Thanks, Tommy.
I would have worn my Adidas tracksuit with my headband
if I knew that was going to be part of it.
Thank you, everyone for coming.
Thank you, Ander, for arranging all this.
And thank you to the Poetry Center for having us and having
the series.
I thought-- can you hear me well?
I thought I would begin from the beginning
and just read for a little while.
And there's an epigraph here that--
from, of course, Revelation.
"And whosoever was not found written in the book of life
was cast into the lake of fire."
"Because a picture is a sort of dream,
the big moon circles the whirling Earth
that follows our little burning star.
And my father hasn't entered the third state.
He's not stressed out here in the back woods of nowhere
becoming the ground.
All the stars are flying away.
The universe empty now.
My father empty by the moon's glare
until he's all shadow and light, beautiful almost.
So overexposed he could be a young man in a photograph.
Light seconds above, orbiting hollowly its lens,
always backward into the night that was.
Clicks a portrait of the artist as a young bomb.
We measure the future by measuring the past.
So where did he go?
Where did the light go that was his body?
The blood that cycled his veins, the too bright picture of him
with his sweetheart--
my mother in her saddle oxfords, and he in his jeans.
Their white shirts fused into the stone
of an Oklahoma high school.
Six years later, he'd be flying out of a sac base in Topeka
up to the North Pole and back, heavy with a single bomb.
And the other things, I know he dreamed of a wife and two kids,
of a tall house inside the spiraling
cloud of Georgia suburbs.
I know he dreamed of moon travel weekends and the art
of amateur photography.
What about the pictures never taken of his sunken farm
and flooded fields?
And where did the light go that was his last smile as he slept
and shivered in the empty air?
We've seen the end, having dreamed it.
A cosmological sadness leaving no one
left to measure the last gesture of the last thinking
subject, when the lights go out in the stars.
He lies in state.
I consider this.
And now somewhere in the far pines,
a mockingbird spits a strange tune.
Maybe Charlie Parker edged into Bob Wills.
And its 1954 all over again.
My father on leave and fallen three sheets to the wind,
lying in his new suit under a hurtling sky.
Just beyond and in all new directions,
the animals move upon the Earth at night.
Chapter 1.
I snapped off the cardboard back of the wooden triangle
and took it out.
A slight, musty smell rose from my hands,
filled as it were with the thing that had been locked up
for several years now.
Dusty stars clung to my fingers while lines of color
tumbled across the floor.
Maybe you started with the stripes,
I thought, kneeling down inside the four corners.
Maybe it was mostly luck, luck and accumulation,
like folding a map.
Even halfway through, I felt lucky--
turning a quick corner into three
points like a child making paper triangles.
But reaching the end, I saw the same old picture again.
My last row is twisted and dangling
beneath the field of stars.
I wondered if I should try once more.
Wasn't it a matter of simple geometry?
Easy crease and tuck, like the soldiers did on TV.
Yet I failed every time I had tried to fold it.
Over and over, I'd felt compelled
to correct the improperly shaped thing in its cheap display
case.
And over and over, my efforts had come to bad ends.
So I stuffed Old Glory back into its container--
blue patch of stars jutting out unevenly
against crooked stripes.
I hoped the neighbors wouldn't notice
the flag case tucked beneath my arm,
even as I'd have to explain it.
I have to say I was taking it, my father's burial flag,
on a little trip.
That I was going to carry it with me
through the back roads of Alabama
on a kind of pilgrimage.
And of course, I couldn't stop there on the loaded word
'pilgrimage.'
Because they'd only want more.
I'd have to say I was setting out on a trip
through the low hills of Northern Alabama,
climbing Lookout Mountain, hoping to descend again
into the valley to the tri-state crematory in noble Georgia.
But my bewilderment about the excursion itself,
and about that flag, would prevent me
from having given a practical description of what
had happened at tri-state.
Instead, I'd probably head straight to the big trouble.
I'd say, yes, astonishing as it may be, my father had died,
and his bones had been resurrected.
And then those same bones, the bones of my father,
had been abandoned at the Tri-State Crematory
for five years.
The man was dead, rose again, and dwelt among the other dead
for a time.
Even in the South, such apocalyptic declarations
might overwhelm my devout neighbors.
But the story required no articles of faith.
My father had died, and I'd gone to his funeral.
And he was buried in the ground.
I saw him lowered into the red dirt.
My father was dead.
And the doors of his graves flew open,
and he came up again upon the Earth.
I would have to tell all that to my neighbors,
because I didn't know what else to say.
I was setting off to unholy ground,
to a field with the lake where hundreds of bodies
once lay scattered and alone, hoping
that something would happen.
For a while, I'd lived with an image of my father lying lost
at the Tri-State Crematory, and I needed to change it.
I needed to take a ride to Tri-State
and see where he'd lain those long years.
I needed to tell him goodbye--
or hello, and goodbye.
Or tell him nothing, but that I had tried.
I tried to make amends for his troubled bones.
And I had that flag, wrapped up all crooked and wrong
to prove it."