Did I really say that rabbit thing?
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you for that introduction.
And I should mention that Aurelie has just
completed a delicious novel based on a Greek myth,
so she is a fairy taler and a warrior, too.
And thank you to the Poetry Center for hosting this event,
and to everyone for coming out on this late summer evening.
And so nice to meet you, Cynthia.
And I can't wait to hear your poetry, and your translations
of poetry.
I'm going to read tonight from "A Work in Progress."
I'll tell you just a tiny bit about it.
It's about a girl named Mike.
Some years ago, before this project
begins, before the writing begins,
she died in a double suicide with her mother.
She works for a company called Central as a night floater.
And her position is to keep suicides company
in their last moments.
I'm going to read the opening pages from this long narrative.
These pages are forthcoming in a journal called Unstuck,
that's out of Austin, Texas.
I think highly of it.
And then I'm going to read some later pages,
so just imagine a lot of time passing.
And those of you who know my work will know they'll
be action-packed pages too.
These later pages were published in a journal last year
called Little Star.
And I'm going to pause in between the two sections.
I should mention my gratitude to the writers, Margaret Wise
Brown, Amy Lowell, and Emily Dickinson, whose work you
may recognize in little fragments in this,
or bigger fragments, drastically changed.
And this is currently called "Happy Hour."
"She felt nothing at all in her hands, except air.
And everything darkened and brightened from there.
Outside the triplex, the three of them
stood, with a few soaking wet curtains around them.
Her father was wearing an old cowboy hat.
Her mother carried a guitar case,
and drank from a bottle of wine.
They trudged up the walkway in their drenched clothes.
The walkway was covered in needles.
Solemnly, three in a row, mother, daughter, and father,
they toured the apartments.
For the daughter, the middle floor
was just right, not too low, and not too high off the ground.
The father had just opened a bar.
The bottom floor was good for those late hours.
That left the top for the mother.
But that was OK.
She would not jump again.
And besides, you needed eight stories.
They stood at their doors for a moment.
Quietly, then, they went inside their new homes,
shut the doors to the rooms.
Soon, Mike got her first assignment from Fontaine,
at the Division Street Diner.
'You're a nice kid,' he said, sipping his coffee.
'A little too nice.
That's a concern, but we think you can do this.
Not many can.'
'Do what?' 'I'm sorry about you and your mom,' Fontaine said,
looking off, his eyes getting darker.
'We did our best to get someone else there,' he said.
Then he explains the position.
'So I try to stop them?'
'No, but you will be there.'
Her stop approached.
Mike could see the dim neon sign of the bar
through the bus window.
The window was wet with rain and blurred of grime.
The bar's name also was blurred, and blinked in the rain.
Mike had just gotten off work as a night floater
in an office downtown.
She gathered her umbrella, a crumpled paper bag,
and her lunch sack.
Night floaters called the evening meal 'lunch,' even when
taken so late in a day's normal duration.
She yanked the wire with a small and confident hand.
The bus slowed to a stop in a large puddle that
glowed from the headlights.
As the engine idled, the glow quivered a bit.
The water seemed to hold life.
At the door, Mike grabbed the trench coat more tightly,
and flew over the puddle.
She tucked herself quietly into the bar.
The city had a light ordinance for the interiors
of drinking establishments.
The city bars always were dark.
A brightly lit bar was a crime.
Bog was darker than most.
Mike chose a stool at the end of the bar,
near the jukebox, and door.
'What's up, Mike?' the bartender said.
'What's up with you?'
The bartender had a handlebar mustache,
and wore a Western shirt with metal snaps, and knot buttons.
He was too old to be a hipster, but he was not so old.
The city was in the West, but not in the desert or plains.
It was in the thickly forested part, a rainy and remote corner
of the Western part of the country.
People dressed like that here, people at Bog, at least.
Mike wore the uniform of a floater--
trench coat, dungarees, red low top sneakers.
The bartender put a can of beer and a glass
down on the counter, and opened the tab of the beer.
He poured a small pitcher full of tomato juice, setting it
beside the beer can with a cardboard shaker of salt. Mike
gratefully nodded, and pulled a thick book out
of her paper bag.
Opening it to a page marked with a feather,
she began peacefully reading.
Light handwriting appeared in the margins of the huge volume.
Occasionally, Mike tapped a pencil on the wooden bar
counter as she read.
Once in a rare while, she made a new note with a light hand.
Without lifting her eyes from the page,
Mike filled the glass 2/3 full with beer,
and then tilting the tiny pitcher,
slowly above the glass, again without lifting
her eyes from the page, to the rim with tomato juice.
She shook on some salt. She picked up
the glass of bloody beer, and took a small sip as she read.
The bartender, whose name also was Mike, but whom everyone
called Pete, walked around the bar,
and put quarters into the jukebox.
He stood with his back to Mike a long time,
and then returned to his station.
A smooth voice backed by slow drums
sang about rain on a particular day of the week.
It rained a lot in the city, almost all the time.
The jukebox only played songs about rain.
But Pete added a song by a local musician.
There's only strange and grim celebration.
Everyone was dying to get on the playlist at Bog.
Recently, Pete had added a new song
by the house band, which was fronted
by a small and beautiful woman who played a child's guitar.
No one else ever performed in the bar.
Her songs featured pine trees and rain,
and all the songs were lullabies.
But the songs were not intended for children.
The house singer could've been 20 or 50, and not only
because Bog had very poor lighting.
It's just how she looked.
She was more illustrated than live-action human.
She wore black boots whose soles were
secured with silver duct tape.
Her look was not warm.
She performed with a languorous drummer,
and a loose-limbed bass player, both tall and thin as wisps.
If they turned sideways, you might not even see them.
They wore black pinstripe suits with narrow pant legs
and white undershirts.
The trio performed every night.
In between sets, they lounged on a black velvet couch
at the back of the bar, nursing their drinks.
The new song on the jukebox was called simply "Children."
In this song, children were led through the rain, Pied Piper
style, into a river, and drowned.
Throughout most of the song, one of the children
was depicted standing by the edge of the river and crying.
At the end of the song, he also jumped in.
And though he probably died, the song never said.
It ended with an image of the sun,
pink like icing, disappearing into the horizon.
The house singer had a few thousand songs on the jukebox.
Every night after work, Mike arrived at Bog
on the last Mount Fair bus of the night,
and made a small pitcher of tomato
juice come out just right, with two cans of beer,
while she sat at the bar counter, and read from the book
a scrapbook of old children's stories,
looking up from the pages only once in a while.
Every so often, she would lift off her chair,
and go out back to get out of the smoke,
and get some fresh air.
Pete allowed Bog's patrons to smoke,
though it was against the law in the rest of the city.
'No harm, no foul,' he said, when new patrons asked if they
could.
Mike lived down the block from the bar,
on a dark stretch lit by dim, moon-like yellow globes.
Pine trees, old growth, like in fairy tales, lined the street,
and made a thick canopy over the sidewalks.
Still, the rain came through, often in giant droplets
that could soak a whole head of hair in one splatter.
Sometimes Pete would offer to walk Mike home, asking
one of the regulars who sat at the bar to watch the till,
and serve drinks.
Most often, Heroin Mary.
On this, the first night of our story,
a young couple came into Bog.
The girl wore a denim blazer and bell bottoms and sunglasses,
dark lenses, white, huge, the boy, a stylized suit, custom
made, clearly, as if sewn right onto his very body.
He also had sunglasses, aviators.
And these, too, fit him perfectly well.
They ordered double vodka martinis.
"Not in tall glasses," the girl said, "not with a long stem."
She darted her eyes toward the boyfriend.
In her uncertainty, there was certainty, too,
that her needs would not be fulfilled.
Pete stared at the girl for a couple of seconds,
and sort of tilted his chin.
Mike barely lifted her eyes off of her book,
and inspected the girl closely inside the mirror,
with a glance expertly directed so the girl would not notice.
The girl's lipstick was lopsided,
but she was not drunk.
She was tearful, and not balanced upon her feet.
She wore vintage boots with high wooden heels.
There was no slurring, and there were no lurches forward.
Still, something wavered as she stood there,
something pungent, and ruined.
Mike focused on her book's page.
It featured a mid-century drawing.
A child was playing.
She was on all fours, next to a chicken.
The child wore a white frock with white ruffles
that was meant to resemble the white chicken beside her.
'It's My Way,' read the caption."