I'm going to end with this last poem called
"A Concise History of the Female,"
and it has an inscription by Anne Carson.
"'But please don't cry.
Ellipses.
Beauty does not rest.'
What faith submits my back a bridge
for your feet, green ferns and day
lilies over the pond, silver mirror and inside the dark
folds, smooth as stones.
The book engages from suffering.
Language unaccustomed from speech malign me.
I am not incremental.
The flood, as it imitates, swallows,
and I swallow but am not that which is spoken of,
grateful to be small.
See the bodies as they float out to their graves
inside the tsunami.
Her clitoris is cut out.
The light on the lintel as she is
sewn in the house of any village sews my tongue
from the poem that breathes, and in this urgency,
I speak to you.
You.
I grieve, make love, the beautiful constellation
of your brain riding me into daybreak of freedom
past unmanned bodies who have none, no sex left,
have become liquid in the black dirt of a ditch
or only the words in my mouth, speech through cotton.
And I am somebody's wife, but I am only local,
looking for my own.
And I am no one's wife, even after 10 years.
Devotion does not ask for time, the movements
of trees and oceans.
What is gentle the eye can answer without harm,
your hand on my back like fire in a metal
can through the dark of night on a city street and homeless.
The new has been built.
This darkness does not, will not be darkness,
as on Earth, we speak of the sun, a god, and our orbit
one of isolation and fear as if the coldness of space
were itself cold, singular, and not just
vacuum, my hand outstretched in their winter air, chafed.
That which cannot be empty I speak to, not divided
but unremained, heat of stars and of energy,
for there is nothing that protects us from passion.
Nor can there be if we are to love like animals
beneath a Joshua tree and not eat
each other, each limb chopped off and cooked for erasure.
An excavation 2,000 years later reveals
the bones, illumined by yellow spotlights, of Roman baths
buried beneath a medieval castle in France, each age consuming
the previous, then unearthed.
And would you not touch me?
Would you not love me if you could?
Decide for humanity."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]