And contrary to what the newspaper article said today,
I don't write a lot in forms.
This is one of the first attempts in form.
I also wrote a terrible villanelle, which
I might read for you later.
Really bad.
I was never interested in form.
And suddenly, in the last few years,
I've gotten really interested.
One of the things I've been doing lately,
which I realized I've been doing all along,
is writing poems about miniatures, tiny things.
And it's something that--
I don't understand why I do this,
but it's something that I keep coming back to again and again.
And one of the poems I wrote is about a Persian miniature,
those little paintings that were painted,
I don't know, 16th, 17th century, very small,
maybe six to eight inches large, the whole size of it.
And the wonderful thing about these miniatures,
these paintings, is that you can't look
at the whole thing at once.
You have to wander through it.
You can't look at the whole thing and say, oh, I get this.
Your eye has to wander through as though it's
in some kind of garden.
And this is "Persian Miniature."
The one thing about these poems, when I'm describing miniatures,
is that if it was just description,
I think the poems would be really boring.
They'd be boring for me to write,
because it's just reeling off an image after an image.
But I try to start with the image,
and then I see what happens after that,
if there's some kind of story that those images are telling
me.
And here's one.
Oh, the thing that got me to write this poem
was that the paintbrush that these miniatures used
were made of two hairs plucked from the chest of a baby
squirrel.
That did it.
"With two hairs plucked from the chest of a baby squirrel
and no lapses of attention, the brush of the miniaturist
freezes an entire population.
Within each quarter inch surveyed and magnified,
a dozen flowers puncture the spongy ground.
And even the holes where tent poles
stuck bare ornamental weeds.
Upon a wooden balance beam, this picture's equator,
a cat is prancing.
All the other animals are eating or being milked,
three spotted goats, a beige suede camel,
half a donkey's face lost in an embroidered feed bag.
Under an enormous canopy, seven elders in pajamas
radiate like spokes around the bridegroom.
The whitest beards frost the elders chins.
Outside, a fat iron cauldron squats
upon a fire, whose flames spike up little golden minarets.
A kneeling boy pours coffee, his pitcher
handles the size of a human eyelash
but larger than the bridegroom's mustache.
It's a wedding.
Is the bride asleep somewhere?
The bride's attendants hover in tiers like angels and heavens
scaffolding.
But heaven here is the Hanging Gardens.
Or maybe the tent poles hold the heavens up.
Lappets of a tent fold back on a woman
holding her soft, triangular breast to an infant's mouth,
the rug she sits on flapped straight up
behind her like wallpaper.
One sixteenth of an inch away, a ram
is tethered to the picture frame.
But where's the bride going to fit?
In the left hand corner of the painting,
across what little of the sky remains,
two geese fly in tandem, pulling two wheels,
two mechanical knotted clouds.
Maybe they're pulling a storm behind them.
Crouched, swirling above the human event, if the storm fits,
it could ruin everything, smash up the whole abbreviated acre,
flush the bride from sleep, while the bridegroom sweeps it
all away, entering her innocent tent like thunder,
and shatters the distance he's had to keep."