Thank you.
First, I'd like to invite you all to join us for a reception
after the reading in the St Phillip's West gallery, which
is just this way from the sanctuary where we are now.
And there will be refreshments and books
will be for sale, courtesy of the U of A bookstore.
Also, there will be a question and answer session
with the poet tomorrow morning at the University Alumni
building, on the corner of Speedway and Cherry.
That will be at 11:30 AM in room 303 at the alumni building.
It gives me great pleasure to introduce the poet
and essayist, Carolyn Forché.
Forché is the author of three books of poetry.
Gathering the Tribes, which was a Yale Younger
Poets Series selection, The Country Between Us,
which was the winner of the Poetry Society of America's
Alice Fay Di Castagnola award,
and the Lamont selection of the Academy of American Poets.
And The Angel of History, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book
Award.
She has also edited the anthology, Against Forgetting--
20th Century Poetry of Witness, and translated the work
of Robert Desnos, Claribel Alegría, and most recently,
the work of Lebanese poet, Mahmoud Darwish.
In addition to her substantial literary contributions,
Forché has worked as a journalist and activist
in El Salvador.
And has served as a member of the commission of the United
States Central American Relations.
She was a National Public Radio correspondent in Beirut,
and in 1998, she was invited to Stockholm
to receive the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation
for Peace and Culture award.
Just last week, she received an award from the Centers
for the Study of War and its Social Consequences,
at their national symposium on post-war communities.
Her recently completed collection of poems, Blue Hour,
will be published by HarperCollins
and released in the spring of 2003.
In an essay entitled, "Emergence," Carolyn Forché
writes, "there was first what could be said,
and later, the way of saying which was superior to the
said."
Forché continues to astonish readers with both what
and how she articulates.
From the self-reflective lyrics of Gathering
the Tribes, through the political interrogations
of The Country Between Us, and the metaphysical orchestrations
of Angel of History, Forché has mastered and reinvented
her poetic identity.
This is no less true in her new collection, Blue Hour,
a book in which she fuses the imprint of the self,
of the intellect, and of that which
is sacred, and surrounds us.
Hers is a reverence of breath and of breathlessness.
Any culture, in any lifetime, is lucky to have such a visionary.
Carolyn Forché, in her pitch and song makes to and of us,
an offering.
And here I quote "between here and here, between hidden points
in the soul, between saying and said,
beyond what one has oneself done."
Please welcome Carolyn Forché.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thank you for that wonderful introduction,
welcome. To the Poetry Center, Gail Browne.
And thank you to the University of Arizona
and the Poetry Center for bringing me back.
I'm very honored to be introduced by Frances Sjoberg,
she's a poet I greatly admire.
I'd like to begin tonight with a few poems from the Country
Between Us.
In honor of Tucson, which was a sanctuary city
during the war of intervention in Central America.
So I thank you, and so, this is for you
that I'm reading this, this evening.
And it comes from a section of The Country
Between Us, which was dedicated to the memory of Monsignor
Oscar Romero, who was the Archbishop of San Salvador.
He was assassinated, as you remember, in March 1980.
I worked for him at his human rights office
Socorro Juridico at the end of my time there.
And he managed to get me out of the country
the week before he died.
I believe he was a saint.
So I dedicate this these poems and this whole section to him.
So, it's fitting that we be in the church for this.
The section has an epigraph by the poet Antonio Machado.
These words are carved on Machado's own tombstone.
Caminante, no hay camino.
Se hace el camino al andar.
Walker, there is no path.
You make the path while you walk.
The first is a small poem, which was written
for a prisoner in Ahuachapan.
"In Spanish he whispers, there is no time left.
It is the sound of scythes arcing in wheat.
The ache of some field song in Salvador.
The wind along the prison, cautious.
As Francisco's hands on the inside touching the walls as he
walks.
It is his wife's breath slipping into his cell
each night, while he imagines his hand to be hers.
It is a small country.
There is nothing one man will not do to another."
I have to apologize, there is an obscenity
in the following poem.
And I'm in a church, but I've been
assured by its parishioners that it's all
right to use this word in this poem in this church.
I think there are two obscenities in the poem,
but National Public Radio only thinks there's one.
So you can decide for yourselves.
"The Colonel."
"What you have heard is true.
I was in his house.
His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar.
His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night.
There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion
beside him.
The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house.
On the television, was a cop show, it was in English.
Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house
to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs
or cut his hands to lace.
On the windows, there were gratings
like those in liquor stores.
We had dinner.
Rack of lamb.
Good wine.
A gold bell was on the table for calling the maid.
The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread.
I was asked how I enjoyed the country.
There was a brief commercial in Spanish.
His wife took everything away.
There was some talk then, of how difficult
it had become to govern.
The parrot said hello on the terrace.
The Colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself
from the table.
My friend said to me with his eyes, say nothing.
The Colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home.
He spilled many human ears on the table.
They were like dried peach halves.
There is no other way to say this.
He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces,
dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there.
I am tired of fooling around, he said.
As for the rights of anyone, tell your people
they could go fuck themselves.
He swept the ears to the floor with his arm,
and held the last of his wine in the air.
Something for your poetry, no, he said.
Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice.
Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground."
-- San Salvador May 1978.
I came back to the United States in 1980
and there was the beginning of the anti intervention
work, the sanctuary movement of which you were a part.
And the publication later, of this, The Country
Between Us, which was controversial
because it was viewed as political poetry, which
was very controversial.
So, I began to collect the work of poets
from all over the world, who had endured conditions of extremity
in the 20th century.
Warfare, imprisonment, forced exile,
torture, assassination, and so on.
And I learned that most of the poets
beyond the English speaking world
had endured such conditions.
But most of them had had one of those things, or more
of those things, happen to them.
My interest was in the fact that their language
had also passed through those experiences,
and was marked by it.
That the trace of that suffering and endurance
was in the language itself.
And that their language was evidence
of what had happened to them.
So it's gathered together in a book called Against Forgetting,
145 poets, 30 languages.
It's an anthological history of the century,
according to its poets.
And it begins with a motto by Bertolt Brecht,
which applies to us now.
"In the dark times, will there also be singing.
Yes, there will be singing about the dark times."
I have only one little poem I have committed
to memory from that work.
It's by Dan Pagis, who was of Bukovina, and later,
of the Ukraine and wound up in Israel at the end of his life.
He went through the Holocaust, passed through the camps.
He gave up poetry reading in Jerusalem
four years before he died.
He prefaced his poem by saying, that when
they were in the boxcars being shipped to the camps,
if someone had a sharp instrument,
they would-- or a pen, or pencil, or knife or anything,
they would try to carve writing into the sides of the boxcars
for the next people who would come.
And then he recited this poem, which
is titled Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car.
"Here in this carload, I am Eve with Abel, my son.
If you see my other son, Cain, son of man, tell him that I",
and it's just finished.
He doesn't get to finish it.
The anthology ends with another motto.
It goes from Armenian genocide to Tiananmen Square.
There is a section on the United States,
the struggle for civil rights and civil liberties
in the United States.
WW Norton was surprised that I included the US,
but you aren't surprised.
I had a motto at the end that said "This then, is all.
It's not enough, I know.
At least I'm still alive, as you can see.
I am like the man who took a brick
to show how beautiful his house used once to be."
So, the next work was a gathering of those things,
and alongside it, I wrote a book called
The Angel of History, which, I thought
was a separate project entirely.
But it's a meditation on the 20th century.
And most specifically, on two events.
The Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There are other things mixed in, but those are
the two events of this book.
And it begins with a quotation by Walter Benjamin,
German Jewish philosopher, who committed suicide
while attempting to flee the Nazis in 1940.
This quote is from his book Theses
on the Philosophy of History, part nine.
"This is how one pictures the angel of history.
His face is turned toward the past.
Where we perceive a chain of events,
he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage,
and throws it in front of his feet.
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead,
and make whole what has been smashed.
But a storm is blowing in from paradise.
It has got caught in his wings with such a violence
that the angel can no longer close them.
The storm irresistibly propels him
into the future to which his back is turned.
While the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
This storm is what we call progress."
I'm going to read one little part
from The Angel of History poem.
A small part because I want you to meet Ellie.
I was in Paris--
I lived in Paris in 1986.
I had my son there, Sean.
He's now-- you can do the math, well he'll be 16 soon.
And I had to go into the hospital
in the middle of the night, for a reason unrelated to the baby.
And I was taken to the
Hotel Dieu
--God's hotel.
It's the name of a hospital right
next to Notre-Dame cathedral.
It looks like a cathedral.
And it's got vaulted--
you know, stone, vaulted corridors.
And they're open to the courtyard.
So you, not only, are holding your gown
closed for that reason, but you're cold.
But it's a beautiful hospital.
Rilke was a patient there.
All the way back through the First World War patients there.
Lots of ghosts in this hospital.
And in the middle of the night, I was taken to my room,
and my roommate was awake.
She was on the other bed.
And she was very tiny.
And she was-- oh gosh, she was in her late 70s then.
And she didn't say good evening, she said, and what are you?
So I said, I'm a poet.
And she said, and I am also a poet.
It's going to be dueling poets.
But anyway, she said-- the next thing she said was,
and I don't speak any languages fluently.
So I thought, I'd never heard anyone ever say that.
But Ellie had rejected languages more or less.
She didn't like anyone well enough to speak their language,
as it turned out.
She was she was in France, living in Paris,
but she was originally from Germany.
She was a German Jew who had hid first in Germany, and then
in France, with her young children who
didn't escape this hiding.
So she didn't want to--
everyone she knew who spoke Yiddish was dead.
She didn't want to speak German anymore,
although she spoke German.
There were too many collaborators in France,
so she didn't want to speak French.
The Soviet Union, that was the problem with Russia--
With Russian language.
And she didn't really like the Americans too much either,
although, I never got clear about why that was.
So, English was out of the question.
So she just spoke what she called, cassoulet, of language.
She mixed everything up.
She talked to me for a week.
And so, I put-- so she's in my book Ellie.
I'm just going to do a little piece.
A little invocation from her, that has her voice in it.
"This is Izieu during the war.
Izieu and the neighboring village of Brégnier-Cordon. This
is a farmhouse in Izieu.
Itself, a quiet place of stone houses over the Rhone,
where between Aprils, 44 children
were hidden successfully for a year in view of the mountains.
Until the fields were black, and snow fell all night.
Over the little plaque, which does not mention that they were
Jewish children hidden April to April in Izieu near
Brégnier-Cordon.
Comment me vint l'criture? Comme un duvet d'oiseau sur ma vitre, en hiver.
In every window, a blank photograph of their internment.
Within the house, the silence of God.
44 bed rolls, 44 metal cups.
And the silence of God is God.
In Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, in Les Milles, Les Tourelles, Moussac and Aubagne,
The silence of God is God.
The children were taken to Poland.
The children were taken to Auschwitz, in Poland.
Singing
Vous n'aurez pas L'Alsace et la Lorraine.
In a farmhouse, still standing in Izieu,
le silence de Dieu est Dieu.
I would like to read another two poems from this work.
This one is called the Garden Shukkei-En.
I went to Japan in 1983.
The Asian Writers Congress was held in Japan that year.
They invited 12 non-Asian writers to the Congress.
Galway Kinnell and I were the two--
well, they wanted two from each of the nuclear powered nations.
Which, by the way, then included also South Africa.
Galway Kinnell and I were the nuclear poets
from the United States.
So, they brought us to Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
so you see there was a theme.
It was called Writing Under the Nuclear Cloud,
the implications of writing in the time of nuclear threat.
So, we were taken to the Peace Parks,
the museums where all the objects
retrieved from the epicenters are still kept and labeled.
And we were also introduced to a number
of hibakusha, survivors, people who
survived the pika, the light.
They told us their stories.
There was something strange about the stories.
I listened to many of them, until I realized
that I was listening-- even though I was listening
to older people, I was listening to the stories of children.
They had all been five, six, seven years old.
The older ones had already all died early of leukemias.
So, I was getting the view of children.
The one woman said, I was in an ornamental garden called
Shukkei-En, and some trees jumped out of the ground
and surrounded me to save me.
So, she believed that she had been
saved by the intervention of some trees.
She had never gone back to this garden,
but she made the decision to come
with us when we were to take our tour of it, that afternoon.
So, I just-- I went with her.
I stuck with her during the tour because I
wanted to see what she would say, and what would happen.
So, we walk together, and this is the poem.
She gave me this poem.
"The Garden Shukkei-En".
"By way of a vanished bridge, we cross this river.
As a cloud of lifted snow would ascend the mountain,
she has always been afraid to come here.
It is the river she most remembers.
The living and the dead, both crying for help.
A world that allowed neither tears nor lamentation.
The Matsu trees brush her hair as she passes beneath them,
as do the shining strands of barbed wire.
Where this lake is, there was a lake.
Where these black pine grow, there grew black pine.
Where there is no teahouse, I see a wooden teahouse.
And the corpses of those who slept in it.
On the opposite bank of the Ota, a weeping willow
etches its memory of their faces into the water.
Where light touches the face, that character for heart
is written.
She strokes a burnt trunk wrapped in straw.
I was weak.
And my skin hung from my fingertips like cloth.
Do you think for a moment, we were human beings to them?
She comes to the stone angel holding paper cranes.
Not an angel, but a woman where she once had been,
who walks through the garden Shukkei-En,
calling the carp to the surface by clapping her hands.
Do Americans think of us?
So she began as we squatted over the toilets, if you want,
I'll tell you.
But nothing I say will be enough.
We tried to dress our burns with vegetable oil.
Her hair is the white froth of rice rising up
kettle sides, her mind also.
In the post-war years, she thought
deeply about how to live.
The common greeting
"dozo yoroshiku"
is "please, take care of me".
All hibakusha still alive, were children then.
A cemetery seen from the air is a child's city.
I don't like this particular red flower
because it reminds me of a woman's brain crushed
under a roof.
Perhaps my language is too precise, and therefore,
difficult to understand.
We have not, all these years, felt what you call happiness.
But at times, with good fortune, we experience something close.
As our life resembles life, and this garden, the garden.
And in the silence surrounding what happened to us.
It is the bell to awaken God that we've heard ringing."
And then, you see I have these poems called
Book Codes in the back.
During the Second World War, they were called piano players.
Men dropped behind enemy lines to send back information
about enemy positions.
I read about them, they had a life expectancy
of six weeks behind enemy lines.
And the material they sent back were called Book Codes.
I started thinking, I was talking
to the students at the University today,
and I thank them for giving me a beautiful hour and a half.
But they understood this idea of mine,
and they were the first group ever
to let me know that they liked it or understood it.
But it's the idea of all the voices.
Anything that's ever been uttered on Earth
could stay close to the Earth.
Could rise from the Earth, and sort of hover around it
like a form of weather.
I got this from the idea of those I Love Lucy programs
in outer space, on radio waves that last forever.
So I thought, well, maybe everything lasts forever.
And if you can stand in a field and attune yourself,
you can hear all of these things being said
and the Book Codes came out of that.
And this one is, of course, from the same field of experience
that Shukkei-En was.
"Stories no more substantial than the clouds,
or what had been his face.
The view, the wind, the light, disposing of the bodies.
Who walked in the realm of dreams,
but like everything else.
For our having tried to cross the river caught between walls.
One could hear a voice, bear the unbearable,
and the broadcast was at an end.
You might relay the message, the rivers and mountains remained.
The unseen figure of the enemy entirely covered.
The central portion of their visual fields,
this blindness for names.
The bone became black with flies again, hatching in ruins.
Here were the black burnt ceilings and boxes of flags.
The walls covered with soot like a kitchen.
Smaller clouds spread out a golden screen,
given the task of painting wounds
through the darkened town, as though it had been light,
at the moment of the birth of this cloud."
I have a new book, which is rare for me.
I don't make new books very often.
I'm slow and I throw a lot of things away.
So, I'm very happy it's going to come out in the spring
next year.
In 2003, they say.
And I'd like to share some of the new work with you because--
and the parts I'm going to read, I've
never read before to anyone.
I have never even read them aloud to myself.
So, I hope you'll--
I hope it'll work out OK.
This is a dangerous experiment but I want to do this.
The first one, I will tell you, I had a very close friend who
Terrence Des Pres, who wrote a work The Survivor--
An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps.
It was not only about the Holocaust,
but about the Stalin purges during the '30s and the Soviet
Union.
And he was studying the spirit of people
who managed to survive, endure, and write about it,
and speak about it.
And he was-- it was a beautiful study he did.
Harrowing, but beautiful.
When you get to the end of it, he said
and now, you must decide whether you
are justified in despairing.
Because he's giving us an example of people who
endure everything and keep going.
And he died in 1987.
And this first poem is called "Nocturne", and I believe--
I believe that it's a poem that is for him.
An elegy.
"What happened?
His face was visible, then not.
Around him, snow fell, but over him, grass
remained wet and young and shaped like a coffin.
I laid her in the snow.
She, who I was, and walked away.
And the house shuttered against fog, awake, wind blown.
The children had cocoa for breakfast,
and milk with bread and jam at lunch.
They took naps in the afternoon, they had a dog.
At the end of the winter, there was no more snow.
And the cries were those of gulls following a seed plow.
The people of this world are moving into the next.
And with them, their hours, and the ink
of their ability to make thought.
Particles of light have taken from them antiphon, asylum,
bail fire, benediction.
Snow fell onto her coat and chewn gloves
at night, like apple blossoms in tar
and my solace became that she would remain as she was.
When the house was alive, its walls
recorded the rising and falling of the bed as if a wind.
The hurrying forth, took with it cask, casement, chalice.
So why does it matter, how precisely?
Behind a curtain, in late day, with a length of rope.
In one of the upper rooms, where a cold rose even when
the house was shuttered.
His mother on the porch, dressing like a man even then.
And the house in the photograph behind her, in flames.
Mother and house.
Beneath the ice, open-eyed, but absent, she who I was.
With ribbon scars faint across her.
Every tip of wheat stalk lit by sun.
They took with them, cruet communicant, and the ability
to keep watch.
Having lit the night sky, their heaven vanished.
He needed to feel as if he were going to die.
Many times to feel it.
Many hundreds of times.
He'd came along and passed beyond.
Had I been, were you not, because I believed I was alone.
Until the derelict house offered its last apparition.
As a star plummets from darkness, a soul is exiled.
Light, silk, the rope, black storms of dream.
But one day, he was given a new mother.
And it was she who starved them.
She who sent them into the wood to cut the very switch.
So, with the rope, as if he could replace the past.
A child awakened by a whip until his narrow coffin and cup
of sleep.
He was only a boy when the world darkened.
But the switches were easy to find, so red in winter.
The house where one could dance without clothes,
imagined an invisible piano, stove mice, chimney swallows,
a curtain, a cry, what may have been the beginning of life
after death.
In the open arms of a burnt wind, he returned to me.
Barefoot by choice, bearing gingerbread, chocolate,
quince jam, a bag of candy.
Look, whole villages intact and shimmering.
The very body itself, begins to evanesce.
It has no true boundary.
Death changes it as a mirror changes a face.
Then he used the past to refer to the present.
Flour sacks, school chalk, a coherent life.
Wings slap along the wall, and in the hardened owl dung,
crickets glint, dust settles on the house
until entire sentences are written.
A window haunted by an open hand.
Here, he said, his voice like gauze, like grieving.
Over the writing table, an empty map.
Years to connect the little marks.
In his closet among the linens, his weapon of choice.
In answer to your question, no, he could not have done it.
The rope was used for something else.
Worn from use.
A cry, a stiffening.
It was with this he untied himself again and again
in the bed, and before the fire, blue voiced and changed
of face.
The house saw everything.
As does every house.
Hollow, walls, staircase, sorrow in ink.
It was the last time.
They had been children.
In towns, years apart.
She who I was, and the man in the coroner's arms.
Perhaps those born after the war,
are those whose lives the war took.
An abandoned house, after all, will soon give itself back.
And its walls become as unreadable as symbols on silk.
With the departed, a sense of time and sleep.
Even sleep is taken, and the world appears as if it were.
Every spring I returned to her.
Laying my thoughts to rest, like a wreath on water.
These are the words no longer.
Here are the photographs taken when we were alive."
I have something very weird to share with you now.
I'm glad you can take a break and spell each other,
because this must be very hard.
I'm going to share with you a strange piece,
and only tiny little excerpts of it,
because I can't give you the whole thing.
It's what's passing through the mind of someone who's dying.
And it's an alphabetical order.
I know that sounds very weird, and it is.
Maybe you won't notice that.
But the whole thing happened-- it was happened in a sort
of white heat of--
and it has a lot of material from my own--
obviously well, what else do I have to work with.
My own life.
So you'll hear little bits.
There are things about the war in Beirut.
Things about Central America.
Little images, you'll recognize them.
After I finished it, a book fell open--
it literally fell.
It flew it by itself off the shelf
and fell flat open on the ground.
And I picked it up, and there was a paragraph.
It was a book I had never read.
I have a lot of those, anyway.
This is by George Burges, it was written in 1850.
This is-- and I read the paragraph, and I thought,
this, I have to put this in front of the poem.
The poem is called "On Earth".
"The recollections of a whole life.
The consciousness of spiritual existence and all
which is mightiest and deepest in our nature,
become brighter even in opposition
to extreme bodily languor.
In the immediate vicinity of death,
the mind enters on an unaccustomed order
of sensations.
A region untrodden before, from which few, very few, travelers
have returned.
And from which those few have brought back
but vague remembrance, sometimes accompanied
with a kind of homesickness for the higher sphere of which they
had some transient prospect.
Here amidst images, dim images of solemnity or peace,
of glory, or of terror.
The Pilgrim pursues his course alone.
And is lost to our eye."
So I'm giving you little pieces, and you'll see,
they stay in alphabetical order.
But you can't have the whole alphabet.
It's kind of a litany, or a chant.
Is, I think, what I was hoping for.
There were ancient Gnostic hymns written in the fourth century
in this form.
They've been found, these hymns.
A lot of them were found around the Nag Hammadi discovery
of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
"Open the Book of What Happened".
"A barn loft of horse dreams"--
wait, yes, OK.
"A barn loft of horse dreams with basin and bedclothes.
A bit of polished quiet from a locked church.
A black coat in smoke.
A map of clouds on a lake.
A blackened book leaf, straw, and implements.
A blue day book hidden in my bed with his name.
A branch weighted with pears.
A brittle crack of dawn light.
A broken clock, a boy awakened by his father's whip.
Then the world as if it had whirled into place.
A broken equation, a partita, a bullet
clicking through her hair, a bullet hold, supper plate,
a burnt room strewn with toy tanks,
a century passing through it.
A chaos of microphones, a city, a motherboard,
a city of thousand years, a city shaken and snowing.
A coin of moonlight on the shattered place,
a confusion of birds and fishes, a consciousness not within us,
a corpse broken into many countries, a cup of sleep,
a desire to live as long as the world itself.
And we, separated on Earth by decades.
And what intervened more, war or the passage of time?
And what of those who have made this same journey,
and whispering what could, and writing
the guardian of the past.
Angelica, Anne's Lace, Aria, ash, asylum.
Apparition in a vacant house appears
to feel the soul go forth.
Apple blossoms and wet wind approaching the other
with empty hands.
As if, with the future, we could replace the past.
As in the childhood of terror and holiness.
As light, or the retreat of light.
As memory, a futile attempt.
As more beautiful than it had been because it is lost.
As rain, before it reaches us.
As rain strikes the pails in our tents of wakefulness.
As the fence has recorded the wind,
as the water, in which the corpse has
been washed, as those who have returned have said.
As though when past and present converge, there is a gap.
As though thought affects the universe
in as yet immeasurable ways.
As unexpected rain craters the fields.
As when cicadas sing at the cenotaph.
Between here and here, between hidden points in the soul,
between hidden points in the soul
born from nothing, between saying and said.
Beyond what one has oneself done.
Birch bark curling from the birch limbs.
Birds dropping from flight, leaving cries in the air.
Birds in the clerestory a tapestry of broken light.
Black corn in the fields.
Crib smoke and bones enough to fill a sack.
Black fingernails, blue hands, lost
hair, black storms of dream, black with burnt up meaning.
Blessed be a knowledge that burns thought.
In thought, where they were lost,
incapable of imagining annihilation,
inhabiting a body to be abolished.
Inter alia, inter knows, intercessor.
Into a duration deep within her, into the world
further illuminated by thought.
Is there anything else?
It appears to be an elegy put into the mouth of a corpse.
It became what it was because of us.
In that sense, loved.
It is as if space were touching itself through us.
It is more ominous than any oblivion to see the world
as it is."
"She went with him willingly, and without knowing
where she was, she saw the country
very much as she would have had she walked through a film
about herself.
She, within me.
She would never again wander too far into the past.
So this is how the past begins.
So we walked pretending our empty suitcases burdened us.
Some dance, one holds a dove aloft.
Some flaw in the message itself, some
were burned with cigarettes, some doused with turpentine.
Every night they poured turpentine through their hair
and slept like that, so as to keep the leeches
from giving them head wounds.
Some, with wicker baskets, others with gathered flax.
Some with children in their arms, others with brooms.
Some dance, others hold aloft a dove,
someone will be pouring milk while another perishes.
Something broken and personal in memory.
Something holding back the pouring, a turn
of the kaleidoscope, a turn again,
radiant, beautiful, meaningless.
So, it is easier to choose stones from the ground.
A sack of words, pieces of language from something larger.
And if a single event caused this ruin, what was that event?
What made the night a country of terror?
But even this refuge might be taken that -ing -ing
of verbs in an eternal present.
That light traveled from the eye to the world.
That nothingness might not be there.
That you might become one among others.
The after touching memory of relief.
The air around the ringing bells filled with ash.
The being that lies half open, the birds
become smoke, the blue whirling that once spoke.
The blue stone streets of English river rock.
The boiling sudden clouds of August.
The border, anywhere, but the war zone.
Mattresses roped to the roof, the boundless
et cetera of indifference.
The breath of the invisible, the bridge
that doesn't touch the other bank, the buildings
of the Center City, no longer.
The candlelit stairwells in blackout.
The cedared hills, smoking orchards
and the rivers of ill luck.
The cemetery workmen's wheelbarrow.
The chandelier of water against stone.
The chorus of mules and roosters,
goat bells, little cries, the cinema trip wired,
the small arms fire, the click night.
The click night, pages turning by a wind and taken.
The confessions written in gunpowder and spit.
The danger of premature good conscience.
The dawn sky at morning, pearl, and smoke.
The trees stripped.
The day has not yet come.
The day will, of all days, be ordinary.
The dead were left among the living,
there were no questions.
The dead were washed, and dressed, and touched.
The dreams are a coffin, with an open window.
The dreams of a mind in the grave."
I tried to make these--
to make a notes on them.
So I could find them easily.
But it did not happen.
"The end and the beginning within it.
This is the city.
This was the city.
This open air asylum.
This, only death can write.
This ossuary of world.
What is the phrase for it?
This reversal, this shattering of indifference.
Those things are obvious, which are invisible.
Those who have entered and left unharmed.
Thoughts turned back into ink and paper,
throwing light, illumination by illumination,
and time a severe border guard becomes imaginary.
Time lapsed in one country, is only beginning in another.
Time to which we are exiled.
To abandon yearning for the body, to be unquiet.
To be visible to oneself.
To become endlessly what one has been.
To cross the field without breaking the snow.
To enter into itself and to stay awake.
To expose ourselves to whatever may happen.
To forget once having known it.
To hide, safeguard, and trust to a protected place.
To know not only what is, but the other of what is.
To know that the great bell, is the great bell.
What you see, is the beginning of life after death.
What you see you shall become.
When did we know, when I opened the door,
when it was possible to walk across the river.
When one could hear behind the curtain the whole thing.
When the light had gone beyond the limits of a room.
When this sunlight reaches the future,
when time seems to us a queer thing, when
we wake from our deaths.
When you know the worst, you can return
to cut stalks of iris in April.
Where, at least, one loveliness wanders.
Where else would they have fallen where everything
destroyed was left intact?
Where he looked, where the helicopters landed,
lifting trees from the ground.
Where the sickness knew us, where the uranium ore is
crushed into yellow cake.
Where there is a message to convey.
Where they go without sleep.
Where thinking takes place, we have a right
to say while I lived in that other world,
years went by in this one.
While out on the cobalt sea, the ship turned towards us.
While we watched, transfixed, the repetitive novelty
of death.
Who cries for the Jasmine as he digs them up, and carries
with him a can of black tobacco and a yellow Finch in a cage.
Who, in mirrors, saw a strange woman, who
no longer realized I was there.
Who returns from the journey with her eyes ruined.
Who wanted only to retrieve a few invisible souvenirs.
Who wrote on the window in lipstick,
"I will never forget you."
Who, if rope were writing, would have hung himself.
Whose white hands lift from this river,
the sudden flight of cranes.
Why do I seem no longer alive?
Wide plane, wind of the sea, wild doves in a warehouse,
Willow, wind throw, winter wisteria,
wind etching the walls, wind singing in the chimney, windows
exed against gun fire.
Windshield wipers clearing a wedge of water, wisteria
floating along a fence.
With a camera hidden in a loaf of bread,
with empty suitcases pretending to be refugees.
With how much uncertainty they told it,
with revolutionary hope we searched, believing.
With the flurry of a dove coat, with personal history or desire
for selfhood, without so much as a biscuit tin of water.
Without passing through thought, without wandering
too far into the past.
Woman in black holding daisies in paper, woman in mourning
black with baskets of lemons and eggs,
wood crates of cognac and ordinance.
Wooden crosses in snow.
World without origin.
Words burning in the windows, where it's
carried by countless mouths.
Work shoes, soda cans, holy braided palm,
world without having been.
Would return to the point of departure,
would reveal itself as other than chance.
Writing an anguished wind written over an open grave.
X does not equal.
Yet, the women dancing with white scarves,
yet the women veiled in Ceres.
You are the ghost, through whom we see the wall.
You came to Earth at Paris in your sorrows.
You might be the revenant of the earlier years.
You might be within.
You must leave.
You cannot remain here.
You must leave at once.
You spit out your teeth, give it up.
You will see the generation in which
you should have been born.
You, leaping tall fields, corn flour, and milk.
Your breath in my mouth.
Your churches will warehouse, weapons, and wheat.
Your freedom is an abyss.
Your hand awkward between us in the absence of love.
Your heart in the guise of mysterious words.
Your light narrow coffin.
Your mother waving goodbye in the flames.
Your notebooks, the sorrow of ink.
Your things have been taken away.
Zero."
You were good, you were really good.
I have two things to close.
[APPLAUSE]
That was very nice, thank you so much.
Thank you for waiting.
I grew up in a haunted house.
I have a little poem about my ghost.
It's called "Sequestered Writing".
It's the first poem I've ever written
about this particular ghost.
"Horses were turned loose in the child's sorrow.
Black and roan cantering through snow.
The way light fills the hand with light.
November with graves, infancy with white.
White.
Given lilacs, lilacs disappear.
Then, low voices rising in walls.
The way they withdrew from the child's body,
and spoke as if it were not there.
What ghost comes to the bedside whispering, you.
With it's no one, without its I. A dwarf ghost,
a closet of empty clothes.
Ours was a ghost who stole household goods.
Nothing anyone would miss.
Supper plates, apples, barbed wire, behind the house, what.
At the end of the hall, its sleep walks into a mirror,
wearing mother's robe.
A bed sheet lifts from the bed, and hovers.
Face with no face.
Come here.
The bookcase knows.
And also, the darkness of books.
Long passages into endless histories toward sleeping pages
about why else toss gloves into a grave.
A language that once sent Ravens through furs, the open world
from which it came, words holding the scent
of an asylum 50 years.
It is 50 years then.
The child hears from within, come here.
And know below and unbeknownst to us,
what these fields had been."