We are still looking for material for our newsletter.
Remember that we have a reception tonight following
the reading in Student Union at the Terrace Lounge.
Some of you may know that Professor Orlen has a cold.
[LAUGHTER]
He asked me what I did when I have a cold,
and I said that I curse and spit.
And he said that didn't do very much good.
What did I find that was very effective?
And I said, well, I usually coughed
a lot just before I went on.
And then I got lots of sympathy.
So give him lots of sympathy, (WHISPERS)
even if he doesn't deserve it.
[LAUGHTER]
Steve Orlen has published one collection of poems
with Wesleyan University Press, Permission to Speak,
one chapbook with Penumbra Press,
Sleeping on Doors, one book with Ironwood Press, Separate
Creatures.
He's been teaching in the creative writing department
here at the University of Arizona since 1967.
He's also been associated with the Master of Fine Arts program
at Goddard College in Vermont.
And he's been a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
His honors include two awards from the National Endowment
for the Arts and a George Dillon Memorial
Prize from Poetry magazine.
Those of you who've heard him before
know that you'll have a great treat
in listening to Steve Orlen.
[APPLAUSE]
I got my throat disks.
Get my hot tea.
Make my preparations here.
It should be chicken soup.
All right.
You may think there's whiskey in there, but there may be.
I'm going to start with a--
how can you read with a throat lozenge?
Hello, and how do you do?
Put it over here, OK.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't think I can do it.
I'm going to start with a short poem, which is called Prologue.
Name is Prologue, the prologue poem to a book called
Separate Creatures.
Can y'all hear me?
Yeah?
Someone is pushing a stone out of place.
And someone is pushing it back gently, without intention.
I wanted to write a lyric while the world slept.
I wanted to write your name.
But the hours passed.
Gray light seeped through my curtain.
The light turned me.
Children gathered in groups on the street
then broke and went their long ways.
A story unfolded, partial and without relief,
the details so intimate, for the moment, I forgot your name.
The light turned, and I forgot your name.
I did hear some good news today you'll be happy to hear.
The Red Sox fans here will know that Don Zimmer's been fired.
And they've hired Johnny Anderson
to be their third baseman and acting manager.
[LAUGHTER]
I thought you'd be pleased.
The next poem is called The Aga Khan.
It's a poem, basically a true poem about my aunt
who died when I was in my early teens.
She was a very beautiful woman.
I think she was really my first love.
And she was very wealthy, told great stories, and was,
I guess, something of a 1950s jet-setter.
And she showed me a ring once that unscrewed.
And when she tapped it, little tiny carved ivory elephants
came out.
There were 13 of them in the ring.
And she claimed that the Aga Khan had given it to her.
It was possible.
This poem is called The Aga Khan.
My aunt Bibi used to visit by surprise
with her husband, uncle Bob, a Cadillac convertible,
and silver furs and the 13 tiny carved ivory elephant
herded into a ring, given her, she said,
by the Aga Khan, who I imagined rode those elephants
in and out of the ring on her finger.
The summer Bibi laid down on mother's bed and moaned,
I could see her beauty reflected in the mirror
as I stood in the kitchen, looking in.
I saw the scars criss-cross her back and fanny.
After the doctor shot her up, she
laughed, her eyelids fluttering up and down.
Then she sat in the parlor, playing gin.
Father took me out for a game of catch, muttering, morphine,
morphine, son of a bitch.
And when, two years later, I saw my mother,
all dolled up at the funeral, kiss my uncle
Bob, lipstick streaking across his cheek, when
I saw the draped casket and the people milling around,
I snuck off to the men's room and tried to laugh Aunt Bibi's
laugh and wondered, whatever happened to the Aga
Khan, that son of a bitch who used
to ride those elephants in and out of the ring?
And what a conqueror he must have
been, her protector, friend, on his passage
in and out of that tiny universe.
And when would he ever stop?
The next poem is called Disguise and is
dedicated to my godson Bodie Orlen-Anderson.
At the window in autumn when the leaves fall down,
mama calls to her boy, little mouse, mausele.
Nothing is farther away than the sounds of leaves
falling and a voice rising.
And the mouse, frail, hopeful, trying to escape
gives in to every crumb of his mother's calling voice.
He will lie in bed with lamp light on his forehead,
locked in his book of dreams.
But now he creeps to the window, lifts the corner of the shade.
The first light comes from the first hope.
Henry Lion and Marvin Bear are the stars propped up
near the immense ceiling.
Papa put them there.
Mama puts them out.
Stars are the distant future, or was it the distant past?
Their light comes down and stifles everything that grows.
Soon, snow will pack around the tree.
And Marvin Bear will smile down.
He's charming, and he's real.
God has the names of animals and stars written
beside each other in a book.
What did mama say?
God is exquisite.
God can never quite come to his decision about the world.
Mama takes off her dress by the fire.
Papa whistles.
What's a whistle but a music you can see through?
The boy is mad because the leaves are gone.
The trees are black.
Everything outdoors is disguised as something else.
That's the first snow, his mother said.
Not true, said father, it's sleet.
Go to bed anyhow.
He kisses his father's wrist and tries to sleep.
God, who's made of snow and light,
sighs but never, never sleeps.
The next poem is called Unwritten Letters.
This is one of those letters I meant
to write while shaving or walking the dog.
It always begins, dear brother or dear friend.
When I was a child, I wrote things down and sewed the words
into sleeves, thoughts like clouds that
changed when I watched them.
I buried them with the bottle caps, the matchbooks
in the backyard under the elm.
I meant to dig them up.
Years later, I think our lives change ceaselessly.
How much older we have grown.
If I write this letter, this is how you'll remember me,
the curtains shut, the sun going down, the cells of my body
stopped.
I must have been thinking of you,
of all we've said or left unsaid,
of all the things we meant to do.
There is nothing that I meant to say.
There's a mirror right above my desk.
When I look up, there I am.
The eyes drift.
My face has lost its symmetry.
The two halves live separately.
Is this what happens to people alone?
I'm afraid when you see me again,
my face will suffer its parts unequally.
One side will limp after the other, always the younger
brother, unable to catch up.
When I look in the mirror, sometimes I see your face,
the eyes unfocused, settled within.
The mouth says nothing now, content to wait.
If we reached out to touch one another,
we would find the glass dark and getting darker.
To bring the two together requires patience, tact.
My face is like the life I lead.
I meant to say, I'm doing fine.
I can't describe it.
I was looking at that poem and the prologue poem in this book.
And I must have lent the book to somebody
or I got somebody else's copy because there were notes in it.
In the first poem, that prologue,
it has somebody pushing a rock.
It says Sisyphus next to it.
And then next to the Unwritten Letters,
it says, is this narcissism?
[LAUGHTER]
Somebody knows their myth, I guess.
No, it isn't narcissism just curiosity.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm gonna have some more of this.
[LAUGHTER]
There's a little anesthetic in there.
That helps too.
This one's called Friends for John Anderson.
Down by the river along the railroad
tracks on a cool August day, we started our journey,
trying to get from one country to the next.
We knew the language because we learned it
outside the old mansion with the dogs
and cats and a little schoolmaster who
finally chased us off.
But we were good big fellows.
People along the road wrapped themselves in wool
and drank a heavy beer.
Do you remember, we were so sure of ourselves
that despair was short-lived and a welcome change of heart?
We went from city to city, every detail lodging in my memory.
And walking like that, I had no desire
to choose one place over another.
Don't ask me how much we influenced each other,
picking up accents, exchanging our nicknames and hats.
Not only that, but the graveyards under the oaks
gave life meaning.
You said that though men die, they're
only proving how human we are.
But then in the capital, remember how
every passerby stared at us?
How in the border village, that woman cut open her arm
and there was no blood, only flat, lacquered veins?
We were no longer living the life of our times.
Let's go home, you said one morning, stirring the fire.
But I knew better.
We stood by the great ocean, having slept all night
on the pebbly shore.
Under the froth, great depths of water slept.
I said, we must start to suffer again so we may learn more.
And you said, no, we must travel to the fat lands across the sea
and do some research there.
Or did I say that?
Do you remember who said there would be
good living and good weather?
Next poem is a narrative poem from a childhood memory
about coming home from school, cutting through the woods
one day, and finding a hand sticking up out of the snow.
Obviously, there was a dead person under there.
But I didn't know.
It's called First Story.
Thick snow, the path, an evergreen
hung above an ice-locked stream.
Home through the woods, he found a hand
thrusting up from the snow.
His dog growled.
The hand was frozen blue.
He was afraid to tell his father, whom
he told all his secrets, afraid to touch the stiff,
curled fingers, or enter the cave of palm.
But numb with winter, he came back to sit-in
the widening circle of story.
A man lay by a northern stream, lost in trout depths, feverish,
his gashed leg refused to heal.
That night, the wolf returned to snarl.
Sunday, when the others knelt in church,
he pressed the blue fire of palm and bound their hands
in prayer.
He passed out in the snow.
The tree let down its branches over a boy
who could not stay away from the dead or the soon to be dead.
And an owl from a storybook sang of another world,
the underground.
It snowed, and the stream froze up.
And dark clouds hid the stars.
In his dream, they were friends, wolf and man,
under a shell of dark.
Far off in the upper world, the miraculous living moved.
Nothing ended but the day.
A father storied his son to sleep.
Children woke and went to school.
The boy moved through them, a ghost,
counting the unborn nails of his hand.
Cold voices urged him back to the woods.
Under the tree, a story was ending.
And when he died, steam rose from his flesh.
And the wolf moaned and ran.
The body slipped under snow.
Then spring, and the snow loosed over rock
to unveil a man's body.
He watched them wrap it in a sack
and saw that the eyes were blind,
the mouth too dumb for grief or story.
But their hands had locked, friends one whole winter,
until the stream broke and blessed him
with its cold skill.
He heard icy veins roaring underground.
He didn't know the dad could live so long,
nor pain nor numbness end.
Next poem is called There Was a Storm.
It's in part an elegy for my uncle who died in 1978.
[CLEARS THROAT] Excuse me.
And he died during that big snowstorm they had back east,
though he didn't die because of that.
But that enters into the poem.
There was a storm so hard I can only imperfectly imagine it.
But my mother on the telephone loses her grief
for a moment to say how the houses by the shore
lost resistance, how the snow was colorless and empty,
fluid as running water.
She pauses over the wires.
Where your brother lives, she says, the ocean
ran right up his street and took a house away.
And our uncle Bunny died.
My mother breaks down, comparing and choosing,
then lost in the thousand pretexts of words.
Uncle Bunny, who would not be touched by anything but snow.
He died a fat man of a heart attack and far inland,
not even shoveling snow.
And now snow, by chance, covers him.
He was a fat man a long time and would not
allow a hand to touch, not even to shake his hand,
his giant, overworked heart.
My mother lost her words.
It was quiet, a family-expected death.
And little sentiment around for a bachelor
who would not be touched.
For a moment, my mother did, then let him go.
Next poem is called Big Friend of the Stones.
And the speaker in the poem is a young boy, a young farm boy.
It comes from a section of this new manuscript that's
mostly poems about characters or persona poems.
There's a little epigraph that is really lovely
that I got from a book that Raleigh Kent put together,
spoken poems by children around the southwest.
I just thought I'd read you this lovely little epigraph.
Going through a ghost, it gets cold.
You get scared.
It picks up something like a knife or sword.
It tries to stab you.
But sometimes it tells you a story.
I like that.
Big Friend of the Stones.
The donkey doctor came covered with rain
and a gift, a picture of Jesus that changed when you looked.
His head seemed to wag.
My father is a good man with a pine cone for his head.
All summer, he chops firewood when the air is hot, not cold.
I've watched him from the rubbish pit where
I was playing with a snail.
My father says I will become the guardian of all God's motions,
wind and sun and rain, the goat after the grapes,
the grapes, the bees spinning the useful honey.
But I could not save the donkey.
The day the donkey died, a strange white peace
came over our land, like the doctor's white hand
into his vest pocket.
My father said the donkey was a friendly old man
because he carried his burden over the hills
with the flies in his ears and the dogs at his legs.
The donkey doctor yawned and muttered.
And we took the graying carcass out though it was tired
and could not obey.
Please me, I prayed, big friend of the stones.
We dragged him down the hill and buried him
beside the poplar tree.
When they left, I knelt and dug a channel to the great head
and stroked his muzzle.
I spoke a little poem I made up in a dream.
It was cold.
A leaf fell on my head.
I sneezed.
I pushed the dirt back over him and thought,
go to heaven where you belong, and get yourself
cured, old favorite of Christ.
Behind me, it was snowing on the stream.
Up the hill, I saw my father and the donkey doctor swigging
whiskey from the jug.
The door to our house was open.
The dog slept on the hearth.
I sneezed again.
And it was winter.
Tea break here.
Someone said if you don't remember the poems,
you remember the shirt.
I've got my best shirt on.
[LAUGHTER]
This one's called The Great Wall of China for Michael Collier.
My friend tells me that he's not sure
whether this is a serious poem or a funny poem.
It brings together the Great Wall of China and the English
philosopher Wittgenstein.
We'll see whether it's funny or serious.
Wittgenstein says that when a man wakes, he deliberates.
Is it time to get up?
He tries to make up his mind then finds
himself rising from the sheets.
But this other man, a mason whose family
had worked in brick and mud for generations
and who works on the Great Wall, couldn't get out of bed.
And there was no Wittgenstein to help him describe it.
He saw his wife, whose legs, showing under the curtain,
were the legs of a little girl, scuffed and dirty from falls
in the gravel.
She was making tea.
He knew what sat at the top of those legs.
Could he get up this morning or even call her over?
Nature is pitiless.
Wittgenstein would have said, were he
there in ancient China by the bedside,
that the mason did not rise because paradox
implies a radical loss of speech,
would have said perhaps.
Here is a group of men building their several meager yards
of a madman's wall then walking home.
What a small part of a life a wall
is, though sturdy and mud baked, too high even to see over.
The mason calls for his tea.
He calls for the infinite to help him out of bed.
His wife yells, why are you screwing up your face?
Ludwig would have answered, imagine
a tribe in whose language fall down means rise up.
The Great Wall of China, only now being built,
will be a long road from castle to castle, will be partial
and twisting.
And each man will be proud and one day say, I built it.
Even this poor mason and his child
will be thrilled and, along the irrigation ditch,
construct their own wall for the ants to climb,
for the rain to hurry beside toward the other Great
Wall of China, about which Ludwig Wittgenstein would have
said years later in England in a room in Cambridge
under a rookery early in the morning, well,
what did you see?
[LAUGHTER]
Every once in a while, poets seemed
to write poems that are extremely direct
and basically addressed to somebody.
This next poem is addressed to my father.
And it is very direct and, in a sense, an uncomfortable poem.
And I had the weird experience of having
to read it at a college in New England
last year when my father was in the audience.
It was very strange.
It's a kind of confrontational poem.
It was almost a confrontation with my father.
Anyways, it's called March 15, 1979.
That which I should have done I did not do.
Here on the porch, the beginning of spring or end of winter
reflects off the screen.
I stare at you, who now can barely see even the light that
sparks the tunnels of dust.
You are blind, prideful, and sentimental
as the dust settles on your shoulder.
I used to think blindness made a person solitary
and close to God.
I watch you shrink from what you cannot see,
which should make me scared of age,
but there's a beauty to it beyond your resignation.
You lay your hand in shadow on the table between us.
And this, our annual visit, we will talk to each other,
I to tell you what I've done, and you to comment on it.
There are no children to distract us from our purpose.
At 37, you'd already had two sons.
I think you wanted none, knowing in that small well of wisdom
we deny that you had no patience, only the kind of love
that flickers in this common light, a source of pride
and sorrow.
It's a letter you wrote years ago and could not finish.
Your words got away.
Your wish was small and serious, that I become, like you,
a man of business.
The small talent you had for where
words come from, where they go has
enlarged in me, my livelihood.
That which I should have done I could not do.
I rose each morning, slack, ingenuous, unreasoning.
I meant to bloom for you, tender to all living things.
I forget each morning to resume.
That which I felt to be simple, to go out among men
and to return a man, solitary, to my room,
turned out to be complicated.
Childless, without theories or fortunes to offer,
I offer some words.
I'd like to offer myself to pester your sleeve.
I play with my fork and knife.
I slice an apple for us.
Next poem is the title poem from my last book.
And you should know the speaker is sitting in an upstairs
window looking out.
And there's been a spring snow the night before,
which is always a very strange circumstance.
Permission to Speak.
Mornings from my upstairs window.
I can see a gray stand of birch and further down,
a hickory grove, then the river that powers the mill that
grinds flour.
Later, I'll eat the bread.
Last night, a spring snow blurred the countryside.
And for a while, I lost my way.
I thought I saw a boy in a crimson bathing suit whirl
downstream on an innertube.
So I closed my eyes on the old words for birch and hickory
and snow, like a novice in his cell,
discovering light, not that one but another
about which he'll remain silent all his life.
I came to myself at the window.
That boy, already seen in memory,
gives me permission to speak.
After a spring snow, a father and son took a sleigh ride
along the riverbank.
And what the sun couldn't see, the particular hills and trees
lost to whiteness made him cry.
The father snapped the reins and pointed
at what must have been a red fox sliding past a birch.
Look at that fellow in the bright nightgown
from which the sun will date his love of the world traveling
swiftly past.
Another poem from the same book called In Praise of Beverly.
The only thing you might need to know
is that back in Massachusetts in the '40s and '50s,
they had these places called Houses of Good Shepherd, which
were reform schools for girls.
When you walk downstairs and touched my route,
God knows what brought you homing there,
barely 14, already known as the town pump, and proud
of your clear attributes.
With breasts like new clouds, you were my first fallen angel.
I don't think we ever kissed but lay
in a rocky ditch all one awful summer
night, alive, in love with heat.
At dawn, we toasted marshmallows.
And when the fire caught the weeds and lit the hillside,
you held me tight and whispered, let's wait
and see the fire engines come.
You got sent up early to the House of Good Shepherd
because the mothers were jealous.
Forgive them.
When the friendly, leering cop told me,
I heard you dipped the wick in Beverly,
I blushed and stammered, proud, then lied, forgive us all,
to save my skin.
Beverly, the night they took you away, I imagined myself
in the ditch, my flesh on fire, curled
against your careless breathing, plodding low.
I dreamt your face and your hands
that parted the dark were mine and groaned
to share your misery.
But I found mine in good time.
Next poem is called--
[CLEARS THROAT] That's not what it's called.
[LAUGHTER]
[CLEARS THROAT]
Got to do that again.
[LAUGHTER]
The next poem is called Love and Memory.
In those days, the sky hung like a cobweb
in the great garden of space.
There were faces in water, as though the river were
trying on its own to evolve.
Now, after years of telling each other apart,
love is not born spontaneously but is realized in the brain
or in the arms, almost mathematically.
There are words that lose courage
when you speak them, even in the darkest room of the house,
to a wife who waits for a single face
to emerge from collective rhythms.
Who can argue with marriage, you believe?
For marriage is a long novel of associations.
Specks of gold swept by and a long river.
Where it leads is to memory.
The odor of lemon trees after a storm and the way blood
clots around a cut lead you further back
to those days in the mountains, where
air was so transparent you both consulted stars.
But memories in bed in the dark are fictitious characters
and a common past does not mean memories in common.
Everyone tells lies in bed.
And you are almost certain you have met this woman before
or this is a dream.
And into the Earth, crushed flowers have been pressed.
And you walk out on them as though you
were resuming an old habit.
A memory passes over you, odor of lemons
in a bath, pearly skin, the dark, dark hair, a memory
of what world, what life?
The next poem is about my grandfather.
It's called Naming the Children.
At one point when my grandfather must have been in his 80s
already, he'd had several strokes and was having trouble.
He was living in a nursing home and was
having trouble with his memory.
And my wife and I went to pick him up.
My wife's name is Gail.
That figures in the poem.
We went to pick him up and bring him to a family party.
And in the drive, he said that every morning when he got up,
he would count to 10 in the three languages
that he knew, Russian, Hebrew, and English,
and then say the names of his children
and his grandchildren in all those languages.
He also got them wrong, but he was trying.
Anyways, the naming figures in here.
Naming the Children.
He remembers good night and good morning.
He remembers my wife Gail, which is
the wind, who sits beside him, stroking his thin right hand.
From back of the car through the neighborhoods,
he recites the names of his children
in Russian, Hebrew, and English.
The names squeeze through the damaged arteries,
past the house in Odessa, over the remarkable ocean
to New York.
Misha will be Morris.
Khodia will be Ida.
10 years later, my mother Beatrice Florence,
stares into polished stone.
At last, she sees herself, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] beautiful
bird, which is how it is in America,
over the graves of our parents, how we are named.
Another grandparents poem, same couple, actually.
They were born in the Ukraine, one in Odessa and one,
I guess, a few hundred miles outside.
And this poem, the first half of it really,
describes a photograph of them when
I guess they were teenagers.
The second half moves into more contemporary times.
Ukrainian Passed Around from a Photo of my Grandparents.
On a wooded hillside by a river, a woman
pauses to catch her breath, leans against a silver birch.
What she sees, we can't know, for her eyes are shut.
She is stocky, young.
Her calves glisten in sunlight.
When she opens her eyes to admit us,
the Earth is a maypole around which she sweeps a clearing.
Upon the water, a small boat is making its way
toward shore, a man rowing, his muscular shoulders propelling
him through mist.
Perhaps he envisions this shape on the hillside,
who might be a wife or a sweetheart waiting.
But his back is to us.
Perhaps he shuts his eyes to hear the river's pulse.
When I enter the parlor, I think you've
been reading the book on your lap, but your eyes are shut.
I remove my old coat.
I see a parakeet preening in its cage
and a salad of onion and cucumber set on a table
by a vase of yellow iris.
Was it something you heard, my foot on the walk, that
woke you, or does light convert us
into people, husband and wife?
The one reading, the other entering an arch,
as he does each day of his life.
On the wall, a woman partially hidden by trees and a man
gliding over water, about whom we
can invent a story or better, say nothing and wait.
The next poem, a little different tone,
is called Recompense.
And the speaker in the poem is Pablo Picasso, of all people.
And he's traveling around.
He's dead in the poem.
But he's traveling around Europe.
See, if you get to be a great painter,
you can do that, I guess.
Recompense.
My name is Pablo Picasso.
And my name rhymes in French, in Catalan, even in American.
As I travel, stopping often to call aloud the single word,
lady, I find my ghost is still feared.
I'd like to answer, this was my body.
I give it to you.
And this my art, which is only some plumes trailing
from my hat.
And all you politicos and decadents
can penetrate the visible, which may someday
change to include your face.
From the north for several years,
I traveled through Navarre and Aragon
and what used to be Leon before the soldiers came.
I wanted to find the wound that caused the death of art.
I wanted recompense but good naturedly,
the way the troubadours of Provence
addressed their ladies fair.
In Malaga, where I was born, I found a broken mirror
in a cottage a few feet from the road.
The mirror spoke.
You must be a strong man to travel so far toward a miracle.
I sat drinking with the farmer, a simple man.
And when he fell asleep, I yelled,
my name is Pablo Picasso, and all words rhyme.
In Andalusia, there is a bird called cowbird.
It lays it spotted eggs in the nests of other birds
then disappears.
Look for my art in your nest, little bird.
There was a second surprise, the artist carries no sword.
Walking across a field, I heard his slurred whistle, cowbird.
Now I am gone.
My eyes have full freedom.
And my name, Pablo Picasso, hides in the bunched grass.
Some of the birds are gray and some black.
And some practice suffering.
And some patter their lobed feet on the water's surface.
What's to be done about my sullen disposition, my money,
and my heirs, my houses, and my death, which is what I fear
will attract your attention?
What finally rhymes in rocks and clouds, in fat
and the grain of wood is the life you feared.
And I am dead as you have guessed.
I have become a pest of the great man who
tosses up shapes, who fractures your face
and arms, your thighs.
Who knows what I'll do next, lady?
[APPLAUSE]
[LAUGHTER]
I'm going to read three more poems.
This one's called The Drunken Man.
It's really about a fairly common experience.
[LAUGHTER]
I guess, but it's the reverse.
It's about being sober and being with somebody who's very drunk
and that mixture of--
all the misunderstandings that happen in such circumstances.
There's nothing you can say to a man who drinks.
He rises in the gray mist of morning
and lights his cigarette, knowing
that soon, he'll be elsewhere.
Out in the world, the old men sweep their shops,
and one barber nods.
The full-breasted woman airing her pillows,
she smiles and squints.
And seeing it is only him, she closes the window.
But it doesn't matter.
There's no way of hurting a man who drinks.
His wife floats in his pockets.
His father twists open the cap.
His mother whispers, drink, drink.
He moves on down the street.
There are times when I feel obligated to speak.
I take my hands from my pockets.
I slide my glass away from him.
In earnest, I'll say something, anything, the weather, my son.
And he'll argue at me from someplace I can't
know because I'm not a drunk.
Perhaps when I stagger home, my wife screams to shut up.
Come to bed like a man.
[AUDIO OUT]
Out in the world, the old men sweep their shops,
and one barber nods.
The full-breasted woman airing her pillows,
she smiles and squints.
And seeing it as only him, she closes the window.
But it doesn't matter.
There's no way of hurting a man who drinks.
His wife floats in his pockets.
His father twists open the cap.
His mother whispers, drink, drink.
He moves on down the street.
There are times when I feel obligated to speak.
I take my hands from my pockets.
I slide my glass away from him.
In earnest, I'll say something, anything, the weather, my son.
And he'll argue at me from someplace I can't know,
because I'm not a drunk.
Perhaps when I stagger home, my wife
screams to shut up, come to bed like a man.
My face reddens.
My shoes drop.
I burrow into her flesh.
But a drunk is like a cloud, is like a ship that
sinks but never drowns, is like a feather bed.
Already it is noon.
His mother and his father are half-gone.
He's weightless now.
I shouldn't waste pity on a drunken man.
At night in the bar, I am his weakness, his hope,
and his family.
If I argue back, if I arm wrestle him,
if the bartender is embarrassed by my antics,
it's time to go home, go home, go home to my noisy wife.
I made it up my wife is not noisy at all.
[LAUGHTER]
Next poem is called All That We Try to Do.
And it's the title poem for this manuscript.
The situation is the speaker is sitting on the second story--
another second story poem--
is sitting on the second floor of a house
and looking out at the ocean and the boardwalk
and his two great uncles, who are sitting on the porch
underneath.
All That We Try to Do.
I have been thinking about love, how hard it
is to remember how to fall in love,
how love has the frankness of giving in
and the firmness of logic.
And yet, when I tried to discover this order,
I noticed far down on the beach, the swimmers testing
the water, which must have been colder than the air in winter.
And I noticed on the porch below me,
the two elderly brothers, my great uncles,
staring at the girls on the boardwalk
and, when the sun was right, at boats
sailing on the sea beyond.
Up in my shared rented room behind the window,
I could remember my love for a girl 15 years ago in summer.
Light through the trees on her black hair as she knelt
beside me, having just done something she didn't
know people did, even in love.
The effect would last for many years, though we never married.
The prickly, shy girl and the boy
who did not know what to say about love.
So we spit at a horse dragging a wagon of tomatoes and eggs
past his house.
I remembered wanting to make another kind of love
with her, not to the body but to whatever rose quietly
out of us.
When I looked up again, three teenage girls
in bikinis and sneakers were teasing the brothers.
The girls' poor postures accentuated their breasts.
My great uncles must have been thinking something, though they
neither moved nor spoke.
Each had a daughter and a son with children
who drove to this beach on weekends from their jobs.
The girl I was thinking about had a mouth too perfect.
So she rarely spoke.
That wasn't it, of course, but that's what I thought.
And all that we thought or did, all
that we tried to do to love each other,
what difference has it made?
As though seeing the swimmers in the cold water and the uncles
staring from the porch, as though remembering
that girl I loved such a long time ago calmed me so much,
life could be generalized.
But what, the boardwalk, the teenagers, the old horse
and the driver who yelled, tomatoes, eggs?
Was it too late to fall in love?
I wasn't even listening.
And this is the last poem and the end of my tea.
This is called Endless Love.
We read a story aloud about an endless love.
From it, a little time was missing.
And so I switched off the light.
You, in your gray robe for winter,
helped me off with my shoes.
The window shade was up, the light flat
and dim in late afternoon.
This, you said, is a perfect affair, nothing particularly
true or untrue, just a little missing time,
like the forgotten arousal of an old perfume.
You got up from bed and stared out the window.
You said you were watching two figures talking
beneath the trees.
The room was darkening.
And you looked back at me and shivered,
then looked once more at the tall, white trees
leafless, the snow falling on a deja vu,
remarking how endless and perfect its falling seemed.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]