And I love saying I'm going to read five hours,
so just settle in.
OK.
So this is the first hour.
And so I graduated from minutes to hours.
After my daughter was born, I was often
given an hour to write.
And so I would go down to my desk,
and I had nothing to write.
There was no brain left in the body--
had come right out with everything else.
[LAUGHTER]
Just dropped right out.
But so what I started to do is, I
was thinking about the minutes, and now time
had a different kind of connotation.
It wasn't the body as a clock creating an entity.
It was this other kind of entity,
and the baby was up-- she had moved into time.
And so I just started doing these--
I decided to do sketches of hours.
So this is within an hour.
Sometimes again, a few seconds off.
And whatever language arose in relation to the hours--
what you see around--
and I think of the drawing itself as these are--
I don't think of it as separate.
It's not like this is the poem, and that's a drawing there.
This is the poem.
And how they appear in the book is,
I typed up what I think of as the language
residue of the hour, and so I'm just going to read--
I'll show you them, but I won't read all of them.
I'll read a few, and I'll start with this one.
"First Hour's Residue."
12:50:09 PM, the hour begins.
When I see a button at the middle of the hour,
flower holding the hour's fabric folds in place.
How I see I drew a flower to rhyme
with hour in sound and shape.
And that its eye, the empty center,
a wind suckles the hour's clothe-less intentions.
Because I am told the hour is directional,
the eye becomes entangled in an arrow.
I had thought to make a marker.
Indicate the first line to fit the structure of an hour.
But that hour's arrow was overtaken by other arrows.
One misstep will ruin this hour.
1:24:50 PM.
Now, I have filled the hour's outer petals with arrows.
The baby cries.
She is hungry.
I do not suffer symmetrophobia.
I see symmetry and asymmetry unfold
that is just like an hour.
It's a Moore's arrows as gleeful spermatozoa rushing to me.
I see this corner pedal of the hour peeking
like an ancient wave, a shark's fin, or an antique prow.
Inside our capsized Es, curled needles gleaming golden sharp.
Three scales on the minutes like those
on the round-scaled spearfish whose tail is bright
glowing blue.
I wrote minute meant minutes inside an hour blue.
My inside minutes are getting slap happy.
Divers gasp for air.
I think seconds are peeling off the hour or petals floating
into a vast distance.
Overhead, the floorboards creak, the humans
I love and live with.
There seem to be spikes at the edges of my hour
like a gold-tipped fence.
Who could climb an hour's fence?
Who fall into the hole?
1:50:48
And I'll just show the Second Hour.
I'm not going to read the Second Hour.
There are little intervals between the hours,
so I'm going to read rather than the hour and interval.
We've graduated to hours and the folds between minutes--
the crumpled folds between hours.
They keep adding dimensions to space, not time, why?
The folds-- the felt folds where the folds
between minutes and hours.
You may wish to mention the old buggers in the bathtub.
No, thanks.
The night line descends.
Carcajou, you wolverine of night.
An hour, an iron collar relaxing into the undone threads.
Night-- night's itself.
A morning, an hour arrives tense as street lights reflected
in rain gutters.
An hour shines like a wound.
The debris of hours accumulated in the face.
An hour like a wrecking ball.
An hour in mid-demolition.
A pirouette performance.
An hour smashing, wounding the face.
You speak only of an hour's destruction.
Here, spicules were built, assembled into a needle-like
house--
transparent, airy, gorgeous, constructed
to withstand all time.
What?
Says body.
This hour is--
I don't know if you recognize, but what
the background is, it's the printout from an amniocentesis.
So it's this really weird thing.
You get a photograph in the mail of your child's
genetic structure.
So it's like what's going to be built from this?
This is what you get.
And you can see that I knew that I
was going to get a girl because there are two Xs and no Y.
And so with this hour, I took that photograph,
and made a collage of it, and sort of
did little imaginings of what would happen over each pair.
They don't really tell you which gene is mine,
and which gene is his.
I want to know.
And actually, this is a photograph
of her taken in a photo booth in Phoenix that
also got incorporated.
And then a little insect wing coming off
of what would have been her elbow.
"Third Hour's Residue."
3:44:45 We come to the dark double X and wonder--
what does a chromosome worry?
Whose genes carry ovary?
Make a face.
What name arrive on the face?
What shape?
When born, she drew a line to the first mother,
from whom was the first mother burned.
There were several shapes to edit--
a knot in the knee, a string of cancer.
These genes like loose squiggles of time.
I mean, twine, which will fray at the ankle--
time.
Go dust at the calf.
The hour does a face.
Unsquare the hour of its making.
Her elbow bleeds to a wing.
A sibyl propped on 22 pairs of evidence.
Part of an hour is erasure, like genotype stomping on phenotype.
A blur at the edges of the thought box and wet
paint around the caption.
Her microscopically visible aspects--
46, XX.
In her haploid cell, she sneezes to show she's--
the quote marks keep falling off her.
Ghosted the teeth of radiance.
Petals-- letters like petals.
The hour takes tweezers to its hairs.
4:46:35
"Fourth Hour's Residue."
Language hangs from the hour in crystalline repose.
To set it in motion, must we?
The hour's stalk is feathered and gay.
I saw it before it arrived, shoeless, helpless, speechless.
Medusa dripping poison A's, each B
a sting, a stamp because daylight savings saddens
the ghost.
It's amazing how hungry an hour can be.
Hand me something to pillow the hour.
Protect it from its own devouring minutes.
I had to do things to this hour, I would never have wished.
In the hour's-heart's garden of earthly delights,
a minute sat with gnashing teeth waiting on a rock.
The human drips from herself where she hangs in time.
Her minutes are bleeding.
Her bream a broken-mouthed minute, as if
the minute, as if the minute, broken-mouthed machine.
And that is the Fifth Hour.
And I'm not going to read the Fifth Hour.
I'm going to read that interleave,
and that will be the last piece I'll read,
and do we do a Q&A afterwards?
Do we?
Do-- Yeah?
Or no?
Short-- and then we'll do a short Q&A. Yeah, OK.
This house is a little haunted.
It's my body house.
Bones rising to the surface in the night,
sinking back before daylight.
What parent pain we carry several more than 40 years?
The way a crumpled can will flash
from the roadside in certain angles of light
like a flashing eye, or what derives of the desiring heart
blinking in the dark.
I guess, I'd say plurality bleeds in.
I emptied the body satchel out.
Of course, it was a womb.
Cat's claws, whiskers, hair nuts, snarl husks--
everything that collected in the sheets round to a fine powder
nearly erased by history--
a day's work.
We named her Evergrace.
She knits herself and everything head,
makes herself into a scary animal, a scarred star
or some blank thing from afar.
This was a girl trying all the things to get from baby to big.
The live cat claws the night for sounds like sharpened rain.
And now I stay here.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.