I'm going to start by reading a poem from my book.
This is called "Perspectives."
Then I'll be reading new work after that.
"Perspectives."
"One night a blunt wind scoured my eyes for hours.
I sell Christmas seals, ringing doorbells,
holding up gold stamps with egg white angels trumpeting
askew in the trees.
It was heaven.
A gaudy fishbowl were the saints mooned forever at a clay child,
a bird for $0.50.
The houses have crystallized in the snow turned blue
with Christmas lights strung in ersatz steeples
over the front yard creche where a dog moved wolf-like.
Years later, I found a curled seal
in a bureau crack, the angels still shining at resurrection.
I burned it to delicate ash on the sidewalk,
watching an ant clamber furiously
from the smoke with a huge breadcrumb lodged
in his black jaw and thought, how well I understand.
Somehow today squinting at a file of ants on a leaf,
they're inscrutable as cuneiform.
I believed death was simply bone against bone,
thoughtlessness, the way a crushed aunt dries
and blows through the grass without memory or direction.
What were angels but wishes.
Now their pellucid wings loom in my dreams.
I see the real meaning of trumpets
and that fierce gift, not death, but the tumult of perception."