I didn't know I was that good but
[LAUGHTER]
Can I just ask if you can hear me.
I always I'm afraid no one can hear me.
Can you hear me back there?
All right.
Not very well.
See because I mutter and I'm going to project.
So I wanted to begin--
I realized about a half hour ago,
I was thinking about Jon Anderson
a poet I love very much, a native of around here and I--
this is the first time I've been here and I know.
There's a poem of his that I keep
at a folder of favorite poems.
It's like kind of big.
I've been keeping it since I was in college.
But then I have another one of the real favorite ones and he's
in--
this is one of the most perfect poems
I know in any language by any poet
that I identify with very much called "Years".
Sometimes in weariness I stop because I've been lucky.
I think the future must be plain.
Over the trees, the stars are quite small.
My friends talk quietly and we have all
come to the same things.
Now if I die I will inherit awhile, their similar bodies.
Now, if I listen someone is telling a story.
The characters matter, they enchanted each other by speech.
Though the stories they lived were not the same,
many were distracted into love.
Slept and woke alone awhile serene.
This last year something happened to me
and I don't know what but I wrote a book of prose
and I don't know--
I know that people are going to call them prose poems
and some of them are.
But it doesn't really--
it's a wonderful oxymoron or it was
in the middle of the 19th century
when Baudelaire used it.
But it just doesn't have much shock value anymore you know.
And I thought maybe there's another term
but I couldn't think of one so I just call them prose.
And that's what they are.
And I've had some of them in magazines
and they're always writing back and going
do you want the line breaks?
I go there are no line breaks, it's like prose.
[LAUGHTER]
Like in a novel.
The line breaks are arbitrary.
But the problem was to get qualities of lyric poetry
into as Baudelaire wrote about this that the wonderful
possibilities of not having to worry about the line break
and not having to--
and yet to use all of the different qualities that
are available, the musical dimension
of language, the dramatic narrative and the lyrical
absolute to the most plain, normal, literal speech.
So anyway I tried to see what I could do with that.
I wrote a--
I want to read the--
there's an untitled kind of prologue at the beginning.
And it's not like the other.
It's kind of torrential and it's not like the other pieces
but I'm going to read it.
It has no title.
Tell them what I can tell nobody anything.
Tell them for me when I am nothing but a name
and some words on a page singing death.
Something told me to do it, taught me to do this,
put a gun to my head then said what to say.
And my hand took it down a zero seared coldly in one temple.
And so I told the electrode glued it chilled to the other.
They'll put the pinchers on you, boy, warn them.
Warn them while they're still young.
They'll set the sniffer dogs on you,
rooting and snuffling away at your crotch
before you know it with their great drooling snouts.
They will put you alone in a room.
They'll be shining one of those pencil
thin flashlights in your eye.
They'll be checking your teeth.
They'll be weighing you.
This one will do but how long will he last?
You can't hear them yet but that's what they're saying.
Almost inaudibly mostly it told me.
And I faithfully spoke what I thought I had heard.
Grinning, idiot, dummy on the lap of words,
words more real than I. They were here before
and we'll be here when I'm not.
And I took it, I stood it.
Surrounded by infinite space I spoke clearly this originalist
soliloquy why I don't know was not told to vast stadiums
the first row of faces as far as near stars if they're at all.
Never having the faintest idea what
it meant with a dead microphone I
did my best to tell them that rough inches thick rope
for an ascot my eyes put out.
Chained to my oar most of the others long gone
I am guessing as me.
The first minute of death is so long.
The first minute of consciousness.
You can never arrive, never seem to reach shore.
Never mind with what clarity you catch now
and then a faint sound of remote surf breaking there.
So guessing at words when they blurred across water
I pulled to for those who could do so no more.
I sang twice sort of.
I sang twice as loud, moved my lips anyway.
Strapped to the mast now my ear ways
cleared though there was no one there, though I heard nothing
so often.
I had to learn cunning, learn cunning.
Try that.
Improvising when nothing else came, making up
what I couldn't make out and that
far off uproarious derision I had to fight through.
Raise my voice above drown out as I drown saying,
I must keep listening above pitiless cock suckers
even in sleep to keep this thing going my desecrated art
and I a mere link.
Tough one though.
There will be no self murder at this address boys,
you'll have to come do it yourself.
I'm not that hard to find.
Where was I?
Yes.
Out on this unknown sea beating at my ear like the sound
that came toward me then in the beginning booming softly.
The first thing I heard so I'm told
from some unplumbed and starless blue distance I reckon.
You got me.
From nowhere it came as did I. Mother morning's poor heart
months before I came forth whatever
a month was whoever I was then.
Engrossed in recapitulating man's descent
and where's my medal?
Small and so nameless inside her stark destitute.
Poor mother mourning her own mother's
dying over the visible at sea.
She lay dying about a strong stone's
throw away from the Ohio's own lightless and chemical lithium
ghost.
I hear they've cleaned it up, restored it
to its ancient beauty, not a minute too late for the end
of the world too.
She lay dying away from this world
just as I'm doing my part to die into it.
And I see them descendants 3,000 years distant from Patmos
sit down in this primitive place, her grieving family
minus us the always unaccounted for, the fuck up duo.
They are up to their knees in it gathered as if for a baptism.
Look at the sign of the cross traced in hydrochloric acid
on a tiny forehead.
No wonder they raise hell.
Right there at the edge of the decidedly not sapphire radiant
water's edge axe of gold poised in the air falling now
in a meteor arc for to sever that hairy umbilical rope.
Hear me out.
And I saw they were standing watch over her.
I saw her wrap that piece in scarlet Magdalenean cerements.
In either hand a scarlet painted egg bobbing, sundering,
undertow, sucking to its breast the white single bed.
Nothing but a Huckleberry raft just now just disappearing
around the first bend lost from sight.
Well my mother unaided by word addled male
she is sentenced to alone in her German hotel room breaks down,
surrenders.
Celestial mother come pity her 22 helplessly
swept down the blind unwept current that flows to this day
through my veins.
So that's what it was.
Months before I first met her I listened to weeping.
It went on forever, how not hear it, how not be fed it.
The sorrowing as always in that vast shoreless
darkness I listened.
I'm listening now but the hell with now.
Watch this and pay close attention.
Nothing else there, only a listening called you.
No name even not yet till they grave it in stone.
Until when in tears we first met,
her vast face I watched it rise on the horizon.
Even then when I heard my first screams
in the even more terrible blindness called light
I was listening.
Long before I invented the first word though it was not
mine whose then?
It taught me.
It told me the others, the rest of them, many.
Many, many.
Even though I was listening, even speaking
was listening only that which was not mine is mine.
So I sang what it meant me to say
and when no one was listening what it meant to me all.
Even now I am hearing through my own disappearing.
There is nothing left to say yet I am listening still in hope.
I sometimes think when there is nothing more to hear
and nothing left to hear with I will still be busy listening
there under the grass.
Come and visit me, talk to me while I am listening forever.
It is so perfect I could never tell you
though that was all I ever did.
I tried at least.
And for you I still I'm only you, tell them that.
When nothing is left of me, I will somehow still
be with you all that was best of me
truest in love with the Earth all my kindest and happiest.
They'll remain, there are these words
which are yours, always work.
Tell yourself it was all done for you.