WEBVTT

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I'm going to end with
this last poem called

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"A Concise History
of the Female,"

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and it has an inscription
by Anne Carson.

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"'But please don't cry.

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Ellipses.

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Beauty does not rest.'

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What faith submits
my back a bridge

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for your feet,
green ferns and day

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lilies over the pond, silver
mirror and inside the dark

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folds, smooth as stones.

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The book engages from suffering.

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Language unaccustomed
from speech malign me.

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I am not incremental.

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The flood, as it
imitates, swallows,

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and I swallow but am not
that which is spoken of,

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grateful to be small.

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See the bodies as they
float out to their graves

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inside the tsunami.

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Her clitoris is cut out.

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The light on the
lintel as she is

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sewn in the house of any
village sews my tongue

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from the poem that breathes,
and in this urgency,

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I speak to you.

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You.

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I grieve, make love, the
beautiful constellation

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of your brain riding me
into daybreak of freedom

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past unmanned bodies who
have none, no sex left,

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have become liquid in
the black dirt of a ditch

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or only the words in my
mouth, speech through cotton.

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And I am somebody's wife,
but I am only local,

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looking for my own.

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And I am no one's wife,
even after 10 years.

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Devotion does not ask
for time, the movements

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of trees and oceans.

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What is gentle the eye
can answer without harm,

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your hand on my back
like fire in a metal

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can through the dark of night
on a city street and homeless.

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The new has been built.

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This darkness does not,
will not be darkness,

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as on Earth, we speak of the
sun, a god, and our orbit

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one of isolation and fear
as if the coldness of space

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were itself cold,
singular, and not just

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vacuum, my hand outstretched
in their winter air, chafed.

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That which cannot be empty
I speak to, not divided

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but unremained, heat
of stars and of energy,

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for there is nothing that
protects us from passion.

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Nor can there be if we
are to love like animals

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beneath a Joshua
tree and not eat

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each other, each limb chopped
off and cooked for erasure.

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An excavation 2,000
years later reveals

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the bones, illumined by yellow
spotlights, of Roman baths

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buried beneath a medieval castle
in France, each age consuming

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the previous, then unearthed.

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And would you not touch me?

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Would you not love
me if you could?

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Decide for humanity."

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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