So now I'm moving into a book called The Islands Project--
whoops--
Poems for Sappho.
Hold on.
I have to see how much time I have left.
Oh, nothing.
Shhh, yeah, go.
Yes.
Go for it.
"The Grackle on the Lawn."
[IMITATES GRACKLE]
[LAUGHTER]
"She wants the blossom.
She wants the seeds in the grass.
She wants the beautiful thing.
She wants to eat.
It's so simple, she's like a person.
She wants the beautiful thing.
She wants to eat.
She flies off with the blossom in her beak."
OK.
[ALARM CHIMES]
See, I have five minutes left.
OK, that's good.
That's good.
I'm going to read one that's for my mother.
My mother had a serious medical condition
that was caused by a doctor giving her a medication that's
not really recommended for geriatric use,
and she went into this amazingly horrifying thing.
And they had to flood her with water,
and she was in intensive care for eight days.
And when she came out from that experience,
she was both able to be hallucinating and be completely
lucid at the same time, and it was very bizarre
because it just changed many things.
But she had a good sense of humor about it,
and she would laugh when I told her she was hallucinating.
Not again.
So this is a poem that's about that.
It's called "The Living Fragments,"
and this hadn't happened yet when I first
started writing this book about Sappho,
who is a poet who's found--
her work is found mainly in fragments.
There are three or four complete poems,
and the rest of her nine books are just
little shreds of papyrus.
So it was a little bit overly metaphorically true
that my own mother and maybe my mother in poetry
were both in fragments.
"Her sentences broke verbs into bits,
her syntax shards of a time sequence
shattered in a swallow.
Some foreshock drug had pushed a verbal precipice
to slide and dive to insane depths.
'When did I go crazy?'
she would ask.
She wasn't crazy.
She had many minds.
They all made sense, just like a word on a fragment of papyrus
means something even when you know the rest are missing.
My mother would think I had children,
that we were cooking a roast, that Dad was still alive,
so our conversation often ended up like Scrabble
in zero gravity.
It turned out we could talk about the Dodger
game, the Laker game, the spring flowers out the window.
Unbelievable that she and I were able to piece together
what she cared about at all.
So I read Sappho's fragments with a trained eye.
She is my other blasted heritage,
beautiful in disarray, the aftermath
I didn't have happen right in front of my eyes."