So that was my attempt at purity at the end there.
Yeah, we were talking about last night, also
about purity in poems and silence.
And I think of it as that place where
wisdom and mystery comes from.
And unfortunately, I'm also attracted
to a kind of heavy social pollution,
a kind of heavy social detail because that's
the world that we live in and that's
certainly the world that I live in, and I'm attracted to it.
I like it.
I'm an American.
It's crapola.
It's Philip Roth's great term.
Like, it's crapola.
So I have this sort of slightly divided sense
about my own poems in relationship
to the purity thing.
On the one hand, I very much like the impure,
and in another way, I'm also really attracted
to these moments that are inexplicable, mysterious.
And I think of them as a kind of source for some kind of wisdom.
Maybe they're just silence and I'd
like to believe they're wisdom.
The wisdom is there.
What is it [INAUDIBLE] says?
Wisdom comes from the darkness.
I'm not going to be able to remember it.
Just thinking of something.
It'll come back later, tonight at about 3 o'clock
in the morning.
All right, so this is a poem that Alison actually referred
to in her introduction.
And it's a poem for the poet Lynda Hull
who was a friend, a friend of other people in this room.
Wonderful poet.
I keep writing to her.
I think in-- I can't remember what book it is, but maybe
"Bewitched Playground."
I don't think it's "Sugartown."
I have another poem for--
so I was thinking about analogies actually,
and the thing about analogy that I realize
is that a good one, the dead person
gets to speak back to you.
Yeah, so I had written one, but it didn't
allow her to speak back to me.
"To Lynda Hull"
The biographical is boring tho you
tried to refute this by charging language with currents
streaming into back-lit gentian-colored chiffon,
seraphically shabby hotel rooms, ruinous taxi rides, Puerto
Rican transvestites, jailhouse conversions, brocades
and mah-jongg tiles.
And even if it sounds heroic, there
was no real drama in the way I carried you over my shoulder
and into the emergency room one September night.
It's a trick called the fireman's hoist,
and was taught by a diligent father
to his two sons in the hope that if necessary
it might be of use one day.
It was.
Before they pumped the drugs from your stomach
with a concoction of emetics and pharmaceutical charcoal,
the on-duty resident asked what meds you might have taken.
Everything, I said.
Reality is sometimes as clear cut as that.
You survived, though I can't claim to have saved you.
You died on a dark road months later
and several weeks after Simone was born.
But there's something I would like to confess.
I was a little afraid your spirit
might enter my daughter then.
There was a square of thrift-store fabric,
you'd brought to us a few panels of worn
quilt coverlet, the scrap of disintegrating energies.
Why else would you have given it to mark her birth?
It seemed a remnant of your life wishing to be transferred.
So I put it where it still is, at the bottom of the cedar
chest, a place where it would not be destroyed,
but its energies contained at rest.
That, as you would say, was very Rivard, and, yes, silly
and superstitious.
Though cedar is still used for coffins and small boats,
both common means of transport.