Thank you.
It's a pleasure to be here.
I want to thank Gail and Frances and the Poetry Center and Dan
and Peter for doing all the work [? to get me ?] here.
I'm going to do a mixture of things today.
Some poetry, some performance work.
And I'm going to start with a poem
that I generally start my readings with.
It's called "Grandfather and Grandmother in Love."
And it's about imagining my grandparents in bed
together, which is what you can do with your grandparents.
You can't really do that with your parents,
but you can do that with your grandparents.
So my grandfather wrote haiku and he also
played the biwa, which is a Japanese stringed instrument.
Otoo-san and okaa-san are father and mother in Japanese.
And so, just imagining them together and...
"Grandfather and Grandmother in Love."
"Now I will ask for the one true word
beyond betrayal that creaks and buoys,
like the bed springs used by the bodies that
begot the bodies that begot me.
Now I will think of the moon bluing the white sheets soaked
in sweat.
That heard him whisper a haiku of clover, azalea.
The cry of the cuckoo, complaints
of moles and beetles, blight and bad debts, as the biwa's spirit
bubbled up between them, its song quavering.
Now I take this word, crack it like a seed between the teeth.
Spit it out in the world to root in the loam of his green house
roses.
Let it leave the sweet taste of teriyaki.
A grain of her rice lodged in my molars.
In my nostrils, a faint, hot breath of sake.
Now as otoo-san, okaa-san drift towards each other,
there reverberates the ran of lovers.
And the ship of the past burst into that other world.
And she, still teasing, pushes him away.
Swats his hand, a pesky tickling fly.
Then turns to his face that cries out
laughing as he hauls her in, trawling the currents,
gathering a sea that seems endless,
depths a boy dreams of, where flounder, dolphin,
fluorescent fins, fish with wings spill before him.
Glittering scales.
And letting slip the net, he dives under.
And night washes over them, slipping from sight.
Just the soft shush of waves, drifting
groundswells echoing the knocking tide of morning."