I'll finish with a poem called "My Daughter Commoner Garden."
Title comes from a documentary on the Pixies, '90s rock band.
David Bowie in the documentary says in his best upper crust
accent, something like the Pixies were quite good,
but you know they wrote about quite commoner garden
types of subjects.
There's a little reference to Melville's confidence man.
And by and large, the poem is in dialogue with
or is trying to write through the Black paintings of Goya
that are in the Prado.
The most famous of which is Saturn eating his children,
but that one's not in this poem.
"My Daughter Commoner Garden."
Below a half moon, the garden parking lot we take
opened impassive stone.
Empty dead and clean accent allows for pun
as Melville makes.
At every category, its inversion.
At every claim, its life.
The black Guinea cripple taken for a whole operator.
The coin for a counterfeit.
The good man for a wordy one.
Let's marshal our figures for danger.
Twilight and gall for lonesomeness Generation
and night for dissolution, for hearth, for abandon.
Like a Pawnee from ambush foams the Yellow Jacket Missouri.
Make or listen carefully for where they stand.
Goya's Dos Viejos circa 1820 to '23, still I learn.
Old man sinks into his own gaze.
Simian double lays a dark hand on his shoulder,
leans in, intimate whisper, death
grow loud with each of us.
The hollow tubes of cattails bring air down into their roots
a settler shack replica, and they will recreate our house
and say, this was his bag, this your bear.
His nightstand here in Atlas theater
drawn around this bend bargain struck.
Here, the rich give this land for expansion.
16 ducks, running water, girls cast in bronze, benevolence,
a circle of crepe myrtles, Texas silver leaf or liar's scrub.
Death duels by club legal in Catalonia and Brugada.
Goya's men in their dust to the knees
or float above at colossal.
Stuck, they seem the land itself.
So much little things a decade or gravel of fire road
find their place.
The nudging heart doesn't tire.
It should.
Simple chickadees came from the suburbs on a man's t-shirt.
Sweet genius composite anxious body they make.
Just like this mountain.
It's the same speed.
Somewhere, death is all time coming.
It events, it invents, the connections between light poles
pays the work crews and the lights come on.
See, heart, you should rest.
Money is moving all around.
I look at the other mountain.
Our gazes make two men called valley and plain.
Light spends most of the day on my one side away from them.
And waking up just happens as do the powdered waves of car
packs released by the light.
Traffic, not spray of light from transcendence or straight light
that sometimes silhouettes an owl on the cable above Blair
Street.
So your find yourself with maybe the old hungers
a little quieter.
But no less friendly.
No less ready to turn a warm smile upon us as you come down
our row of cubicles circa 2008 to 2010.
We are together, you and I, server and patients.
We are together, you and I, wolf and phenotype.
We are together, you and I, rainwater and hillside.
We are together, you and I, glory and people say.
We are together, you and I, photograph and people say.
Still, Saturday, cool season turn,
abuses the old prairie house.
Mockingbird swoops cross traffic.
Beads hold fast on the car hoods making mirrors for everyone
for free.
Finally, we see our week's efforts
covered by clean cool sheets.
With one night's sleep, smell sweet shoulder oils
it's still Saturday, and the nation a small
and floating three inches above its land.
No corner of which doesn't offer itself as night.
I'll be Michael.
The universe can be Lisa Marie.
Goya's fate raked in dark gray.
White death burn simple faced float above the yellow plain.
You have to believe no matter what the universe is
as exactly as it needs to be.
Along this ridgescape the people mark the hills.
Dark hills and rock and dirt burnt soil about the folk
play their parts.
You have to believe this massive panorama
that we are set close to witches in the painting whose
grouped bulk fills the frame and a cabro breathes out,
sweet Earth, return.
The bulk of witches made animate by their bright eyes.
You have to believe it is quiet outside my exchange of glances
with the witches.
Pretty, blurry, pink mouth pushing out to land.
Witches to land.
Help me make a figure for our fear of return.
Life gets made but not because we
had to carry the debtors' burden of faith.
Fuck the universe and its way of opening
its carapace into wings.
One day, you get in the car and trust your dad
and ignore the showered ones he talks to to get things from.
Somehow, frogs get all the way up this hill
find an underside of a succulent for to tuck their nut and eggs.
We are at the edge of the country.
Upon the face of the waters, Japan sends its things.
China and New Jersey send their containers.
The sun knows where it sleeps.
No one is coming to kill us.
No one is coming to cut off our hands.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]