Lois assigned me a poem last night.
She said if you stayed at the Poetry Cottage,
you had to mix it up with the ghosts in there
and that William Stafford had written
a poem about the birds and flowers waking him
in the morning.
And so she assigned me a poem.
And I knew I wouldn't be able to hear
the birds because the windows were painted shut.
[LAUGHTER]
So I'm going to take this big risk
and read you the poem I wrote.
It's a first draft.
Remember that.
And it's called "In Bed Looking at Myself" or "William Stafford
Slept Here".
[LAUGHTER]
That's the only time I'm ever going to give
that other title, however.
It's a very serious poem.
"Bare legs sprawled and bent against pressed sheets,
I see my skin is not white but some mix of pigment
as difficult to catch as colors squeezed from tubes
on a white plate, thinned with water, the effect at any moment
washed out by a drift of attention
so that the pigment lifts from the paper
and floats on the surface tension of water
without direction.
Trying to catch the fragile light of these legs seen
as wildflowers my teacher stuck in tin coffee cans
this summer, inviting us to paint the impossible.
Did she call them freesias?
Said she'd thrown out seed from a random mix.
And conch-pink, flesh-colored lilies
sprang up in exquisite excess, fringed
with muted green and somewhat scraggly
leaves which served simply as ground and contrast,
not an assertion of their own shapeliness.
In this room, I've been given a blue chest of drawers,
blue door, and the nectarine lowest
placed between two pears now sticky in the cracks where
my fingers meet and bend.
Nobody knows where I am, a body placed in an unfamiliar room,
spread against folds of white cotton,
pit of nectarine glistening in hand,
hot Tucson air pressing up to the window, round moon.
I look down and see my nipples, pink and erect,
sensing moisture, Think of A in San Francisco this morning,
still drowsy under sheets, me packing summer dresses
and light perfume, easing David out of 7:00 AM dreams
to enter the world of binder and combed hair.
Then, looking back to the bed, A's eyes suddenly open upon me.
No words.
Moving towards him to see what shifts had occurred in sleep,
finger tracing his lips, skin listening
to see if he desired me, and did I want him?
Feeling the current begin, pulling me down
to his hot, sleep-heavy mouth, eyes
closed, descending blindly, and where his fingers moved,
and where his cock caught me delicately,
and his whispers in my hair I couldn't hear, arising,
a sweet ache collecting.
At the foot of my bed, the beginning
edge of sunrise seen earlier through the window now
giving form to the bay's little ships,
leaping rooftops, throwing its pink light over us."
[APPLAUSE]