I don't know if you can see it.
But there's an enormous fly swatter.
If I'm bad, I fear I'm going to--
it's going to swoop down.
And I'm going to join you in the audience.
I'm going to read mostly from manuscript tonight
having read it Pima just a year ago.
I'm going to try not to repeat myself.
This first poem, it's called "Elegy
to the Pulley of Superior Oblique."
And that sounds like a title for one of those poems
that I often write that makes no sense.
But you'll be relieved to know that's not the case.
And the pulley of the superior oblique
is just part of the musculature of the eye.
And the poem is, I think, a fairly uncomplicated poem.
It has a little tribute under the title.
It reads, "Weston's photograph of a border bridge."
It does have something to do with a photograph
that Weston took one July about--
I don't know--
90 miles from here.
"The three girls in a donkey cart
are ascending the tiled adobe bridge,
its little arc over the dry wash under noonday sun.
Below them, a wizened farmer with a bag of grain
sleeps in the shadows of the bridge
while sitting on the dry river bottom, which
looks like a long, black skid mark
vanishing off the side of a cliff on the highway
beyond the purple mountains.
There are miserable people standing
for the duration in a halated light whom I would never
describe, for it would be a lie to write, for example, that two
house flies are like two fiddles drawing in a mahogany vise
beside the blue chisels and almond pastes.
That all over the shop, fans are blowing
across huge blocks of ice.
That would be a lie.
There's blood on an apron and the green checkered bills
in the cigar box.
And the carpenter's wife is a Jew.
This is Warsaw.
10 years before my birth, the sweltering ghetto.
Months later, the sweltering snow.
So I must tell you that the sisters in the cart
are unhappy and not beautiful.
They have suffered scabs and diarrhea.
They've boiled water out in their yard
beside the deep fragrant cilia plants,
and had been too weak to drag the scalded water just
a foot or two beyond the fire.
They've all fainted once or twice
while squatting in the trench out behind their barn.
This influenza killed her mother and aunt.
And now, they've crossed the bridge.
And the donkey looks under his belly slumps to one side
and falls dead.
The younger sister begins to sob.
The oldest jumps from the car and runs down a pebble slope
to the sleeping farmer.
The farmer wakes frightened not for a moment,
looking away from the girl's chest that
is running with sores.
He says a man is taking our picture from above.
The toothless farmer then waves to Weston.
And the girl slumps onto the brown river bed with her arms
around herself.
There are dogs sniffing near the donkey.
There are two flies.
What does the sick girl have to do with our lives?
That excellent man Rosen knows.
Open your eyes.
There's sky, mountains, the moment of death
is instant, contrived."
Kenneth Rosen is the Rosen I should have sung.
He's a poet who I admire greatly.