Thank you so much.
Thank you, Melissa.
It's so wonderful to be here, honored
to read with you, Laynie. And I want
to thank Gail, and Cybele, and Jamie, and Noah,
and Casa Libre and Chax has just on this beautiful chapbook
Matriot acts.
And I'm going to read first from "Manatee/Humanity" and then
a little bit of the new chapbook.
So very, very thrilled.
Thank you, Charles.
OK.
"Manatee/Humanity" is a long narrative hybrid poem,
began with an encounter at a aquarium, a sea park in Florida
with a manatee.
We stared into each other's eyes for a long time.
This manatee was female, very scarred, very old.
And I took a vow at that point to include manatee
in some kind of project.
So that was the origin.
And then I had been working with the structure of something
called the Kalachakra initiation,
which is a Tibetan Buddhist ceremony, ritual that
goes on for over three days.
And one is given instructions on dreams.
And you visualize a central deity that morphs
and this sort of thing.
So I decided to put the manatee in the place
of the deity in this ritual.
So I'm going to read from some parts of that.
There's a bit of an introduction called Undercurrent.
And I talk about these various structures for the poem.
The Jack Spicer's metaphor for the poet as the radio, the poet
is always on.
And what is the mind of manatee, was a question for this poem.
There seems something wonderfully
cognizant and primordial and on in the manatee spirit,
albeit at a less speedy frequency.
I remember William Burroughs sensing,
maybe riffing on something Jack Kerouac
had said that so many animals seem to be in Samadhi.
He thought this of his cats.
And he often said that he would prefer the company of lemurs
to that of humans.
And the lemur has a walk on in the poem as does the gray wolf.
And those of us who spend time in Colorado and other parts
out West have caught up with that struggle
for the life of the gray wolf.
Then I talk a little bit about the Buddhist view
that all life forms are interrelated
through their evolutionary history
and that animal and human minds are
both participants in reality.
We share the planet with many non-human temporalities.
Minds exist at the quantum level,
below the level of atoms, and subatomic particles.
As is said, minds never come from nothing or go to nothing.
I visualized the manatees realm and the shallow pool
as a shrine.
I perceived her less as a victim and more as a poetic deity.
And I felt she had the greater sympathy for me.
The manatee ostensibly has no use in the current world.
It's odd how creatures pacifistic transcendent
even go extinct as human realms of cruelty plunder and war
grind on."
So it's also a meditation on evolution
on what our humanity has some lore
of the manatee, the drunken sailors who
would see the manatee come up with seaweed
and think they were mermaids, so on.
So I'm going to jump in and start
a little bit at the beginning and work
through a bit of the poem.
And let's see.
Here's a little variant of Sir Patrick Spens
Out and starts the mermaid in with a fan into her hand.
Keep up your hearts, my merry men,
for you're near the dry land.
Out and spake Earl Patrick Graham with a saught
tear in his eye Now, sin we've seen the mermaid
in, dry land we'll never see.
And why did my brain incubate all those long years?
And why was it not using its genius to make fire?
And why not the making of which would stir neurons further,
and touching the texture of stone shaping hand to stone,
putting marks upon it further, and why not?
Why?
To further beauty in the making of art.
And why in sound to not making music all those long years,
sounds imitate what must have been the call of birds,
or of the body, an internal hum and chatter, and growl
and chit, and woo, woo, woo.
Parts of the body convening together as alluvial,
as sound together alluvial, alluvial in strange harmony
or discord, to or in hunger, need, desire,
fighting in all the discords of desire,
and wooing to signal distress, signal delight,
signal the stark moon you see, and eclipsing of it.
Signal distress, signal delight, signal, signal redress
mistress, redress, and holy moon.
And cry when the moon disappears, returns,
and celebrate by dancing.
Why did not my brain dance all those long years?
Would this not be in the frame of that incubation,
its calibration toward gender, toward yearning,
toward other particulars of size, and gaze, and color?
How many thousands of years, and between all and what
is human thousands of possibilities constituting,
reconstituting thousands upon thousands.
And why did my brain incubate all those long years
not using its genius to make fire?
Cry for water with a parched sound.
And why?
How could it with slow memory, without knowledge of itself now
growing, moving slowly, know itself.
Why?
And why do you explore the periphery of latere
to lie hidden?
My, what size you are my hominid, and of intellect
not strewn about.
And why are you at the root of my word, lanthanien to escape.
Notice inside a universe with a hidden dimension one
tries curling up inside of what if and why.
And heard why not, explore realms of where we meet.
Oldowan stone of irregular edge cuts another stone crudely.
Stone of irregular edge cuts broodingly.
Old woman, old woman hold the blunt instrument
to soothe thee, of Acheulean more gracile hammer flakes
off stone rue thee And vocal in the cry of hunt, hunt, kill,
kill.
What?
Kill thee?
Primate surprise, chieftain so named
by Linnaeus, survival mechanisms,
self-recognizing prosimian mirror neuron.
She stood up.
Shrill, hurried conversation expressing sorrow.
Oh, snared swan once in the mirror backlit by sun,
beauty me a snared swan.
I excite you, gesticulate modern heterosexist presumption
not in place by candlelight.
You are beauty.
You moving up the ladder of the spine.
And I, a fragmented me.
Do mirrors have eyes?
With bestial affection for you of kin,
but no matter of purpose.
Shatter would a shepherdess be in a eclogue splendor
if she could be.
But these cranial valleys and stars
both by kin of this action, left hand lifts, kind palm
open, hands free for greater locomotion,
out on open savanna, slope of beckoning.
Now, swing, turn, grab a kindred object.
How you feel, attraction, hold, offer a mandible heart.
Cross-dressed body puts on syncretic pelt,
and moves as in plucky mating dance, stabs at promise,
tongues, words stand up, looking eye to eye.
My grip around your legs.
Footprints at Laetoli.
Three australopithecines crossed a carpet of fresh volcanic ash,
walking much as we do in two legged gait, hip and leg gone
much the way toward human form in place of what in apes suits
them for swinging through trees, scamper
on all fours across a line that leads to man.
They decided to walk to the ferryboat now.
The map of the lakes lay on the table.
She picked up the book close by setting the map aside.
And as she approached it, she looked closely now.
Looking at it, she was happy to see.
And she did this quickly, lifted as she
was by the title, the photographs within,
walls, a superimposition of a she-wolf's face.
It was a book by a friend, the name of her friend
clearly on it, whose writing she admired.
It was lateral writing, a kind of meditation on the detritus
and refuse, and vast sweep of times
ravage upon many great cities, diasporas
of visible and invisible migrations.
Subsequent incursions that make their curious desperate mark
on the faces of cities.
A photo of the friend stares out squarely,
defiant, she might say, knowing him.
But perhaps, not more certain of the credibility of line
and mark and point, a puncture and fury.
He was one to walk a lot and comment
upon the certainty of seething, and disploding peoples
of people pull to the maelstrom of survival of them,
pushing and pulling, tug at this.
What you say, a string, a lifeline, and back streets,
places by water.
Melancholy survival deals that dealt a raw hand.
He had traveled to the undersides of them
indefatigably, and lived in the interstices,
watching those cities below her imagination.
What he had seen, what he had seen below the imagination,
he had seen odd delineations of fear,
and seething, and disploding juxtaposed
with mad delight of martyrdom, how impedes everywhere,
the ethos by any necessary means.
He meant they were crowded like rats,
or like the circumpolar head people living
under the sea, ghosts consisting only of a head.
Ghosts waiting to be buried off the killing
fields of Srebrenica.
Doctor districts outside Paris where the trouble
they complain of arrives from.
She thought of semaphores.
He was trying to tell her something with his signals,
with his codes, and flags, and where
they might measure distress, could measure help them now,
signal distress, distress.
It was words, words, only now, the very
close by within walking from their temporary shelter.
He was of the words only school.
Then turning words to movies, those moving
pictures impersonating shadows, and moving pictures school
and movies, movies.
Only for you could tell in light he would say, words.
And he liked them dark, transgressive even.
And what are you wishing on?
I mean, working, working on, he asked.
Chewing on the mammal.
It was like an hallucination.
First, the object strewn about where
they had arrived from a book, a map, quadrants discarded now,
a sense of the shelter and the departing from it.
Map cast aside, they would try their luck.
His caverns of cities wait of them in him in her mind now.
They had sat with their lunch on another ferry, Lago di
Como, animal bereft, lithic underpinnings.
And the writing they both did took you
to those other places, waves on the Bosphorus, Istanbul,
or Cambodia.
They both wrote as if in the grip of a fever.
Have you ever had the terrible dengue?
Because of urgency, survival to describe the known world
of any reach or stretch of imagination,
the relative world of death and change
with the machinations of capitalism grinding away,
charged a mysterious brute force and deracination
Was her time irreversible?
How many objects put to the test?
Taken apart, deconstruct them into their essential nature,
compassion.
Name outliving the person who carries it
as with a book, name, identity, person.
And have you heard he asked, of the continent of detritus
100,000 pounds of petroleum plastic,
twice the size of your continent?
He was not American born.
Churning in a vortex, the water animals
under the intense burden, the intense burden of naming.
How do we know them by their sound, by their cry?
Struggling in the serpent coils of plastic, marred, scarred.
And she wondered what animals must
be sacrificed to the colonization of time,
to the colonization of cities, the colonization of oceans,
when science doesn't find something.
She mused two possibilities toward him in her philosophy,
the not finding of something that doesn't exist,
and the case of even though something exists,
it can't be found.
Do you know what I say of this?
Not exactly the purpose.
And he, there is a world that is enough.
Start here.
Like to go with you he said, with you,
and picking up her thought like wind's cognition
said again, what is unmistaken.
And she, I know him.
I know my friend by looking at him in my mirror of him.
And we rode then many miles, when
riding was a way of thinking, investigating
places, people, animals, some miles of them, tribes and all.
And in sympathy, being magic ones, poet ones,
because we could ride out in another century,
and bring the past along wondering what
animal traps, the what of, what of animal cages.
And the troops, we saw them embarking in the distance.
What traps the troops, and torture unseen?
But you see it in the mind most impossible
a subject, which becomes a trapped factor of life,
mere trappings, razor wires meant torching men, lynching,
and summoning the animals to the hunt dressed in their skins
with gestures and sounds from the vibrating larynx,
seeing that becoming them, being them, eating them.
Animals of troubled descent, or sewing the star flower
shirts by which the birds would be brought back to human shape.
It was a time of fossil fuel priorities, a precious business
time.
That's what they'll say about a century since.
It was a busy get on with it time, a busy business time.
So better get on with it time.
They fucked us all over.
And they're greedy get over a time.
That's what they'll say about us.
What were they thinking?
Stupid fuckers, it was commodification
fun hog time, time modification time, got on with time.
We killed time.
They fucked us over in our future time.
We'll be surely more stressed in time.
That's what they'll be saying.
That's what they'll say.
They got on with it, saying about us going nowhere,
but going down, and us all with them.
What were they thinking in their selfish minds?
Us, us, us.
That's what they'll say about us generations hence
how living then hence without so many animals.
Hence, they fucked the world over
in their sweet avaricious time frame.
That's what they'll say about us.
Those stupid fuckers, they let the animals die.
They let the plants die.
They killed the air.
They killed the water.
They killed each other.
They killed language.
Humdrum Paleolithic, where we could
talk in sweet time notches.
Well, that's over.
Where the fuck did that ever evolve to?
Then along 20,000 years of keeping time,
once keeping it all and moving it time forward,
and it the art forward, and it humanity forward.
And now, they want to kill it.
Really, they killed it.
Then a long rim, a Babylonian rim of Egyptian 5,000 years
once ago, such progress.
They kill all that too.
Stupid fuckers.
Then but now my solar day, my lunar month,
my solar year, my speed, I inherited from them.
What time is it now?
And we resumed our talk.
After these excessive outbreaks, discussing the nature
of calibration, how different times give the peculiarities
and particulars of people and praxis,
and place, and thought systems have become their own zones
in this.
We spoke of lustrations and the architectures
of spiritual places, of constructing
mandalas with colored sands, and the women who
dance on the precipice of eclipses, performance
and ritual under arches pillars that delineate the way to move
as a chorus might.
Open atriums, they are moving into the augur's space,
the space of frequent animal sacrifice.
Both, both he cautioned further.
It's quite unconscionably relative.
That doesn't explain, I protested,
the way we brutalize time.
The manatee is found in shallow slow moving rivers.
The manatee moves in estuaries, moves in saltwater bays.
The manatee in moving moves gently.
The manatee is to be found in canals and coastal areas.
The manatee is a migratory animal.
The manatee is gentle and slow moving.
The manatee moves in slow moving rivers slowly.
The manatee is completely herbivorous.
The West Indian manatee has no natural enemies.
The manatee has no natural enemies, but unnatural man.
The manatee is constantly threatened
by man, unnaturally man with his boats and plastic,
and attitude.
The manatee often drowns in canal locks
of man, man who makes no concession to manatee.
The manatee often dies in flood control structures.
Man who makes no concession to manatee, nor cares
of manatee life, manatee fortune.
The manatee dies in collision with watercraft.
Man who does not protect the manatee, what
steward of the Earth is this unnatural man,
man who makes no concession to manatee?
The manatee dies with the ingestion
of fish hooks, man who unnaturally
makes no concession.
The manatee dies from litter and monofilament lines.
Man who is ranked in attitude has no use for manatee.
The manatee dies entrapped in crab trap lines.
The manatee dies from loss of habitat claimed by man.
The manatee could be maimed by man.
The manatee could be aided by man, man.
Oh wait, the manatee, man, come to the manatee heart.
A manatee calf is born every two to five years.
A manatee gestates for a year in the manatee womb.
8,400 miles of tidal waters could be for the manatee.
11,000 miles of rivers and streams
could be for the manatee.
10,000 miles of canals, would they all be for the manatee?
The manatee has more gray matter in the brain than man.
The manatee is perhaps thinking archivally deeper than man,
ancient days of manatee.
So many thousands of years, manatee mind.
What is the mind of manatee?
The manatee has no natural enemies.
The manatee is completely herbivorous.
The metabolism of this manatees slow, move slowly.
And it goes on.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]