The last piece from here is a prose poem.
Someone asked me this afternoon how--
what was the-- there were about three questions.
How did I know?
Did I consider it really a poem?
And if it were a journal entry or a prose poem.
Well, there was a mix of them.
And what determined whether something went into lines
or into a prose poem?
I had no answers.
This just seemed to need to be explored
in a more prose-like space.
That's the best way I can describe it.
I didn't want to think about lines.
I was circling more or just or--
I don't know.
I'll stop.
This is called "Not to Be Reproduced."
And the image in this picture is of a man formally dressed
in a black suit.
It's the back of him, and he has a bowler on.
And he's looking in a very fancy mirror with a gilt frame.
And the image coming back out is also of his back.
[LAUGHTER]
"I am interested in the logic of secrets, how it has always
moved me, in particular, to be invited by a phase
into the aura of its withholding,
as though we were designed to bring forward
two opposing sets of facts and bathe ourselves
in the resulting struggle.
As in watching a tightrope walker move
from one point in space to another,
each foot brought precisely from behind
and placed in front of the other,
but without the delicious possibility of falling,
were it not for the rope stretched tautly beneath him,
cutting the air with its odor of hemp.
The secrets between men and women
are of peculiar fascination.
My father, for example, invited me into a dream
last summer where I discovered that he was making preparations
to die.
He was busy doing small errands, rushing
about in his impeccably tailored suit and polished
shoes with a face so sad, so preoccupied with its secret,
so designed to escape observation that I immediately
began to pay attention, invited, as I
was, by that closed-off expression
to become the rope upon which he demonstrated his journey.
As I watched him moving to get everything in order
before leaving, my sense of dismay
began to take on its own life, expanding
into anger and then curiosity.
How does he know?
I asked my mother.
The fibers in me were twisting and vibrating.
A conviction was growing.
I became filled with the possibility
of his life continuing and decided to speak to him
directly, hoping to convince him that his death need not
be imminent.
I go to my father and I say, why do you
think you are going to die?
His feeling is more one of resignation or tiredness
than any specific illness.
I ask him matter-of-factly to take off his clothes
so that I may look at his body.
He does so, and his body appears to be fine.
A bit shorter and stockier than I remember,
but ruddy and glowing.
I see immediately that he's perfectly well and able
to live for a very long time.
I tell him with conviction and energy
that there is no reason for him to continue
on this course of dying, that he is wholly alive
and has many things yet to do.
As I tell him this, we are walking
outside through a woods, now up a slight incline to a clearing.
My father seems very joyous and happy to hear the news.
He accepts it, but with a kind of privacy
that he's always had, savoring it for himself,
indicating that he hopes I won't make a public issue of it.
There is a kind of charged excitement between us,
a flirtation with the possibilities
that now lie ahead.
In 1965, my father was hit by a car and pronounced dead.
I asked for his first set of architect's drawing tools,
wrapped in a chamois case he'd sewn himself,
each metal pencil and compass enclosed
in its own soft pocket, each a potential source of precision
and invention, given a hand to hold it."