Thank you.
All of you who've told me this week that you were looking
forward to tonight have made me feel
like I was coming to a birthday party for me instead
of a reading, and I appreciate that.
Thank you Poetry Center Director Jim
Paul for that beautiful introduction
and for adding my name to a list of amazing poets coming
this year for the poetry series.
The school newspaper today reported
that I said that someone else said, that the manuscript I'll
be reading from has themes of direction, loss, penitence,
duty, desire.
But at this point, it's at the level of rumor,
so you'll have to decide for yourself.
What I'm hoping is that you'll notice the ocean that
really occurs in the poems.
The ocean itself was a constant for me outside my window
as I wrote a lot of these poems in the summer of 1999.
And the poems in this book were finished, pretty much,
by November last year.
But I've worked with it, and my devoted readers,
Frances Sjoberg and Boyer Rickel have helped me in that process,
making it a book.
And I've also just let it sit, and whenever
I think of something just sitting,
I think of the Chinese Book of Changes, admonition,
to let three days pass whenever anything is important.
And that three days could be three hours, or three weeks,
or three months, or three years--
in this case, about nine months, three times three.
But I also think of those pies that
were left to sit out on the window sills,
in the illustrated version of the Mother Goose nursery
rhymes that my dad used to read to me
on the couch with my sisters.
Do you remember the one, I think it was, 47 blackbirds
baked in a pie, and when the pie was opened,
the birds began to sing.
And wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the king?
Tonight, you're the royalty.
You're the King.
And this is Desire Reclining.
"In Violet, Inviolate"
"The beauty of the previous year's now solemn memory--
what was honey colored, what was spoken by chance,
but contained a porch and an hour.
You, a weeping girl with illuminated eyes.
Your father, also small, offering an entree of stars.
I heard that the leaves were destroyed because they wanted
to live forever, that they threw away
their usual caution for commingling of hands and feet.
I'm sorry that I hurt you.
The moon props awkwardly against the tide, the ocean,
too loud outside my window.
We know what killed the feline was not
a miscalculation or a crisis of will.
We know that to mortify is a transitive verb.
There is no place to escape to.
Ashes mark the footpath of the one
who was hesitant or unguarded.
In review, everything will have gone well
until a single action makes a wasteland.
In a box called the devil's country favorites,
other disgraces could occur to us--
a forest grows freshly green after a fire.
Are the hills and mountains subject to spasms
of perfectability?
Are they alive with remembered phrases and coral ecstasies
resounding across a snow lipped canyon on a waning New Year's
day?
Steadfast, the mountain blunders into an act of keeping still
when it is time to keep still, but it
has trouble going forward when it is time to go forward.
First, we have desire in its box of solitude--
a sheriff to seduction, then the body with its hungers,
hoping to be tried.
The penitent's punishment is 10 million stones
because duration in time is the image of all that is powerful.
The ocean is violet and orange at its edges.
Dusk is the place to lie down and shrink effortlessly.
Where we sit, a hummingbird has decided
to take a rest, luminous on a branch protected from the wind,
provided the world does not end.
Years ago, in the maritime zone, more like lovers than friends,
we gesticulated along the promenade--
a brown spider worked at staying upright in dry sand.
A battered mango flipped, rolling
seaward in a wave rushing back.
Two versions of the end are at odds
in the story of the snake and its God--
lose and go after that which is lost.
No one can taste the darkness for you.
Go naked in procession with your flaws and candles.
Hang your harp on a willow.
Now that you are a captive, what is required is a song.
After a long walk, etched figures and red water lilies
among the beach rubble--
enough evidence that the righteous
worship a god of justice and anger.
Wounded, we line up for our cupful.
At the crucial moment, the law will
decree where to lay our heads--
harbor or willow?
Banishment or bondage?
Crossing the creek with the scorpion on its back,
the frog is stung.
Stinging, the scorpion knows the lack of beauty
and the certainty of sinking.
Mutually concerned with ethics, water, danger,
and the vocabulary of instinctive behavior,
their conversation lasted the length of the ride.
They both would have preferred the other mark solemnly
the spot where his own muddy toes or earlobes receded
from sight.
In an ideal world, where a few scattered hamlets
make for a civility with dry patches,
the continued forecast is overcast, clearing by midday.
The skin is stretched cleanly over muscle, organ, and bone.
The eye in its cap hidden from all
but the unforeseen invasions.
My old aunt falls from bed and slices her good eye
on the chrome edge of her chair.
We have heard the heroism of the ages rushing cleanly
toward the baby tossed from the burning building.
Your suffering days in the arroyos
told me that when we die for love courageously, tragedy,
we are not saved by the exercise of that courage.
Tears failing to honor and remorse,
what was ours or yours, are the armed forces
of repentance and improvement endlessly
on the scale of the eternal return.
Do we avoid both by being on guard and time?
Indeed, if time is the realm of gradual progress,
I am certain we will meet again on the pier by the river.
Nothing is pure or as clear as the soul, as they say.
Nothing is uncompromised and unprofaned.
In a morning of clipped vines and roses brought inward,
I cocked my ear windward.
A high school girl raped repeatedly
is told by her teacher that there is an emerald core that
has not been touched.
He opens a book of geological records and says,
here, here it is.
See.
What I heard you say is that we go
along thinking that what we are is inviolate
until, when we asked for the count, we are called up short.
You were wearing a sun gold sweatshirt
and offered me eggs, not like Nadezhda Mandelstam
offering Akhmatova the last egg in the house--
sweeter, more like I woke up hungry, and we were to go out."