Hi, thanks for coming.
We may take a minute to turn our mics on.
I don't have my glasses on on purpose
so I don't have to feel too nervous by how many people
are here.
I think we're ready.
These are two pieces from my book, Bird Lovers, Backyard.
"Crossroads."
"Chapter one.
Always start by saying, this is not a ghost story.
Cozy and protective as such stories
were, they were only fun at first.
Like nuns besieged by poltergeists who tickled them
near to death, that's cute.
That old fashioned ghost detonated in shallow seas,
continues a plague of faceless moments.
But this is not a ghost story because experiments
have begun to show that bad deaths don't stay local.
We've run out of romance and haunting an attic.
Rumor is an old technique.
Rumor kept things local.
That's no longer possible."
"Chapter one.
There are diets of sleep, lunacy,
and visitations of people from wherever beyond settled
across the river, once named Lethe, either an island
or the land of the Cimmerians.
There are diets and deities, Morpheus, say, twin of death,
sun of sleep and night.
1,000 brothered, bringing up old friends and strangers
at the most unexpected times.
Entwined with his brothers, including Phobetor
and Phastasos, they confuse us with animals and things, light
and water, smoke and steam, confuse us
so that we lose animals and things when they decay,
so we think we are not animals and things.
We're not sleeping when we see these
loved ones, lost as they are, or we are, in a world rotting.
We are not sleeping because we experience unique visitations
from the dead without confusion.
Confusion says there's a map to follow,
a near-death of islands and territories
different than the skin on our faces
that in decomposing crumbles into smaller parts.
An ocean of skin exposes the formless creativity
of byproducts, exploding in the water just a few miles out.
How different are we from things that have died?
Purple-haired Morpheus confuses us with the forms of people,
as Ovid tells us, their gestures and perfect pitch.
In sleep they give advice or orders.
Sleep is the tenuous bridge controlled by these brothers,
don't let anyone cross.
Green-skinned Morpheus mimics the exact words and faces
of loved ones and rewards loss with radioactive dissipation,
loss unleashing bigger energy.
Such were William Blake and his ghost brother Robert,
out at sea beyond mind-forged manacles,
drifting into the minds life washed
expanse of acid, images in relief,
without slavery, without kings.
How, William Blake, will you eliminate the relief etching
discovered in the hoarse throat of the dead?"
"Chapter one.
Picture the isolation and small size of Bikini Island,
with children taking their hand luggage and evacuating,
167 souls in all.
Now the island's for skin and scuba diving.
The skin, a Bravo crater, now a tourist hole.
Bikini Island vaporized into an attractive model
for the sensitivity of biota, an important subject
for studies of extinction.
In the years since the war, I have
pursued the origin of island biotas dispersed and in-situ,
and the hate towards these odors since contact.
What in these cases isn't depauperate and disharmonic,
facilitating the disappearing relict taxa
and stimulating adaptive radiations?
Fancy words.
Operation Crossroads.
The restricted range and small population size of children,
together with their limited diversity of defenses,
make them particularly vulnerable
to extinction, largely through habitat loss or interactions
with pigs and dogs.
But I'm not trying to sound cranky.
I might be in favor of tourists diving
to see the sunken aircraft carrier
in Bikini Harbor, along with the one Japanese flagship,
two submarines, one battleship, two destroyers, and one
frigate.
I'm one of the lucky ones still with skin.
On the island, it's 70 off year later
and the radiological cleanup has still not begun.
56 original children wait to go home,
unsettled on other islands.
Experts want to scrape the topsoil
and store it in Bravo crater, or spread potassium in the hopes
that plants won't drink in the poisonous cesium still deep
in the surface.
Bikini may never support life again."
"Chapter one.
Stand on the bridge between lung and matter,
on a boat handled by Charon, between stalling and starting.
Bacteria, we know you as you wiggle
in our thoughts, a compass in the head leading
to the spoil, the scroll.
Proverbs 8:27, when He established the heavens,
I was there, when He set a compass upon the face of depth.
This compass, the man in his ignorance of the world heaping
around him, agony and ecstasy, his narrow experience,
a wiggle he defines by ignoring bacteria even as they evolve
under his tongue.
OK, that's not quite true.
William Blake couldn't have known
that things as small as bacteria or atoms
could pass between larger mortal barricades.
William Blake couldn't decide which was worse,
to read the scroll and stare at the compass, or punish the sins
and steer without stars.
Or the third way, to fall into transformed parts,
give up these choices, and become a deity, a rot diet.
There is only me to eat, and there you are said,
William Blake, saintly heretic.
Proverbs 8:36, all they that hate me love death.
In the loss of a brother there vibrates a yellow-green border.
Brother slips on the fetid mud of the shore, coin in hand.
We all lose brothers between fingers and clouds.
Angels he thought he saw writhing in a tree
because angels he knew, there came
unexplained and unscientific.
Roots imagine a compost.
There is no philosophy in the material but endless material.
In other words, entropy is kept low
because there is something outside us to take our trash.
This is more than a clever game.
Brothers who have died provide a thin, vulgar layer
that supports life.
In the radioactive, there is energy bent
in the wrong direction and new loss.
But there's a story that will steer the dead back toward us,
or grant access to the dark matter between planets,
thoughts, the atmosphere, which allows travel or transference
between orbiting masses.
Dead brothers are as common as death.
And what's not to love in death?"
"Chapter one.
For the children, it was impossible to wait as children.
They slept in the boat, so to speak.
Drifting made them tall with muscle growth and new bone
shapes.
If the system has a larger system to take from,
and a way to shove its residue back out,
we can survive our own toxicity, middle and old ages.
Other islands just close enough to hear information
in the noise.
But loving death, the children are told, is to lose
your face, your name, your bigness.
To love death is to love all that has given up form.
The neighboring islands look similar, but not familiar.
If it has nowhere to live, get it from the house.
Some trash sinks and washes up, no one on Earth to love it."
"Chapter one.
Ghost, a faint image near the image intended,
caused by radiation that has taken a different path,
or by ideas that have changed and grow darker.
Ghost, the decay and decomposition of imagination,
for all purposes still living off flesh."
"Chapter one.
I was a doctor when I returned from Bikini.
Now I am nothing more than a coated surface, contaminated
with invisible effects.
Nothing scrapes off.
The young, innocent sailors try their best
to distract me as they lounged, and swam, and played
on the twists of ruined ships.
A few months later, they returned home, freaked out
that old-fashioned elbow grease couldn't
compensate for cleaning products too weak to help.
The invisible pollutants made little boxes
click each time the space men approached us in the hospitals.
The poor boys dressed head to foot in lead suits,
afraid to touch my naked chest without their gloves.
No one will forget how they lined up hundreds of old ships
in the harbor, roped together like the sheep and goats
to the decks.
I was a senior medical officer then,
but for the past 50 years, I have been nothing
but a receptacle for secrets people
think no one will believe.
I'm amazed how well they are guarded
and how they pass silently through generations.
There is no appeal to so-called natural law
for the shadowy visitors who pull their strange experiences
from inside breast pockets, and stuff them back if you cough,
or say so much as, excuse me?
First one, then several, now nine women in tailored jackets
have come to my door this September.
One young woman told me of hearing her dead father's voice
explaining the principle of the wind.
And now every time I go to type up her file,
a gust blows the papers up and around,
so that I have still not been able to complete it."
"Chapter one.
In 1950, a trip from Chicago to Venus
could be made in 146 days.
Nowadays it would be faster, but the return trip
is more complicated, as always.
I explained that since Venus is moving faster through space
than the Earth ever will, a stopover
would be necessary for the visitor on Venus
while the Earth realigns for the landing.
In every single one of her cells,
and each of her follicles, and every drop of her spit,
the clock of the universe tick tocks its isotopes
as we fulfill our half lives, half-sleeping.
She shifted a little closer when I mentioned
this stopover of 470 days.
What happens in that time?
She asked.
Of course, the copper content of the human DNA,
now outside its normal system of influence,
is affected by the pull of Earth.
The other half of our lives reappears.
No mere coincidence, I whisper to her.
Seven metals in our cells for the seven days,
the seven deadly sins.
She does the math herself.
The return would have been another 146 days, making
a total of 762 days round trip.
Maybe you'll figure out how to omit yourself
there one particle at a time and go visit, I suggest.
I suggest the sort of decay astronauts
know, the progressive accelerating
reduction in orbital parameters, apogee and perigee
of a spacecraft due to atmospheric drag.
A cosmic ray circling in reverse.
Oh, but I forgot to mention that messenger's originating
from Venus would only need 42 minutes to conduct themselves
here and back, that's the handicap."
"Chapter one, January 7th, 1948, The Louisville Courier, F-51
and Captain Mantell destroyed chasing a flying saucer.
Captain Thomas Mantell, a veteran of the Normandy
invasion, chased either a flying saucer
or the planet Venus to his death over Godman Air Force base
near Fort Knox.
Two others in the formation pulled out,
but Captain Mantell went practically to heaven
before crashing."
"Chapter one.
How many dead brothers does it take to resolve mythology?
Morpheus, parented by night and sleep,
is responsible for the way change resists
yet restores false families.
There's a reason ghosts are not vampires.
Vampires need changing and overlapping forms.
Ghosts must speak through symbols, symptoms.
Charon, Morpheus' half-brother, captains the endings.
Neither ghosts nor vampires will step in the boat.
My dead brother was dead as he killed one man on a beach
in France.
He killed the man, and he too was killed in time,
by staring into the sun.
The brother's death is the echo of our father's death,
which allows the story to give itself blind spots.
I saw my dead brother on a long stay in Normandy.
He was full of guilt he couldn't shake.
Foregrounded, I suddenly went the other way,
from a pitiful student to a doctor full of hope,
believing I could change children back into children.
But they are exiled on their scattered islands now,
and refuge is lost to them though they are refugees.
In refuge, they will learn some of suffering,
and that only a new classification of life
will bring them a place to live.
There will be plants that restore their island's soil.
Responding to death takes cleaning up toxins,
and amazingly, there are life forms
that will accomplish this."
"Chapter one.
Aerodynamic proverb.
Everything has an end except a flying saucer, which
has neither beginning nor end."
"Chapter one.
13 years, I nearly sang these words
as I wrestled papers near the window.
Yes, William Blake, that's a good number.
Dusting off the cover of a little chapbook, the first one
I started years ago, I searched the loose clippings
until I found a Xerox letter written by William Blake
to a friend on the occasion of a death.
To the rhythm of the steady clicking, I read his words.
13 years ago I lost a brother, and with his spirit
I conversed daily and hourly.
I hear his advice and so on.
I am the companion of angels."
"Picture a naked man bent ecstatically backward as he
descends dark stairs, his muscular body
in perfect condition, his face hidden.
A star with a burning tail shoots through the picture,
entering the man's right foot at the top.
The comet is Milton.
It is with a right foot that one steps into the spiritual world.
Also on the image, the printed word, the name Robert.
This is the illustration of William's brother
as he appeared to William in spiritual form.
Blake had watched his brother die from tuberculosis.
Together they had started the printing shop,
but William got frustrated with the work.
Without Robert, he continued unsuccessfully
until Robert's ghost visited and gave him
new formulas for inks and binders,
a new process of engraving, new modes of printing.
The secrets changed everything William
did, and brought business.
Normally, the etching carves into the plate,
but Robert's ghost advised William
to put the lines in relief, stand them out,
and that color is not the point.
The forms and lines must be strong.
Ghosts see symbols rather than blood to talk.
William Blake had always found ghosts in the company of trees,
or hay fields.
He kept regular nine to five hours
so the ghost inclined to visit could stop in
without appointment.
But what proof could he offer the scientists?
I am trained in medicine, yet I remind myself
what William wrote.
Whatever the seer sees, he must see for himself alone.
There can be no other eyewitnesses."
"Chapter one.
For William Blake, the copper plate was a cave.
The cave was a planet, receding apparent surface,
and a human animal circling the orbit,
which is the freedom of a life of skin.
What skin burns away and is infinite?
The recess is a void.
Poet and painter, what skin makes
islands touch the ocean, the aggregate of beings
making worlds inside beings, swimming
blindly inside each other.
The recess which allows text and images to hover together.
What contaminates and can't be kept off the barrier?
What illuminates blood in mind both?
Morpheus cannot stay on land, for the green lawn runs to sand
and seas, lap back the algae.
Single-celled creatures and things
which are only half alive confuse
the laws of good and bad.
They rage in our world in excess.
Theirs is a place of wisdom.
What life is black and putrid?
What doesn't die can't be a relief,
can't be coiled in the bacteria's dream,
where invention and destruction join.
In death loving diets, small forms
of mire in the spoon of carbons ripen the planet.
Some bacteria can withstand radiation
1,000 times greater than what kills humans and most animals.
These are still living as single islands
in a flooding, burning, frozen home waiting to return."
"Chapter one.
If this were a ghost story, precautions
might be better taken.
It was once believed that burying scandalous folks,
murderers, pagans, suicides at a crossroads
would be the only way to get them in the ground.
But it could also be true that carrying the dead
to the crossroads and turning them around, creating a maze,
or burying them facing down, or the wrong way,
then walking them home by another route,
all this might ensure that the ghost who felt unfinished
with you couldn't follow and take up where he left off."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]