OK.
So the reason there are images behind you
is that when I was working on this long poem.
This long, crazy, ridiculous project.
I was traveling around with a lot of images to,
initially, to instigate the writing.
And I soon realized that the images
were part of the project.
And so I thought I would just--
and so there are many, many images in here
and I thought I would just have them behind me as I'm reading
and so, occasionally, I guess, I'll just change the images.
These aren't necessarily the images
that are going with the portions of the poem
that I'm going to read, but I thought
it would be nice to have a little sense
of the artifact of the book, the sort of insulation of the book.
And I'm going to start--
so this is about 190 page poem.
It's in sequences that are not necessarily linear.
And when I say, here, in this very first line,
I'm writing from New York about California.
"It's OK here, but we don't have any sour grass,
not so many happy lizards in the sun,
seaweed sliding back toward licking the sea, sand
flies, sand fleas, jogging men nasty, naked along the beach,
and Joakim's oily eucalyptus combusting up toward heaven.
I was swimming in the black water underneath my breath
and then dragged by the seaweed vines and belts.
The water is yellow with sand and ecology, my friends,
are being punished by off duty fathers in tract houses.
They are not allowed to leave after dark.
My family is wily.
We live in derelict apartments.
Our government subsidized go everywhere at night onshore.
Oil rigs out in the water like lighted bird palace places.
In the dream of dying cephalopods.
Cuttlefish feathers and things invented by sound and light
like the great spangled fritillary monarch
and magnitude of scales.
What lies in inner and outer margins of such wings
that came with soft alarm like heartless light.
And the numberous thunder of veins.
Blue bellies in strange arrangement
break their tails and weedy nooses to grow back new ones.
Backs bend in the rows between crop dusted plants.
The little singing seeds sting the fingers
and stain them red, red.
Eagle shells crumbling under the eagles weight,
croaking at Cachuma Lake.
California did not hold its shape.
And the condors were laid end to end
to form a replica of California with photographs of balsa wood
and glue, which was later beamed to space from Big Sur.
This message is in regards to the gardens of the sea
graft in the scallops eyes bright amid its tentacles.
The fringe rich in fossil guts of hermaphroditic oysters
hanging out and kitchen middens.
A theater acted out on land masses between bivalves
motoring self-powered castanets fluttering and zigzagging
arcs and hungry bipeds.
This heroic fantasy is set in an ominous landscape.
A dark world that mirrors our watery arms and legs but not
our muscular hearts.
Have I been shaped like an animal, God?
Or have I been good?
Everything I know occurred in California.
And everything I know later.
Everything I know of California is
shaped like a piece of cardboard and smells
like the black plastic pitch that
stretches between Bakersfield and apricots.
Blue and green, and the penny arcade,
my dream is just like that.
1,000 miles long and deep into the otter ice water cliffs.
Almonds Fresno when I was nearly blonde and knees
straight as an arrow.
And my name was Dylan in the grass, blue grass.
When my homestead read, Mary of the Villas of the Vocables of
Conches.
Jalama ice plant in Spanish mosses.
At its Eastern boundaries of the ear,
without answer key or blue fig, California
at its goldenest gold, brim fullest bright of citron sun
when the blazing pollen falls all, all.
California blooms, pornographic, hysterical flowers,
loyal daughters of the revolution,
horses winning up state street stamped the independence
of California into the tarmac.
Chumash dancers with fancy feet but no state.
In One-Eyed Jacks, Marlon Brando and Karl Malden
will escape on steaming ponies in the beautiful Mexican girl.
And roar into that sleepy village just north of Salinas
and it's beautiful low Chinese dwarf cypress in a shady Glen.
And the villages of Chinese hoteliers.
Fisher people with gray eyes, railroad coolies
who bent their backs and did not break in filmy vista vision.
Salinas rises from its valley like a huge dusty mutt mottled
with lettuce and chemicals, not of trash
in the state's hallways.
I want to make you dream this just as you made me dream you
in a beginning of bundles and other beginnings slash endings.
Get up, you scum sucking pig, growls Brando
and plays a wild card."
You guys should see that movie, if you haven't.
It's really great.
That's what he says in my mind, but he doesn't really
say that in the movie, it turns out.
He says something like it.
I think it's the only movie that Brando directed.
I guess, Kubrick started it, and then
Brando took over, which is a really strange combination
already.
My father loved the movie because there's this close
up of Brando's chest--
I think it's somebody's hairy chest with a watermelon
seed in the hair.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, that's a make or break scene for a movie.
[LAUGHTER]
"Sidewinders and autumn siroccos.
Winos tell stories in the back with their hands.
The son comes home from a long trip.
The wino opens the car trunk, and there
is the girlfriend, dead.
And the father gets in the car and he drives.
He buys a shovel and he drives.
He buries her deep in the desert and he never says where.
This, he does not say to the son,
but maybe he buries her somewhere near Soda Lake
or Cadiz under the scurry and rasp of things in the desert.
Ah, haha, California's opening the refrigerator door.
What's in there?
Avocado?
Alfalfa sprouts?
And we're laughing our heads off in Goleta
because we just smoked a lot of pot and don't have any theories
but obliques on LA.
Evil, smog choked city to the South like black witchcraft
practiced next door.
A rotten pot, olla podrida, of those city's
historically lousy with devils.
The politician stands in sunlight.
Vice, like an oil swimming at the surface of his body.
All of human history is lying in the grass, in nature,
there is nothing we can do to escape it.
So just relax, sybarite, symbiont.
And let this melt from my hand to yours like tar serpiginous
on the beach used to cock gaps in knowing.
Of course I am the messenger of belief and truth.
Address me as gracious and benign animal.
Ho, not so?
Made for war?
Which is as much as to say the heavens of flame
where all knowledge is contained.
Whence I might almost, entirely, perceive myself
in shadows cast on earth.
Biotic community, riparian woodland, asked Virgil,
should we pillage woods?
Thick culverts of game point to newfound streams.
Sylvan hare streak, setter angle wing, dipper or water ouzel.
Yellow breasted chat, belted kingfisher,
dusky footed wood rat.
On the eve of that dark bright shelf, me, my name,
licked my throat with dust of ourselves, shelves.
Put a few jelly jars there.
What colors?
What sin or sorrow?
What butter?
Big butt and hilarious laughter bright sifting
powder to be seen in each.
Wind tunnel.
Water tunnel.
Tunnel of branches, leaves, and sky.
I grew up in a--
just outside of Santa Barbara in Goleta and a little town
called Isla Vista, that was a college town.
And so I grew up around a lot of 19 and 20 and 21-year-olds
and I thought that everybody in the world was about that age.
And I thought that they all had keg parties all the time.
I was a waitress in a white dress, an avocado goddess
in the land of Phocis, Queen of the drought
in the kingdom of Prop 13.
I set forth.
It was four blocks to the beach.
What did I see there?
A kegger with lots of young men preparing to drink.
Dream, all the wild beaches had been built upon.
Fancy hotels with eyeless edges--
fancy hotels with eyeless edgeless pools and all rotting
piers ripped out.
They built hundreds of hotels a night on Haskell's wild shores
for Tom Hanks' weekends.
To the south, my beaches have been given over
to oil drilling companies, cargo wharves,
factory built blackness by the sea,
squatting buildings black smoke up to the edge
of the water, concrete haunches jumbled and built
blackness right into the water.
A huge city lurking in absence of light,
lies under the waves as they say it-- excuse me--
a huge city lurking in absence of light, lies under the waves
as they roll, roll evil.
I found one patch left.
Lucent creatures drift along the coral under a clean sea,
an electrically purple elegant nudibranch
with neon orange fringe.
Hopkins rosy nudibranch.
Red crabs turning with the water in an easy metropolis of sea.
But so did lens lie at the southern right and I know,
soon, it will edge up in the night
with the will of the people and engulf this last bright animal
ditch.
In the dream I was hunting for dinner,
razorback clams, any soft bodied animal that
oozes at the edges of symmetry.
Anything delicious, wearable, lovely."
I'll just tell you that some of this next section
draws from John Steinbeck's and Ed Ricketts,
Log from the Sea of Cortez, which is an amazing book.
And probably lots of you have read Cannery Row,
and the character, Doc, is based on Ed Ricketts, who
is a dear friend of Steinbeck's, and who
was a model for many of Steinbeck's characters,
not just Doc.
And he was one of the first people--
biologists to track the animals that
live right in that intertidal zone that are adaptable to both
being submerged and being dried out when
the waves-- when the tide goes out.
And they took this incredible trip from Monterey
down to the Sea of Cortez, collecting animals.
It's, kind of, horrible too because a lot of it
is about we collected 346 blah, blah, blah and we threw them
in alcohol and--
there's this incredible description
of this bonito losing its color as it's feeding on shore.
And it's something-- I was just recently
at a museum of Natural History in France
and seeing how these taxidermists have
to put color back into animals.
And sometimes they overdo it.
And so if you've ever been to a Natural History Museum
and you see the stork whose legs are too red or--
but it's, kind of, just thinking about what color
animals, ourselves included, have when living
and what colors we have when dead.
It was something-- it's something I think about.
Let's see, maybe I'll--
this.
"Removing the heart of the turtle to a jar of saltwater.
It will beat when prodded 24 hours later.
The mermaid's purse is a sand shark unhatched.
And now the tiny fish is pickled in alcohol.
A turtle's flesh will continue to respond even
when you place the white cubes of meat in a pot.
Moving pictures of the color and patterns change in the bonito
during death.
As they beat their tails against the deck colors pulse and fade,
pulse and fade.
And then, they are dead.
Animals have one color when they are alive, another when dead.
This smooth blue water runs out of time and a, kind of,
dream sits in it.
The playing porpoises do not play opposites.
Turtles, the great schools of fish under the ruffled waters.
All the thing was alive when you saw it.
The teeming surface of the watery earth.
Barnacle and hydroid riding the turtles back.
Pelagic rock lobsters in his gut.
A crab inhabits his ass.
The water is stuffed with living plankton through which
the big fish swim.
Moving pictures of langostino littering the waters currents
and soon put them in a white porcelain pan.
Now,
The film is immersed in alcohol which promptly
removed their brilliant color.
The heat of a great furnace, said Cortez.
Calida Fornax, not the denomination of New Mexico.
Apaches land, but of shorespeople,
sxa'min, a small sea cave and arch,
sexy cala-y-fornix rooted in primitive magic's names will
stick or fall away.
A list of disappearances.
What disappeared?
Has disappeared?
Is disappearing?
Will disappear?
I can't tell for they are disappearing.
It is happening around us in forests, on highways.
What is appearing?
This remains to be named and seen."