WEBVTT

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This reading aloud,
I think, I hear it,

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reading the poems over
is certainly writing,

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a kind of writing.

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Even not looking,
not listening to them

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feels like a kind of writing.

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There in its pile left with
the others and its potential.

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It is easy to imagine
putting poems away

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as a kind of dead stop.

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But what about letting them
settle, settle into themselves

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so they can be
returned to clearly

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with just a bit of dusting off?

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Or maybe as likely
their mess takes over.

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They start to grow together
or mold a kind of compost

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that leaving alone
making becomes,

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and us out in the
world changing,

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so different upon
return as well.

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And all this living happened.

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And as it did, the poems started
to acquire new formal ways

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about them.

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I would see it sometimes
and sometimes I wouldn't.

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Sometimes they would feel like
the slight peculiarities of one

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poem repeated in another.

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Sometimes more
clearly they'd appear.

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And maybe the most
obvious and peculiar

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was having the titles in
the interior of the poems.

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Most of my poems are untitled.

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And it made sense that
this would happen,

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the poems not really wanting to
start or finish the way titles

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seem to cause them to.

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I found I would just underline
when met with the impulse

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to title.

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And so there where
it happened it

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would stay, sometimes
in the middle

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anywhere, sometimes in the end.

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Caution still on
cold flat boards,

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adulated and filling
a brown pouch

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with food, Melville's
companionship, and more apples

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I'm going to bring
to the revolution.

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That one's called
"Melville's Companionship."

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The title is underlined, and
those two words are set off

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like something's been done.

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This one's called "The
Big North Pacific Ocean."

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Calm lattice sole of a thought
rolled over with a finger,

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I came down to see myself for
a sort of conversation and then

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the big North Pacific Ocean.

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And other things appeared
in the middle of the poems

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as part of the poems, as much
part of the poems as anything

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else, dates and places
parenthetically, interior

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or dedications so that the
person was right there where

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they were where they are.

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Sick her breaths for tea,
gasping and breathing

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and falling of fear.

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And this one was for Cindy.

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Spectral and dashing
as leaves in sunlight

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are there turning for Cindy
in front of things quietly,

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quiet and in time.

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It sounds as I say it now
so purposeful and willed,

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but really it was just
about letting it all

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happen in the time
it was happening,

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a kind of thing done
aloud and listening.

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I like taking in
little bits of cloud

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from paintings and from towns,
feet cold on ground still

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standing around.

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This wise and
wilting thought have

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turned a sweet,
wet cast of the day

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did come in my red bruise which
was a burn pulsed like a lip

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or like a tongue.

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