Thank you very much for that.
They're sunchokes, you're right.
You're absolutely right.
It's good to be here.
I really feel lucky to be here as part of this.
And I'm going to read you poems.
I think the way that I'm going to read,
there's going to be a kind of, sort of--
hey, so it's cold out, chilly, so, with consent,
I think we should be closer.
Just like, if you're cold, lean into your neighbor, if it's OK.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm sort of interested in the ways
that we all collaborate, sort of unwittingly, invisibly.
Keep each other warm.
I'm going to start with the poem that you mentioned,
"Sharing with the Ants."
And what I was going to say--
I think I probably interrupted myself, as I do sometimes.
This reading will probably make some kind of an--
argument is too strong of a word--
but a sort of notion of a relationship between the lyric
or the poetic and the ecological.
"Sharing with the Ants."
A euphemism for some, yank and gobble, no doubt,
some yummy tumbler or other, like monkey
spanking, or hiding the salami.
Of course your mind goes there.
Me too, me too.
You have a favorite?
Don't lie.
I've heard you say them.
Tending the hive, eating the melon.
How is the tunnel traffic?
Or, as a "massage therapist" would say to my pal
when his loneliness dragged him to a carpeted room
in an apartment building in Chinatown
where the small hands lathered his body, open the door.
Naturally sharing with the ants some entymologic metaphor.
The chronic yoke in lovemaking, not only of body to body,
but life to death.
Sharing with the ants.
Or, the specific act of dragging with the tongue,
one sweat-gilded body from the tibia's lookout,
along the rope bridge of the Achilles,
marching across the long plains of the calf
and the meticulously unnamed zone behind the knee
over the hamstring.
And to use your imagination, for Chrissakes,
but I will tell you it is dark there and sweet.
Sharing with the ants.
But that's not at all what I'm talking about.
I actually am talking about sharing with the ants,
which I did, September 21, a Friday, in 2012, when,
by fluke or whim or prayer, I jostled the crotch-high fig
tree whose few fruit had been scooped by our fat friends
the squirrels, but found shriveled and purple
into an almost testicular papoose--
Who knows what a fig looks like?--
into an almost testicular papoose,
smuggled beneath the fronds of a few
leaves one stalwart fruit, which I immediately bit in half,
only to find a small platoon of ants twisting in the meat.
And when I spit out my bite, another four or five
lay sacked out, their spindly legs pedaling slow nothing.
One barely looking at me through a half-open eye,
the way an infant might, curled into its mother's breast.
And one stumbled, dazed, through my beard,
tickling me as it tumbled head over feet over head
over feet, back into the bite in my hand, the hooked
sabers of their mandibles made soft,
kneading the flesh, their claws heavy and slow with fruit,
their armor slathered plush as the seeds shown
above the sounds of their work, like water slapping a pier at
night.
And not one to disrupt an orgy, I mostly gobbled
around their nuzzle and slurp, careful not to chomp a reveler.
And nibbling one last thread of flesh,
I noticed a dozy ant nibbling the same toward me,
its antenna just caressing my face,
its pincers slowing at my lips.
Both of our mouths sugared and shining,
both of us twirling beneath the fig's seeds,
spinning like a newly discovered galaxy
that's been there forever.