The first poem that I want to read
is a poem called "Shall We Dance?"
And it's actually a letter that I wrote to a friend
sometime back.
Shall we dance?
Shall Yul Brynner approach your town
and sling his Winchester Model 94 over his shoulder
and laugh Stroman's laugh and erupt
into gunfire and catcalling, while his hands rub
against each other with precision.
He always says that with precision
and then he grins and shoots a town in effigy.
On his estate, we used to watch him make papier mache animals
for days, adjusting the horns of the water buffaloes
to look startlingly authentic in the hot midday Texas sun.
Then, we would gather at the Bay window
and watch you shoot those paper animal effigies to smithereens,
while he laughed and laughed until he would fall down.
Watching the shreds and bits of animal paper falling away
into the room, getting swept along into the fields
where real animals grazed goats.
Yul always had goats, so that he had something
to eat up all the paper that he would
shoot all over his fields.
It made sense to us, all of us except young Jesus
who never showed up.
I can't say where he was at those times,
maybe moseying around the village square bumping
into people saying excuse me, if my mother is looking for me,
would you please, tell her I'm in my father's house.
But of course, most of the people he bumped into
were little children being led by their mothers
and their mothers would usually pull the children away and look
back nervously on Jesus.
Wondering what child would have such bloodshot eyes and why
on Earth would be wearing a weird loin cloth
with tahini stains on his seat.
[LAUGHTER]
That was a really good friend.
This one is called "America Is One Dog"
and it begins with a quote by Wallace Stevens from the poem
For an Old Woman in a Wig.
Are you then fonder of the circumference
of Earth's impounding than of some sphere on which
the mind might blunder?
If you, with irrepressible will abounding
in wish for revelation sought out the unknown new
in your surrounding.
We're thinking about what it would be like
if our country with all its people and animals
became a dog.
If all beings in our geographical region
became one single dog.
What dog?
German shepherd, Jack Russell.
And what traits would we run, bite, snooze?
In our decision, we'll have to account
for the Painted Desert's rattlesnakes, various types
of salamanders from the forests and bogs of Maine and New
Hampshire.
All the dogs themselves and their personalities
in a strange move they're given by those who own them.
Also the computer programmers from Stanford and Columbia
Universities plus the flapjack and Burger flippers
and all the Waffle Houses in Tennessee.
The little mites and fleas living
in the dreadlocks of itinerant post Grateful Dead
heads and the most elderly and close
to death members of Alaskan carrion birds.
And the guy who did the camerawork
for the scene in Reservoir Dogs or hyper--
or Harvey Keitel suddenly, horrifically, tragically
finds out that Tim Roth is in fact a cop.
All living relatives of Jimi Hendrix and all the girls
kept as pets by the children.
The ones that have wheels to run on.
The bears will be shot this year by tobacco chewing Virginians.
The migrant Mexican-Americans of North Carolina
who picked the tobacco and the answer Nantucket.
I've got one that is a--
What I did, was I took one of Rilke's--
Rainer Maria Rilke, the German poet's sonnets
and I broke it all apart.
And I took all the different parts of the speech
and made them into stanzas that way, so you'll see.
So most of the transitional words are in the first stanza
then I have nouns and adjectives in another stanza,
you'll see what I mean.
And a who from this almost--
and of her through the--
and of that inside had now--
and then her in that where and that this her your out before
almost to me herself my.
It girl, harmony, song, liar, form, bed, fear, meat, sleep,
everything trees distances heart,
I want bears, I never meadows, spring.
She world God sleep, she desired, she death
sing new song itself, she grew up the-- and so
could that ever my.
Single diaphanous, awesome, deeply all first perfect.
The-- so no effort to see and stepping appear made
was touched, seized, slept, felt singing, slept, was had,
weak, a room slept, is discovered
consumes, his vanishing.
Ah, will.
And I have one more, which is actually a little mini
experiment that I did with Tim Peterson, who was a member of--
for a long time in Boston.
And he and I wrote this together just alternating lines.
And it's really short, it's called
You're Going Out to Fight Crime in That?
The poor bedraggled men outside the window
crawling in the snow, hide wires, and rifles
quickly below frail shattering torsos, winches in corridors,
some kind of trance contraption, and wishing dogs
hunt you down like a cursed animal.
The reluctant hero appears draped with cues
from a theatrical revue: a trusty but shivering servant
girl.
[APPLAUSE]