.
The last name on the ledger belonged to Joseph Mary
Plunkett Ward, and was followed, as often as not, by silence,
knowing looks, a nod and a wink, the Master's droll,
'and where's our little Ward-of-court?'
I remember the first time he came back,
the Master had sent him out along the hedges
to weigh up for himself, and cut a stick with which he
would be beaten.
After a while, nothing was spoken.
He would arrive as a matter, of course,
with an ash-plant, a sally-rod, or finally, the hazel-wand he
had whittled down to a whip-lash, its twist
of red and yellow lacquers sanded and polished,
and altogether so delicately wrought that he had
engraved his initials on it.
I last met Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward in a pub
just over the Irish border.
He was living in the open, in a secret camp on the other side
of the mountain.
He was fighting for Ireland, making things happen.
And he told me, Joe Ward, of how he had risen through the ranks
to Quartermaster, Commandant, how every morning at parade
his volunteers would call back Anseo, and raise their hands
as their names occurred.
Seemed for a long time every Sunday
afternoon, my parents had organized
a little outing, a little trip.
And usually, it was to see a graveyard somewhere
in the vicinity.
Graveyard visiting was a very popular pastime.
And I've just forgotten for the moment
what this poem is called.
[INAUDIBLE]
And for a long time, we went on these trips,
and we depended for a ride on one particular uncle.
And then, we got our own car, and I
was reminded of this today as we encountered
a roundabout somewhere in Tucson, a rotary or traffic
circle.
The first trip we took in this car was to visit the first--
what term do you use here?
Traffic roundabout?
No, traffic circle.
Traffic circle.
The first traffic circle in Ireland, basically.
Certainly in Northern Ireland.
We'd heard all kinds of reports about it, of course,
because people from the vicinity had been working on it.
And you know, had been explaining the principle,
I suppose.
[LAUGHTER]
Insofar as it's graspable.
Well, we had--
[LAUGHTER]
--we did grasp it, but nothing would do, of course,
until we experienced it, which we did on the first trip
in this car.
This is a little poem about that.
Or at least it mentions that, it alludes to that.
I mentioned along the way here the sash,
the sash my father wore, which is an orange song.
And the B-Specials who were the second division of the Royal
Ulster Constabulary, disbanded in the early 1970s,
for, well, what was generally accepted
to be bad behavior, a tendency towards bad behavior.
[LAUGHTER]
So "The Sightseers."
My father and mother, my brother and sister and I,
with Uncle Pat, are dour best-loved Uncle,
had set out that Sunday afternoon in July in his broken
down Ford, not to visit some graveyard--
one died of shingles, one of fever,
another's knees turned to jelly--
but the brand new roundabout at Ballygawley,
the first in mid-Ulster.
Uncle Pat was telling us how the B-Specials had stopped him
one night somewhere near Ballygawley,
and smashed his bicycle, and made him sing the Sash,
and curse the Pope of Rome.
They held a pistol so hard against his forehead
there was still the mark of an O when he got home.
Title poem the next book comes from a word
we used in our house for the hot water bottle.
I'm sure sales of hot water bottles will be up in Tucson
today.
[LAUGHTER]
Now, this word is Quoof, which I spell Q-U-O-O-F. Quoof.
Now, after--
[LAUGHTER]
For a long time, I wondered if this
might be a corruption of an Elizabethan word
for a hot water bottle, because there
are, of course, such fossilizations in Northern
Ireland from the Elizabethan plantation.
Perhaps not.
Then I wondered if it might be fossilization
of an old Gaelic word for a hot water bottle.
Also perhaps not.
A while after I'd written it, I'd
asked my father about this word, and he told me
that the first time he'd heard it was from us, the kids.
[LAUGHTER]
So I just assumed it had been handed down
from generation to generation.
So anyway, "Quoof."
I think this is a poem very much of its time,
and you have to forgive me for that.
How often have I carried our family word for the hot water
bottle to a strange bed, as my father would juggle
a red-hot-half-brick in an old sock to his childhood settle.
I have taken it into so many lovely heads,
or laid it between us like a sword.
A hotel room in New York City with a girl who spoke hardly
any English, my hand on her breast,
like the smoldering one-off spoor of the yeti,
or some other shy beast that is yet to enter the language.
Do you have Bigfoot in these parts?
[LAUGHTER]
Do you?
No, a bit further north into the Rockies.
Texas.
I'm sorry.
Please forgive me.
That was not meant to be a slur.
[LAUGHTER]
It's only that the next poem is called "Bigfoot."
I hadn't planned to read it at all, but now I am.
"Bigfoot."
Comes, if he comes at all, among sumach and birches,
stops halfway across the clearing.
Wood-smoke, the cabin where you mourn your wife,
where, darkening the tiny window,
is the fur coat you promised her when
she was twenty or twenty-one, you forget.
This poem called "Meeting The British."
It's set in the area just northwest of Detroit
in the 1760s, when, if you recall,
there was a spot of trouble with the locals.
And this is a poem spoken by the spirit of one of the Ottawa.
"Meeting The British."
We met the British in the dead of winter.
The sky was lavender and the snow lavender blue.
I could hear far below the sound of two streams coming together.
Both were frozen over.
And no less strange, myself calling out in French
across that forest clearing.
Neither General Jeffrey Amherst nor Colonel Henry Bouquet
could stomach our willow-tobacco.
As for the unusual scent when the Colonel shook out
his handkerchief, C-est la lavande, une fleur mauve,
comme le ciel.
They gave us six fishhooks, and two blankets
embroidered with smallpox.
Enough of that.
This is a poem about a hare I met once when I was a kid.
I was brought up in an area of Ireland
where on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas Day,
there was always a big hunt, a hunt off the hare.
And almost everyone in the vicinity
kept a dog of some description, some class of a Beagle
or Bagle, as they pronounce it there.
And this is a little poem about that,
about Boxing Day and the Bagels.
"Beagels."
That Boxing Day morning, I would hear the familiar far-off gowls
and guilders over Keenaghan and Aughanlig,
of a pack of beagles, old dogs disinclined
to chase a car suddenly quite unlike themselves,
pups coming helter skelter across the plowlands,
with all the chutzpah of veterans
of the trenches, their slate-grays, cinnamons,
liver-browns, lemons, rusts, and violets
turning and twisting unseen across the fields.
Their gowls and gulders turning and twisting
after the twists and turns of the great hare who had just
now sauntered into the yard where I stood on tiptoes,
astride my new Raleigh cycle.
His demeanor somewhat louche, somewhat
lackadaisical under the circumstances.
What with him standing on tiptoes as if to mimic me,
standing almost as tall as I, looking
as if he might for a moment put himself in my place,
thinking better off it, sloping off behind the lorry bend.
Moving quickly along.
Oh, I think I'll drop a couple of things from that plan,
since we're moving.
Let me read you three little poems about my daughter.
This first one has to do with her in the womb.
It's a poem about a sonogram, the sound picture of the child
there in the womb, as you know, at 14 or 16
weeks into the process.
I mention here Spiddal, the town, little village in Galway.
Corruption of ospideal, hospital.
Hospital.
So the sex of the child not entirely clear at the end here.
"The Sonogram."
Only a few weeks ago, the sonogram of Jean's womb
resembled nothing so much as a satellite map of Ireland.
Now the image is so well-defined,
we can make out not only a hand but a thumb.
On the road to Spiddal, a woman hitching a ride,
at gladiator in his net, passing judgment on the crowd.
We discovered just before she was
born that rather than coming headfirst into the world,
she was putting her foot down.
She was a footling breech.
And the minute I heard this term,
I felt a little poem coming on.
[LAUGHTER]
I think I may have attacked her perhaps a little too earnestly,
because in the second line, I use the word groyne,
G-R-O-Y-N-E, which of course is the breakwater type of thing
jutting out into the ocean.
It seemed like a terrific idea at the time.
But anyway, the child was born by cesarean section, C-E-S-A-R,
as it spelled in this part of the world.
"Footling."
This I don't believe.
Rather than take a header off the groyne
and into the ground swell, yea verily,
the ground swell of life, she shows
instead her utter disregard--
part diffidence, but mostly scorn--
for what lies behind the great sea-wall,
and what knocks away at the great sea-cliff.
Though she's been in training all spring and summer,
and swathed herself in fat and Saran-wrap,
like an old time Channel swimmer,
she's now got cold feet and turned in on herself,
the phantom 'a' in Cesarian.
"The Birth."
Seven o'clock.
The seventh day of the seventh month of the year.
No sooner have I got myself up in lime-green scrubs,
a sterile cap and mask, and taken my place at the head
of the table, than the windless women ply their shears
and gralloch-grub for a footling foot, then,
warming to their task, haul into the inestimable realm
of apple-blossoms and chanterelles and damsons
and eel-spears and foxes and the general hubbub of inkies
and jennets and Kickapoos with their lemniscs,
or peekaboo-quiffs of Russian sable,
and tallow-unctuous vernix, into the realm of the widgeon--
the whew or yellow-poll, not the zuizin.
Dorothy Aoife Korelitz Muldoon.
I watch through floods of tears as they
give her a quick rub-a-dub and whisk her off to the nursery,
then check their staple-guns for staples.
And just two more.
This one is about that same child a little bit
down the road.
Getting there, getting there, I'm getting there.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
What horrible to watch.
[LAUGHTER]
Worse to do.
Xerxes, Xerxes, Xerxes, and I mention here the Persian King,
rather than the other guy.
[LAUGHTER]
So this little poem goes from 0 to 60 and just--
it's a poem about a little tick.
"The Throwback."
Even I can't help but notice, my sweet,
but when you tuck your chin into your chest,
as if folding a sheet while holding
a clothespin between your teeth, or when, a small detail,
you put your hands like so on your little potbelly,
and twiddle your thumbs like so, it's
as if you're a throwback to the grandmother you never met,
the mother whom I sight in this reddish patch of psoriasis
behind your ear, that might suddenly flare up
into the helmet she wore when she stood firm against Xerxes.
I'll end with a little marital love poem.
It takes its title "Long Finish" from one of those phrases,
beloved of wine label--
wine bottle label writers.
"Long Finish."
I mentioned along the way a known play Matsukaze,
or Pining Wind.
I mentioned some of the things happening
in Ireland along the way.
It's a ballad or a double ballad, for what it's worth.
Traditionally, the ballad, the envoy of the ballad
began with the word Prince, where, if you recall,
the troubadour addressed his patron.
And there's a little play on that here.
Accutane.
Accutane is a prescription medicine.
I hear a funny noise?
That's from the speaker.
It's from the speaker.
Oh.
[LAUGHTER]
Accutane is a drug for some forms of skin trouble.
So may I say what a pleasure it is to have been here.
Thank you so much for inviting me
and I look forward to talking with you after this.
So "Long Finish."
Not too long, I hope.
[LAUGHTER]
Ten years since we were married, since we
stood under a chuppah of pine boughs
in the middle of a little pinewood
and exchanged our wedding vows.
Save me good, good though, a piece of marchpane,
while I fill your glass with Simi Chardonnay,
as high as decency allows, and then some.
Bear with me now, as I myself must
bear the scrutiny of a bottle of wine
that boasts of hints plum and pear, its muscadine tempered
by an oak backbone.
I myself have designs on the willow-boss
of your breast, on all your waist confines,
between longing and loss.
The wonder is that we somehow have withstood the soars
and slumps in the Dow, of ten years of marriage
and parenthood, its summits and its sloughs,
that we've somehow managed to withstand
an almond-blossomy five years of bitter rapture, five
of blissful rows, and then some, if we
count the one or two to spare when we've been firmly
on cloud nine.
Even though, as you turn away from me with your one
bare shoulder, the veer of your neckline, I glimpse the all
but cleared up eczema patch on your spine,
and it brings to mind not the Schloss that stands,
transitory, tra la, Triestine, between longing and loss,
but a crude hip trench in a field,
covered with pine bones, in which
two men in masks and hoods who have themselves taken
vows wait for a farmer to break a bale for his cows
before opening fire with semi-automatics,
cutting him off slightly above the eyebrows, and then some.
It brings to mind another, driving out
to care for six white-faced kine,
finishing on heather and mountain air, another who'll
shortly divine the precise whereabouts of a landmine
on the road between Beragh and Six Mile Cross, who'll shortly
know what it is to have breasted the line between longing
and loss.
Such forbearance in the face of vicissitude
also brings to mind the little there there's
a now, nows of two sisters whose sleeves are imbued
with the constant douse and souse of salt water
through their salt house in Matsukaze or Pining Wind
by Zeami.
The salt house, through which the wind soughs and soughs,
and then some of the wind's little now,
nows and there, theres seem to intertwine
with those of pining wind and autumn
rain, who must forebear the dolor of their lives of boiling
down brine.
For the double meaning of pine is much the same in Japanese
as English, coming across both in the sense of tree,
and the sense we assign between longing and loss.
As when the ghost of Yukihira, the poet-courtier
who wooed both sisters appears as a ghostly pine,
pining among pine boughs.
Barely have Autumn Rain and Pining Wind
renewed their vines, when you turn back toward me,
and your blouse, while it covers the all
but cleared up patch of eczema, forms as low
as decency allows, and then some.
Princess of Accutane, lets no more
try to refine the pure drop from the dross
than distinguish good thou, between mine and thine,
between longing and loss, but rouse ourselves each dawn, here
on the shore of Suma, with such force and fervor
as spouses may yet espouse, and then some.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]