As Laura said, I read here last seven years ago.
I'm going to read almost entirely poems
written in the last six years.
I know this doesn't matter to anybody out here,
but it pleases me to be able to read newer things.
I want to start by reading one that I almost certainly read
seven years ago, for anybody who might possibly remember.
This is a poem.
I say I probably read it not because I remember
but because I almost always do.
It's a poem called The Man in the Dead Machine.
In the second line, there's a name
of a fighter plane from the Second World
War from the American side, the Grumman Hellcat.
It was a plane that flew off carriers,
in particular in the Pacific.
High on a slope in New Guinea, the Grumman Hellcat
lodges among bright vines as thick as arms.
In 1942, the clenched hand of a pilot
glided it here where no one has ever been.
In the cockpit, the helmeted skeleton
sits upright, held by dry sinews at neck and shoulder
and by webbing that straps the pelvic cross to the cracked
leather of the seat and the breastbone to the canvas
cover of the parachute, or say that the shrapnel missed him.
He flew back to the carrier and every morning takes his chair.
His pale hands on the black arms,
and sits upright, held by the firm webbing.
I want the end of that poem to have the kind of effect
that you see sometimes in political badges
with little ridges on them, so that on one angle
you see one picture and one another,
as if there's flesh from the skeleton, flesh and skeleton
going back and forth.