WEBVTT

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I'm going to read a
few short sections

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from a longer poem, called
"This World Without Miracles."

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And the speaker is a woman.

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It's about solitude--
learning to live with that.

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Waking in the dark-- the dark
takes on a kind of radiance

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and gives the trees an
elegant human shape.

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I hear cars approach from
miles away and celebrate

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the personality of engines.

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I imagine I hear our
neighbors breathe

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across our acres, the
bird-hearted pulse

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of the raspberry bush in bloom
and the armor of one mosquito,

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squeezing through one wire
square of bedroom screen.

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The day before you left,
weeding the garden,

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you look like Adam surveying
the world his first day out

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of Eden.

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I want to be that thin,
familiar rib you can't yank out.

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I want it not to be that
easy to rid yourself

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of what is most to be desired,
complex, misunderstood.

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Who can say desire
is not practical?

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The body fits.

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We wear it right out of
the store, or collide

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with it in the street, or in
the night, as if by accident.

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A friend writes, it occurs
to me I may be alone

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for the rest of my life.

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This does not terrify
me as it used to.

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After the divorce, I thought my
privacy a kind of punishment,

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having left her.

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Now I can appreciate my
empty time as a great luxury

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and fill it just by
looking at things.

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In a room alone, my paintings
seem to contemplate me,

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seem to have more of a right
to be in the room than I do.

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Not objects only-- the thin
chill of air in early evening,

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the angle of sunlight
narrowing on the floor.

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Never before to discover
I can enjoy myself so much

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is as much a shock to
me as falling in love.

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Would I bore myself--

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or worse-- would I knock
on the door of my own house

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to discover, simply,
no one was home,

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or the person living
there I didn't like?

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Always with others
inappropriately present,

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always that double vision--

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all the time I spent
seeing through their eyes.

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Their presence soften the
edge of my perception.

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Now I feel I am
learning how to grow

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into the space I was
always meant to occupy,

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into a self I can know.

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Navigating inch by inch with
a knowable landscape provides,

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I am like the astronaut,
spinning deeper into space,

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deeper into his mind,
hurtling towards darkness

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to celebrate the light
his world contains.

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A poet has just
committed suicide.

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There are reasons--

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I tell my students
anxious faces--

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you may not know.

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The slow poisons
working as the car idles

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start long before we
turn the engine on.

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I say, I think despair
sets the mechanism going,

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skin is palimpsest, the
child's face sunk indelibly

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into the face of the adult.

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There are no
questions, one cough.

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I have disturbed the
order of our class.

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I sit at the head of
the table, rocking

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on the hind legs of
my chair, like a woman

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teetering on the ledge of the
city's tallest public building.

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I'm afraid I've said too much.

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One hand is raised.

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A voice-- a first
tentative gesture.

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The rescue nets flutter
open, make room.

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I feel like the man in
the desert, approaching--

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always in his mind an oasis, not
yet knowing himself a survivor.

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One by one, he
carries on his back

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as if a man could lift
a weight like that.

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All he remembers of the
shapes of the world--

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a dish, an antelope,
a pillar, a stare,

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the snowflakes
architecture or repairs.

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And holding each, he
feels, in their contours,

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the beginnings of
tenderness and fear.

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I was raised to practice
such economy of feeling,

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the way my street at night
drew in its houses and trees

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like a breath.

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I wanted to be the air
between the mountains

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of my parents sleeping forms.

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I wanted to be the
air you could breathe.

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I live here where I live.

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I live in my body, which
is not a man's, but fear

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is a man does his isolation,
the journey in the dark

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were his desert is.

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I know that colors occupy the
darkness, the inconsistent

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clots of red, spasms of
violet, as the forest changes

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season on the hill below.

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And I know my blood cannot
reverse its current,

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or expect the sky to drop its
miracle of water or of manner

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right into my mouth.

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I cannot carry every
memory, so like the snail,

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I am learning patience--
my household on my back.

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Only my body can
move with grace--

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in its single room,
in its fixed space--

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that moves as I move, east or
west, its small space with room

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to spare.

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Living with my hunger,
I can name the fear.

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Four walls are four
walls anywhere.

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