Thank you, Ander Monson, for your beautiful work.
And thank you all for being here tonight.
I know there are many readers and writers in the room.
And so this first poem is for you.
In a long text on live TV, in an amphitheater, in the soil.
After the postmoderns, after it's still proven
you can get a kiss out of a pretty girl.
After the meta-ritual lectures and Heinz
switches to plastic squeeze bottles.
As one flies into St Louis listening to Lorca's
"Luna, Luna, Luna," beyond Anacin time.
After God help us, the dishwasher is emptied again,
and Miss America, Miss Mississippi,
reveals she has entered 100 pageants since age six.
Packers ball, first down after a fumble.
The corn de-tasseled, the assembly of enthusiasms
awakened, and we meet in a car by a river.
Not not kissing, considering making love,
visiting Jerusalem, the awful daily knowledge that we
will have to die in a hospital on the sixth floor,
or on live TV, or in an amphitheater at halftime,
or it's one's parents' condo over pasta.
Or in a strange relative's arms along the coast.
The heart bumping, bumping the old pebble up the old spine,
a squirrel scared up a Sycamore by an infant.
Along this stench of humility, along that highway
of come, charge card in hand, I will give my time freely.
And the more I dissemble, the more I resemble,
the better, the faster I sleep, the more
I remember to go elsewhere.
A movie, excuse me, now I must whisper
not to disturb the patrons.
Now I must drive, park, tramp to the edge of the world.
Roughness, ferocity, cannibalism, bite, chew,
transmogrified.
Inside the lungs, the little revolutionaries.
Between the thighs of the reflex, it's too this,
it's too that.
It's not enough.
Similarly, and more particularly,
it's raw twice over.
It's the imagination draining its husks left handed
because comparison is motive, which is why
one writes with one's desire.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
That was called, thank you, "Miami Heart,"
named after a hospital in South Florida.
A poem that I presented here at one of my first readings
at the Poetry Center.