So this is a poem that I was very, very lucky
to have the Poetry Center do a broadside of,
in a very limited edition.
And it's quite beautiful, and I hope you all
get a chance to see it, although perhaps it's not public.
I don't know.
Do we have one here, or no?
Here.
I have one here for you.
Oh yeah.
You can go see Mildred.
She'll show it to you.
[LAUGHTER]
So the poem's called "The Moon in Time Lapse."
And this is a new poem.
There's a poem of Frank O'Hara's and I wish
I could remember it, where he does--
oh.
I can almost remember the lines, "the moon--
the moon, like the river--" no.
Wait a minute.
"Kisses, kisses like the moon that runs like a river
through girls."
And I thought, oh, that's cool.
That's almost like a triple metaphor, simile thing,
you know?
[LAUGHTER]
And I thought, I could do that.
[LAUGHTER]
I think I can actually do it better.
OK.
So this is called "The Moon in Time Lapse."
So that maneuver happens, that kind
of very difficult dismount, actually
happens at the beginning of the poem.
And this is a poem about-- so I there's
so many things in this poem to explain.
My brother and I, we used to like to put pieces of metal
into electrical sockets and see what would happen.
[LAUGHTER]
And our favorite objects were these erector set--
Oh god.
--pieces because they were really straight,
and they got really nice and black.
And you know, so this is a little bit about that,
though this is not about--
this is-- there's a dinner fork that figures in this one.
Anyway.
And the other thing that you need
to know about this, Fanny Ardant is the wonderful French actress
who I have--
so I'm going to have a whole book of poems about actresses
that I have crushes on, and this is the second one
in a series, so Fanny Ardant.
Yeah.
I think no-- Scarlett Johansson is nothing
compared to Fanny Ardant.
[LAUGHTER]
"The Moon in Time Lapse."
"The moon in time lapse, sliding over skyline,
the way a remote Frisbee might wheel through air
as slowly as a banjo once floated
across the wide Missouri River in my mind, when as a boy,
the devil to pay permitted me to dream up my getaway from home,
far from my parents' witch-y vigilance
and the wine barrel cellars of their household.
This after my experimental stuffing of a dinner
fork into a light socket in the green gazebo
under backyard grapevines.
That fuse box, blown and blackened,
was the bliss of departure.
It was thrilling, but sometimes I have to stop to touch my life
and see if it's real.
How surprising to find that I wanted so much,
and mostly got it
My fantasies are fewer now.
One involves living through a day without resentment.
The other getting seated next to gorgeous Fanny Ardant
on a puddle jumper.
No need to see my life as a story the world has to read.
No need for sentimental mooning and nostalgia.
Blessed with a bit of amnesia anyway,
I don't recall much of what went down.
I know that it's engraved there, on some cellular level,
and that I can't command the consequences.
Like a spider that's climbed atop a survey
stake in a bulldozed field, I feel slightly truer
in any case."