This is the last poem.
Thanks for clapping.
[LAUGHTER]
It's better than throwing tomatoes.
[LAUGHTER]
This is a new book I'm working on.
These things are really handy.
They're dissertation binders.
This book, its working title is Wedding Day,
and after writing this book, I became a little uninterested
in pain and darkness, so there's plenty
of pain in here in the book.
I became much more interested in the difficulty
of maintaining happiness and inviting it into your life
and satisfaction.
And of course, this book, it's also
related to relationships, love relationships, and really
any kind of reconciliation of opposites.
So this first poem in the book is called "Nurse of Flame,"
and it begins in an operating room
but quickly moves out of it.
And what we have to be willing to do
is be in an operating room where they're doing a heart
transplant, and then there's a box
that they bring the heart in into the room
and that's full of ice and stuff,
and so what you have to be willing to do
is dive into the box.
And under the box is the woods.
Under the ice in this box is the woods where
this poem takes place, so that's the kind of surreality of it.
And then it moves back and forth between the heart transplant
and also these woods.
"Nurse of Flame--" "Do you think the stories in here
in the nurses hurrying it into the transplant room,
the drama of the lifted heart, the doctors with their blades
and the thread to mend it.
The metaphor-- as in, my heart is dead.
As in, please doctor, give me a new one.
But the story is not in there anymore.
The story is in the ice, in the pale green box
they've abandoned having plucked its valved cache.
In the donor box, water beads around its rim.
Everyone's so busy now.
You can dig your hands into the ice.
No one will see.
You can lift yourself into it, dig your whole body down.
Cold, white, that's how it is inside.
That's how it is in the woods where you're walking--
the crushed ice above you like a layer of sky.
Some sun under it, making it gleam.
Some weak eye between the lid of snow and the lid of white sky,
a pearl of cataract and white.
You're walking.
You've got your palm to your chest.
There's nothing in there, not a thing.
This is the beginning of the story.
As in, I have no heart.
As in, I have worked a long time at not having to love.
My world is crystal beauty.
The snow spins up like sugar from every black-barked tree.
You're safe in your borders as the trees are safe.
How the snow rests on them but does not penetrate.
As in my winter has lasted 34 years,
a deep February I have loved.
Above you, they're flushing the new heart with blood--
the breathing patient like a factory
bellows, driving the doctors on.
It's a wind through the trees, a sequined updraught filling
the air, guiding you into the stories turn where
you continue on, expecting nothing but the wood in snow.
You have worked a long time at not having to love.
You have worked a long time alone.
To see him there slumped at the foot of the birch,
such a bright dead man.
He's all sprawled out like straw.
You need him.
You're very scientific.
You think his ribs would make a fine grit.
Because it's something visual, something
aesthetic, seeing a triangle of fire
there in the double ladder of bone.
So you dig.
It's something to do.
It's surprisingly easy like he's made
of pink soil, flesh baking up on either sides of your burrowing
hands.
Until you've got it, the treasure,
the firm white fingers making a cage from the wine
dark frozen heart.
And the doctors are sewing the patient up,
and the patient sits up.
He's got new feeling.
You wanted the story to be in here,
where they do it all for you.
The literal healing, knocked out,
cut through, sewn up, and awakened.
The miracle of not having to feel it.
To simply wake up new.
For you are the doctor, the diagnosis.
You're sick.
You haven't any heart.
And because you're cold, because it's nothing,
instead you must be the nurse of flame.
I'm telling you this, but it's a wind
through the trees, a bit of snow in your eye.
You can flick it away.
You are the master hand with the matches,
thinking his ribs could make a grate.
A few twigs, dried leaves, a handful of needles
dropped from the pines, you stuff it all in there.
You strike the yellow tip of the match against the sand paper
and watch it flare.
The morphing of the yellow pearl that
is a spade of frame in your cupped hands.
You drop it in there, watch the leaves take.
You're very scientific making a fire in the man.
As in, why don't you warm me up?
Be the object of my affliction, which is that I am cold.
Which is that I have worked a long time at being alone,
never knowing the live likes of you.
And the patient is sleeping, and the doctors go home.
It's the end of the tale, the end
of the pretense that someone will fix you--
all you have to do is lie down.
Listen, this is the story.
Your breath on the fire in the dead man's chest.
The fire in their big as a fist.
You're so very cool watching it stretch
up and up to your frozen cheek.
Such a fascination, such an experiment, until his eyes
flick open and veer into yours.
And the void in the middle of the chest
ignites, and the thrill of flame goes coursing through."
[APPLAUSE]