Thank you, Jason.
It's a lie, first of all.
I didn't save his life.
I just didn't let him die.
I was sure you'd kill me.
I didn't kill you, which I don't every second I know you, so.
He's really the best friend anyone has quantified.
It's Jason.
Thank you, and Thanks to Maddie for letting me --
Can people hear me?
I don't feel like I'm amplifying.
It's OK?
OK.
It's a great pleasure to read with--and challenge to read with--Richard
Siken more than any other poet.
It makes me more nervous than--
but I'm glad that we've had a chance to become friends.
We sort of secretly decided that we
want to do other things in different ways.
So this first poem is for Richard
who sort of complicates what I mean by the same question,
"The Same Question".
"Weissmuller lifts himself out second.
A pool is a somehow still part of the stream.
Send in a hat of pith close to current.
It fusses at distinction and keeps a winding oath.
The two had toggled at the bank, to a watery reprise.
There's another trick in the scene ashore.
They sit in confrontation folding thrillingly
at the meridian of first facing.
He prepares a lesson on site and reaches
to hide her eyes when Jane has the better idea, giddy
atop the promise of sex with a swimmer,
to mirror her hand against his.
Then disoblige the likeness applied,
turning it, as the sound to the sea,
measure for counter measure "different.
Do you like the difference?"
When have I been, so new to nature?
I helped the drifter you sent to my rock bed.
There now.
He says it's the same body, water the one world over.
We shifted stones in the brook and asked one
another the same questions about you,
and troubled the water masterlessly.
Turned us right up onto a public beach.
You should see the calcified tail
he found in the Snapple bottle.
We fed lines through the terrarium at the aquarium.
Everything cascades all over again,
and why, who have I crept alongside somehow
still piloting the world over my one life on elbows
to at the least level drain my recalcitrant head
in his hand and some sand."
"To Come True A Thing Must Come Second".
"Once was a story of following, following.
Return is rarely the reverse I value,
or so I led you like a zero out the zoo,
toured it twice at once for your regard and came to understand.
Roughing it, a captive is another whom a captive asks
which one of us stays wilder.
We catch them polar in the Bronx among the shots of me
looked at in the eyes.
The check of one tactic - drowsing
in the rear - against another - pacing the periphery."