I know a lot of you are artists, writers.
And in the spirit of that, I want
to read this very particular poem, that I originally
wrote actually for Arizona Commission on the Arts.
And this is about gathering artists.
Don't try.
It's hard.
That's what this poem is about.
It's called On Gathering Artists.
And it has an epigraph, "Who does a job well and very well?
These are the artists, those curious lights.
We are cobblers of the song and barkers of the carnival word.
We are tailors of the light and framers of the earth.
We fish among the elements and hunt the elusive green
in gray and blue.
We drink forbidden waters and eat an invisible food.
In this time of electronic-mail and facsimile conversation,
we send as our voice the poem, the bridge, the circuit,
the cure, whose electricity is made from dreams, whose song is
sung in the colors yet unnamed, drawn
from the solitary etudes of the soul
and given up in tender to the world.
How easy to spend a day writing a poem?
How hard to spend a life writing 1,000?
A poem, a bridge, a circuit, cures, laws, bowls,
the warp and weave and waft of iron and paper and light
and salt. We labor for a lifetime
but take every day off.
Who knows what to make of us?
We are not the rib cage but the legs.
We are not the steering wheel but the headlamps.
We gather happily, if not often.
We can't sit still.
We hurry off.
Goodbye to us, hello to us, a tip of the hat to us
as we go about the drumming of our stars."