Thank you, Allison, and also to all of you
for coming out this evening and celebrating
this book, and poetry, and language, and words, and songs.
And I also want to express my gratitude, too,
to the Arizona Press--
Arizona University Press.
And you know when they do a book,
you know it's going to be good, because they always
try to get the best work.
My poems are fairly short.
So I was working on this small little book
that I used to have.
It was a blue book, actually.
It was colored navy blue and I started writing poems in there.
So I started calling it Blue Book, these poems that
came out of that.
This is called "Blue Book Number 5."
"Half of your moon hangs on your side of the world.
Mine hangs outside my bedroom window,
where the cicadas sing the last of their summer songs
in the desert night.
Soon they will sing us into another season than leave us,
and I will be left to make my way, and you yours.
Where are the Billie Holiday songs
that will lift the heavy boot of our longing?
And where is the poetry to soothe our hurting hearts?
Yours grew wings and flew across the ocean like a butterfly."