Something about my first book is I
think I mentioned all the themes in my first book
that I probably will ever come to use or something.
And this poem got into the theme of the other
in the sense of the inner self, which I really went
into again in my new section.
I really, really played with that.
I'd like to read a part of the long poem
"Elements," which has really got 16 sections.
I'm just going to read five through 10.
The whole poem in all was sort of a first impressions
of Arizona after having been here three years.
It's, again, sort of using the road image and sort of just
impressions from different places.
Wild stallion voice off the far hills after a mare.
I hear your call, listening above the saguaro and ocotillo
as a searchlight from the air base
shoots its stars leaving tufts of white clouds.
Long after the barrage, a pinto sighing,
entices only shadows in a fall storm.
His silence is so clear.
I feel oceans of patience foaming into madness.
Near Scottsdale, Mexicans picked half the Pima cotton
before falling of sunstroke.
Their tan bodies lie now fleeced in white fibers.
They are speechless.
On beaches somewhere in Asia, far from their missions,
machine gun men lie buried in equipment.
I have seen his mate.
She has powerful haunches, but stumbles crossing shell craters
in New Mexico.
Slower than usual, my branches tuned by the wind,
shade graves growing moss.
The cool feeling relaxes, roots sinking down
to mingle with bones of cliff dwellers, who
raise corn in this desert.
When sun peaks in Yuma, there is nothing to do.
Though I would flow in a heat rising like water swirling
in a wind at Mazatlan for when body is calmed,
the mind walks on water.
Not out of the thirst known when the barrel
cactus is dry, but from looking too long at the perfectly
still.
Alas, red flame ignites in the sky.
Days last, mood wanes, the eyes squints.
A gray cloud, the final light settles.
Out of their clouds of soil, the long horned beetles
emerge the tread on the unshut eye.
To think of the body still when the rot of it
sinks into the vine that twists out of its root,
a cemetery jammed with spires and squares is
a city that mocks the skyline.
One corpse undiscovered in Sonora.
Even the marrow dries.
One rides a field.
Desert birds you cannot name scream as they hunt
the foothills.
These streaks of a desert burial follow him
as thoughts of a public funeral, as routes
taken from intensive care units, calling from some bitter pride
to be quietly separate.
A white skull unmoved.
By dawn, the morsels will be gone.
Buzzards must tear through clothing for liver and heart.
The sun starts its cremation.
Accelerating, wheels barely touch the road.
Telephone poles along fence.
On a cycle, this is the highway.
Year '69, storms of gnats clogged the nostrils.
Hands rise from the handlebars.
Cat smeared into the pavement.
Dogs bloody by the roadside to be removed.
Utah time and the Dead Sea, races of people
insensitive to salt, torn floating, bellies to the gulls.
Salt rubbed in the wound.
Spirit robed in humidity walking in the trail of the body
past its deserted homes.
Arrival, the coyote's gorged reach the salt lick.
A doe, my mistress runs off.
I turn whimpering back into Earth.
The plain verse of the '70s begins.
Well, for the moment, that's all I want to read off
of the East by Southwest book.
I guess it didn't get around to explaining
most of those titles.
[CHUCKLES]