Last poem I'll read is about a woman
who burned up in a fire two doors
from our house in Portland, Christmas 1968.
In the poem, which I couldn't get together
for about two years, I use a quote
from natural history magazine which brought the experience
together for me describing the collapsed star
or black hole-- it's an astronomical phenomenon.
A star which has condensed so that it's
so heavy that the light can't escape its gravity.
And if you look at it, you see nothing.
If you shine light on it, the light would disappear into it.
That quote is interwoven with my own writing in this.
Poem begins by mentioning an astrologer who
forecast this event three years ahead of time, to the week--
"Collapsars."
"The problem with black holes is, she
would see if I had a problem.
She read my birth, and I grew cold.
The chart held a dark time for a near woman
in the snow stars of Christmas.
No, I said, tragedies like that, there is no way
to see them or hear them.
As one hears even in sleep a man shouting fire in the street.
There are stars that have collapsed, suffered what
even hard winter doesn't bring.
Snow fallen between houses like a body between bed and door.
Inhaling then choking is called an implosion.
Without realizing what happens, you reach intensity.
The matter in such stars has been squashed
together like a victim of a fire carried down
in a bag, half size, but then again and again, fire
after fire, into forms unknown on earth,
because our knowledge has made us rare and cold.
How can I look at it?
Matter so dense its gravitational field
prevents any kind of radiation from escaping.
I have kept my body heat in heavy sweaters
and weather stripping while Earth's night grows colder
and what was burned freezes.
From that body could a soul be escaping?
You couldn't see one if it was right next to you.
Miss Nugent was like that.
She must have walked right by our house twice a day.
I never saw her, never saw her take the steps
one by one up to her apartment after work
and switch on the light.
If you shone a light on it today in the noon
after the fire broke out, like the sun's own rooster rising
from her window way too early in the dark holiday morning,
licking up story after story, the light
would simply disappear like a Christmas present we missed
and sifted the ashes for--
thrown away with its wrapping into the black hole.
And what spark doesn't desire all?
And what kind of star visited a woman that night?
35 of a secretary's passions, 98.6."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]