So this is the first reading I'm giving since I found out
the news that a very important person to me died in February.
Some of you may know him.
He lived in Tucson for most of his life.
Jeremy Isajiw died.
He was 35.
He was someone-- he was "one of those people"
is what I want to say, but he was more unique than that.
He was the kind of person that one
meets at just the right time.
And our lives intersected when we really needed each other.
And we didn't have a lot of friends in common
and so I didn't find out about his death until a few months
after he died.
He was very much a survivor of HIV.
He was an important activist in the fight against HIV and AIDS,
in this city and elsewhere.
And he died from an unrelated, precipitous lung
infection, double pneumonia, in the hospital in February.
I'm very lucky that the last memory I have of him,
I think almost the last thing he said to me publicly,
was-- he was with a group of friends.
He was very much the kind of the star prince of one
of Tucson's underworlds.
And I didn't have a lot of access to that world.
But he was with some friends.
He hushed everyone when I approached the table.
And he said, this is the guy who made me want to keep living.
So I met Jeremy days after his diagnosis, in 2006 and 2007.
And I want to say to him that the feeling is mutual.
And in his memory and with hopes for comfort
for his husband, Ben, and his mother,
who was very devoted to him, Sheila, I want to read--
not a poem, because I don't really
have a poem that I wrote for Jeremy.
And so my partner, John, said, why don't you just dedicate
the reading to him?
And so that's what I'm doing.
And I selected some poems that have
sympathies with who I knew Jeremy to be,
including that first poem.
This is then called "Lifespan Addenda."
It's the first poem in the last section of this book.
It's not in parts.
But now that I've written the book and it's out there,
I kind of wish that it was.
There's a sort of little prefatory moment,
and then there's three sections belonging to three birds.
So I won't say them, but it could be in sections "Grackle,"
"Buzzard," and "Pheasant."
So you might have that in mind.
"Lifespan Addenda"
"Auspex in hospice, each of us, home forsworn,
should hope to be visited again.
Three birds come back, crisis apparition or provident
delivery, searching the air in a reverie you might announce.
And they'd grant you that, or I, present for astonishment
purposes in moments everything reset.
The way Guy Davenport said a bird'd be, an attachment,
mailer-daemon, returning for review ones
that rook, a parliament gathering singly.
The grackle above the backlot xeriscape two feet
levitated for his mate.
Pima County, el milagro, Arizona.
A casino gush of nonpareil, openly winning a minute long.
All that ultra black to undo his lover did.
Nature spent a fortune.
One day into night I got it right.
The colors trail, trail away.
The Christ Event obviating adverbs, as it were.
Not even once, not finally.
Back when I had everything to want.
The bird jumping into the hold in the air, attached
to whatever time is attached to.
Where for a stretch coming off the bridge
to the barrier island the causeway
veins the isthmus entirely.
The stone crabs cross the street,
and gravid must, for less brackish hatch.
And a turkey buzzard gets the picture.
Never been eyed, not that way, since, seed sown in.
The midpoint of my life now you see.
Interruptions across and the causeway too.
Here I am breaking the horizon.
Something unwinding still in the car,
slowing another half mile before the turnout came, an antidote
and doubleback.
Causeway transposition-- from yanking the wet sweet back body
out of the cracked case, a pause,
her fearsome red rule to return through.
In the suffusion of a rich old woods' last new growth,
Election Day ferns capitalize on shred light,
an Idaho of understory greener than spring.
Like this, the footfalls far from home, his and mine and his
and mine.
And now, again, the dotty canopy and the sink sensation focus
upward sends.
When did the world start so the ghost berry bush, by dark,
is a grown-down constellation and the newt in his hand
wasabi?
The void, chasing the ample rush,
heart-level, like a drawer receding into the mountainside.
Heavily the pheasant pushes her flight deeper in."