WEBVTT

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As Laura said, I read
here last seven years ago.

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I'm going to read
almost entirely poems

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written in the last six years.

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I know this doesn't matter
to anybody out here,

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but it pleases me to be
able to read newer things.

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I want to start by reading one
that I almost certainly read

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seven years ago, for anybody
who might possibly remember.

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This is a poem.

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I say I probably read it
not because I remember

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but because I almost always do.

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It's a poem called The
Man in the Dead Machine.

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In the second line,
there's a name

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of a fighter plane
from the Second World

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War from the American
side, the Grumman Hellcat.

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It was a plane that
flew off carriers,

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in particular in the Pacific.

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High on a slope in New
Guinea, the Grumman Hellcat

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lodges among bright
vines as thick as arms.

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In 1942, the clenched
hand of a pilot

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glided it here where
no one has ever been.

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In the cockpit, the
helmeted skeleton

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sits upright, held by dry
sinews at neck and shoulder

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and by webbing that straps the
pelvic cross to the cracked

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leather of the seat and the
breastbone to the canvas

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cover of the parachute, or say
that the shrapnel missed him.

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He flew back to the carrier and
every morning takes his chair.

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His pale hands on
the black arms,

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and sits upright, held
by the firm webbing.

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I want the end of that poem
to have the kind of effect

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that you see sometimes
in political badges

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with little ridges on
them, so that on one angle

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you see one picture
and one another,

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as if there's flesh from the
skeleton, flesh and skeleton

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going back and forth.

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