And I want to close with "The Invisible Body"
with the last poem in the book.
And it has the epigraph of the definition from the Alaska
dictionary.
And I was translating a memoir I have of ours,
and I came across this term, regla lesbia, which I had never
seen in my entire life.
I had never ever heard of.
And so I thought, I know regla, that's rule.
What the hell is lesbia?
That's not how you say lesbian in Spanish.
So I tried to look up lesbia by itself.
It doesn't exist.
But, it doesn't-- it's nowhere in any dictionary by itself.
So I have no idea what the hell that is.
But it's interesting to know that this definition,
"flexible rule that may be adjusted
to anybody to be measured.
Compare regla fija, standard."
Now regla fija makes perfect sense to me.
Regla, rule.
Fija, fixed.
So as a standard, right?
Where does that lesbian thing comes from?
It's like, that's what I want to know.
If anybody knows that please talk me afterward.
But the reason it captured me, and I was like working on that.
I couldn't take any time out for my writing,
but I have these little notes that I keep on doing.
So I wrote the definition out knowing
that I would use it because it didn't
say flexible rule that may be adjusted to any object
to be measured.
It said flexible rule that may be it adjusted to any body
to be measured.
And I thought that is so intriguing because right
before this I had this weird thing.
I knew that I was about to write a poem because I kept hearing
in my mind was the invisible body, the invisible body,
the invisible body.
I didn't have no idea what the hell it was about.
And I had no poem cooking, I thought.
And then when I came across this I thought,
I wonder if this has to do with the invisible body?
So I just like copied it down and hoped
that the poem would come.
And in fact, the first and only poem
I've written on a computer.
And have long lines as a result.
It has seven parts, and I won't read the numbers.
Oh, there's a little bit of a reference here.
There's a 75-year-old poet that I mentioned,
and that is Marie Ponsot to whom I posed this very question.
I went to her as an oracle.
So that's who it is.
I'd like to fill that little piece of the puzzle in.
"The Invisible Body."
"In the garden, it's there.
Even when you're inside, you feel it
as though it were you standing naked among the weeds.
The tips of the bougainvillea bursting into flame.
Your nipples ruffled like the skin of a lake by a breeze.
You worship the invisible body like an old fashioned lover
from afar, loving the specificity
of space between you.
Sometimes at night it stretches out
on the empty side of the bed.
Stares at you the length of its invisible circles.
Every contour of your body not filled by you
is molded by the attentiveness of the invisible body whose
breath surrounds you.
It's more than prayer it wants.
More than language with its conditions.
The invisible body demands you invent
new senses to receive it.
New places on your body to marvel at its subtlety,
like the eyes of the deaf percussionist that
perceives sound.
The invisible body wants you to become a satellite dish,
tuned to what exists only because your body comes to it.
Like the woman who had her kitchen remodeled
to make room for the microwave she'd entered a contest for.
Then won.
When asked whether falling in love
was about inquisitiveness, about the ego,
the 75-year-old poet responded that the ego
had nothing to do with it.
It was the need for union with the beloved.
Rumi asks, who is it we spend our entire lives loving?
How then do you measure the invisible body,
which was this commitment, but is faithful?
Is it clear who the beloved is when
no clear body exists that can be measured against a standard?
The invisible body sometimes acquires a body.
It's so convincing.
It takes you a while to figure out it's
really the invisible body.
Like someone who has been reading your journal,
it has decoded from your petty, daily complaints
the open sesame that slides the stone from the hidden caves
opening and cleans you out while you sleep,
leaving a sarcastic note.
It wants you to know it was doing you a favor.
Besides, how else did you think you discovered
the cave's precise location?
When Aphrodite sharpens you, you sacrifice a little of yourself,
willingly, as the knife does so that you may become better
at it.
This is the point at which the invisible body
speaks in italics, the Ouija board of poetry.
In my mind, says the invisible body, that time capsule
shuffling through space, I hold in all the languages
of the world, your love, rush like holographic platters
to a table.
Steaming into the future long after you cease to shine.
The silver faces of your beloved bobbing
out of the darkness, the black velvet pillow of your life
on which you offer them review.
The invisible body is created out of your longing.
Your longing, compressing invisible molecules together
into an absence you recognize.
That is the way one blind man sees the world
after the fact in photographs he took
once he had passed through it.
Thank you very, very much.