Finally, I'd like to read the last poem
in this book They Feed They Lion, which is another love
poem to my wife again.
I had a strange experience with my first book, the guy who
published it wrote me and he said it's weird how you
make discoveries in your life.
The guy wrote me and he said it's going to take me longer
to print this book than I thought,
because I've run out of capital I's.
[LAUGHTER]
And I thought well--
the first book I this, I that, I, incredible unrivaled egotism
of the first book, and so I had to wait another year.
When I proofread this book I kept coming across the word
breath over and over again.
And it became clear to me that I was obsessed with breathing,
really.
It sounds dumb when you say it, but it
kept coming up in my poems all the time and I said,
Jesus I never knew that.
And so I did just kind of fired a crazy idea in my brain
and this poem came very quickly and it's
the favorite poem of my best friend Robert Mezey, who
had many friends in this audience, an extremely
beautiful man and a great poet, I think,
and he was very excited about it.
So I'll always love it, because he loved it.
It's a very simple poem.
It takes place in the Sierras.
"Breath."
Who hears the humming of rocks at great height?
The long steady drone of granite holding
together, the strumming of obsidian to itself.
I go among the stones stooping and pecking like a sparrow,
imagining the glacier's final push resounding still.
In a freezing mountain stream, my hand
opens scratched and raw, and flutters strangely,
more like an animal or wild blossom in wind
than any part of me.
Great fields of stone stretching away under a slate sky.
Their single flower, the flower of my right hand.
Last night, the fire died into itself black, stick by stick
and the dark came out of my eyes flooding everything.
I slept alone and dreamed of you in an old house, back home
among your country people, among the dead,
not any living one besides yourself.
I woke, scared by the gasping of a wild one,
scared by my own breath and slowly calmed,
remembering your weight beside me all these years and here
and there, an eye of stone gleamed with a warm light
of an absent star.
Today in this high clear room of the world,
I squat to the life of rocks jeweled in the stream
or whispering like shards.
What fears are still held locked in the veins
till the last fire?
And who will calm us then under a gold sky that
will be all of Earth.
Two miles below on the burning summer plains,
you go about your life one more day.
I give you almond blossoms for your hair,
your hair that will be white.
I give the world my worn out breath on an old tune.
I give it all I have and take it back again.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]