And watch your bathtub early in the morning.
OK, I want to read a poem called "Crazy Love," which
is the title poem of this book.
And I read this in Tennessee last year
when the book just came out, and I prefaced it
with something I probably shouldn't have prefaced it
with.
I said, I didn't understand what the poem meant.
And, so, a guy got up after the reading, and he said,
I know what your poem means.
It means you haven't yet found God.
And I-- I go, "uh-oh."
never going to do that again.
"Crazy love."
"Chickadees are most themselves bravest of birds,
Blackfeet say, with the heart of a grizzly
booming inside their thin ribs.
My grandmother said, watch out for small women--
the violin of joy that flexes inside their wrists,
their talent for making themselves huge as Amazons.
Like all adolescents, I promised myself happiness,
an adoring mate.
Got clay guitars instead.
Thunder reigned and lips tore from the 1,000 masks
and dreams.
Lovers slipped away like silk lilies lying to the wind.
And I dreamed I watched a dwarf build an intricate toothpick
pagoda at the end of a pier jutting
over the forehead of a black tossing sea.
The sky was the color of wet grapes.
He slipped between his teeth.
Just as the dwarf set the pagoda on fire,
blazing the pier to my feet.
Two giant turtles swam up, and carried me on their backs
across burning tide.
On the opposite shore, a chickadee
buzzed, carrying the wrist bones of a dwarf in its beak.
And I knew love couldn't be far behind those small Amazon
wings."
See, I think that guy was wrong.
I think this poem does find God.