Thank you.
I think.
It's true about the ferret, though, and the mice.
How did you remember that after all these years?
I once shared my bed with a ferret without meaning to.
And the story isn't half as interesting as the fact,
so we'll just leave it right there.
Thank you all for coming tonight.
And thank you to the Poetry Center
for asking me to come from Pennsylvania.
This is called "On the Seventh Anniversary of the US
Invasion of Afghanistan."
"Your body is a white pallet covering a sacrifice of gills.
Some moons clement misanthropy.
I do not mean it does not love us,
only that inside the ash gold camber physics makes,
your breath exerts a gravity trapped in winter's porcelain
teeth through which hunger, like some history, keeps appearing.
The dogs run round and round the salt well of your hair,
barking.
I almost wrote banking.
In the language of fur coats, something already
dead and ornamental, a bamboo grove in January,
offering its own guided tour of the war.
Its broad cranium.
Its massive hips.
Sometimes I think we are all figures in a portrait war
is painting.
Other times, the canvas on which war paints.
If I say devotion is a candle in the shape of a bell,
you are already 6,000 miles away from the neighboring place
setting, a French forest through which
soldiers sight my sister bent low over thrust smoking flare.
I like to imagine it, in this penultimate moment,
as a breathing thing that turns in current with eyes
that magnify, that feels pain after all.
Scientists now maintain what we call darkness, it calls desert.
Before language, there was this idea of language.
To record the empathy, the mirage, the attractions
of both chance and surgery.
Of body to bomb.
The chapped hand of the one who stoops now to trouble
this water."