Hi.
Thanks especially to Louise for picking this book
and inviting you to come here today
and this is about the largest audience
I've ever read poetry to, so thank you very much for coming.
Especially thanks to the Poetry Center
and to Jim Paul and Frances Sjoberg.
It's really nice to be here.
I'm going to read five poems.
I tend to write a little long.
Four of these poems are long, one isn't.
Four of them are in this book and one isn't.
One's new.
And I usually like to frame my poems a little bit.
So one of the things I was thinking about
was, the title for the book is In the Surgical Theatre
and it was a title that came late to the book.
I called it all sorts of different things.
And so, I was thinking about the word surgery recently
and I decided to look up its etymology.
And I was interested in it.
It comes from the ancient Greek and my Greek is horrible.
So correct me "kairo ergia".
"Kairos": hands.
"Ergon": work.
So that surgery actually means working
with the hands with scope.
And the modern definition is of course
to open up the body to cut, extract with the impulse being
to heal.
And I realized that actually really informs my approach
to poetry.
Each poem feels like an act of surgery.
An attempt to open up some kind of outer surface or outer body
to find what has been hidden.
In the act of poetry the outer body
is poetic as in a central metaphor or image.
And what has been hidden for me is psychological, i.e.
the motivation for the image or metaphor coming to mind.
In colloquium today I was talking
about how most of my poems begin with an image,
and I don't know why it comes into my head.
And so for me the act of writing is
trying to encounter the unconscious reasons for why
the images, often surreal, come into my head.
And this has bearing on the first poem I'm going to read,
which is called personal history and I
feel like I have to give you some autobiographical detail.
A lot of this book has--
was driven by-- when I was in New York City
I became sort of a surgery-filiac.
I became really just my mind was inundated
with images of the open body.
The chest being open and for some kind of Revelation of I
wanted to get into hospital rooms
and look at open heart surgery.
I just became fascinated by this and I kept
thinking what is wrong with me.
And I realized and it seems obvious.
But at the time, it was not available to me
that I had surgery when I was six days old.
I had part of my intestine removed
and I was in an incubator for the first two months
of my life.
And I began to think that maybe I should
do some writing about it.
So the first poem was called personal history.
And one of the difficulties in writing about this topic
is the difficulty of writing autobiographically
about pain, which almost seems like a cliche at this point.
So I was trying to find other ways
of talking about personal pain.
And I became interested in--
I was born in 65, which is the year that the Vietnam
War was escalated.
And so I became interested in the relationship
between being on a surgical table in 1965,
at the same time that soldiers and civilians were being killed
in this place that was far away from Los Angeles
where I was born.
So this poem moves in and out of a hospital nursery
and a battlefield in Vietnam.
Personal History.
Like lifting a curtain.
Magic chest.
Open it up.
See the baby inside?
The tubes twisting out of the wrists and ankles,
trickles of blood where the needles go in.
Soft machines inhale, exhale.
The plasma bag dripping the minutes.
Moisture beading on the rim of the glass.
The drip bags hang heavy as flowers, droplets
collecting like dew, like time.
The bodies of fruit, the baby's inside it,
ripening in its own steam.
Follow the yellow food flowing in like water.
Bruises flowering round the entering tubes.
Reach in with your latexed hands through the humid air
and lift the skin over the belly, where
the intestines coil in the brackish water, rot running
through it, a blooded green.
The rotting wood, the moss, dripping luminous
to the jungle floor.
A fever of banana decaying.
Plains.
Orange smoke billowing from the napalmed river,
flaming and slowing to the sea.
The plasma bag bleeding the minutes.
If you'd listen to me before, you'd know what I was saying.
You'd know that I was saying the upraised scalpel,
a glint in the light.
The upraised scalpel, the brush of a wing, invisible.
Because I have this compulsion to lift
the shirt over my distended belly to show you the scars.
Like a revealed religion, the cross,
the X slicing into the skin, ave doctorus,
ave angelus, white caps floating like wings on the air.
Reach in.
Do you expect to find light here in this windowless room,
digging your thumb deeper and deeper into the hospital
nursery, to the dark stink in the bowels?
It's 1965.
The world's radiating out of it.
The tubes like spokes of a living wheel.
And are you connected?
Pale faced hovering over the incubator glass, pale moon
through galactic trees.
Boots tensing in the milk green mud, footprints, feet
swallowed.
It was the doctors, their scalpels
like steel green angels arching the knife that
could cut the rocks out of miles of river
snaked by the silent Viet-Cong.
Boys in rags up to their necks in the malarial water,
holding their guns up high.
Don't you see how every time I look
between the scalpeled flaps pinned back
to the sides of the belly, it's war rotting inside?
Is this why it's important to tell you
how the baby lays strapped with its belly sliced open,
doctors plunging their hands in it's
six days old to remove a gangrenous alien?
And the boys croaking, don't take my leg,
doc, don't take my leg.
And the boys with their intestines
sprung out in loops, Mr. Johnson's can of snakes.
For so long, I thought surgical white
was the color of the soul.
I've been floating for years in the Albanic air
around the hospital nursery, above the orange smoke
billowing from the napalmed river,
huts collapsed into palm fronds and fire.
And the people staggering away to lie burned
and bleeding in the soft haired ferns curling
around the incubator glass.
Is this how I can tell it, how it can make sense?
By placing it in history?
Doctor, do you know what it's like to be connected
as flesh to machine, to be fed not by the nipple,
but by the needle cutting into the veins of the ankle?
To never be handled by a bare hand,
to never look in a face that is not masked, to never feel air
not enclosed by a box?
And don't we live this way every day,
gloved, and masked, and dying?
I'm trying to figure out why it's important to show you,
because I have this compulsion to rip
the shirt from my distended belly and show you the scars,
like the botched job of a drunken butcher X-ing drippily
into the skin.
Do you know what I am saying?
Nurses swoop and hover, cold birds in the tropical air.
In the sick world on the sick day on which I was born,
sick, and dying, rotting tuber in a glass,
was there someone trying to heal himself,
sutured dreaming tears?
That person is the guiding angel lifting now
over the stucco roofs of the white hospital
where I was born, having hovered there
for so very long while the ghost of me
kept me burning in the glass.
Unstitch my deepest scar, and find the baby
on the cold chrome table.
Descend through that ravine of bleeding flesh,
and look up at the people circling
like gulls in the humid air.
The medics, the nurses, the mothers, and fathers,
generals, and presidents hovering above the stink
of ripeness and death.
If you looked inside them, would there be suffering?
The capacity or desire to heal through suffering.
If you took the scalpel and opened them up,
would there be the baby vital inside?
I want to see it arriving now out of the blood rich sky,
fat and shining as if the healing were not
from the outside in, as if the world were sick,
and the tubes radiating out in a corona of ribbons
of fiery light carrying all life's innocence
through the sickness of the world.
Oh doctor, angel, person healed, do
you think this is grandeur to see myself
as an avatar of healing?
To see in the sick child the fever of the world,
and to say to the people in the distant air circling
and circling like planets caught,
the fires of their own history's wreckage,
come down into the burning.
Feel it, so you cannot live it anymore.