And I'm going to read you one more poem.
It's called "Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude."
It takes 10 minutes to read.
Which means it takes 10 minutes for you to hear it.
So if you need to shift, shift.
[LAUGHTER]
There's two things about this poem that I want to tell you.
One is that part of it, it starts in a dream,
but then the second part it goes to this community
orchard in Bloomington, called the Bloomington Community
Orchard.
Which is this sort of experiment in a neighborliness.
An experiment in caring for people you may not know.
There's 100 trees, there's 100 or more fruit bushes,
there's all kinds of complimentary plants,
but there's this place where we have
decided to try to figure out how to grow food for each other.
And to have the conversations about growing food, which
are really conversations about taking care of each other.
That's in Bloomington.
Come Please come.
And the other thing is that there's
this kid who was not yet a kid in this poem named Aralee.
Aralee was the idea of a kid.
And now Aralee is like a three 3 and 1/2 year old kid.
"Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude."
I'm very glad to be here, feel lucky to do this today.
Friends, will you bear with me today,
for I have awakened from a dream in which a robin made
with its shabby wings a kind of veil, behind which it shimmied
and stopped something from the south of Spain,
Its breast a flare, looking me dead in the eye
from the branch that grew into my window,
coochie-cooing my chin.
The bird shuffling its little talons
left, then right, while the leaves
bristle against the plaster wall, Two of them drifting
onto my blanket while the bird opened and closed
its wings like a matador giving up on murder.
Jutting its beak, turning a circle, and flashing,
again, the ruddy bombast of its breast,
by which I knew upon waking it was telling me
in no uncertain terms to bellow forth
the tubas and sousaphones.
The whole rusty brass band of gratitude
not quite dormant in my belly.
It said so in a human voice.
Below forth.
And who among us could ignore such odd and precise counsel?
Hear ye!
I am here to holler that I have hauled tons.
By which I don't mean lots I mean, tons of cowshit.
And stood ankle deep in swales of maggots
swirling the spent beer grains, the brewery man
was good enough to dump off holding his nose
for they smell very bad.
But make the compost writhe giddy
and lick its lips, twirling dung with my pitchfork,
again and again.
With hundreds and hundreds of other people,
we dreamt an orchard this way.
Furrowing our brows, and hauling our wheelbarrows,
and sweating through our shirts, and less than a year later
there was a party, at which trees
were sunk into the well-fed earth, one of which
a liberty apple, after being watered in
was tamped by a baby, barefoot with a bow hanging in her hair,
biting her lip in her joyous work.
And friends, this is the realest place I know.
It makes me squirm like a worm.
I am so grateful.
You could ride your bike there, or roller skate,
or catch the bus.
There is a fence and a gate twisted by hand.
There is a fig tree taller than you in Indiana.
It will make you gasp.
It might make you want to stay alive even, thank you.
And thank you for not taking my pal when the engine of his mind
dragged him to swig fistfuls of Xanax and a bottle
or two of booze.
And thank you for taking my father
a few years after his own father went down.
Thank you, Mercy.
Mercy, thank you, for not smoking meth with your mother.
Both, thank you.
Thank you for leaving and for coming back.
And thank you for what inside my friends.
Love bursts like a throng of roadside
goldenrod gleaming into the world.
Likely, hauling a shovel with her like one
named Aralee ought.
With hands big as a horses and who like one named
Aralee ought.
Will laugh time to time til the juice runs from her nose.
Oh, thank you for the way a small thing's wail,
makes the milk or what once was milk
in us gather into horses huckle-buckling across a field.
And thank you, friends.
When last spring, the hyacinth bells rang, and the crocuses
flaunted their upturned skirts, and a quiet
roved the beehive, which when I entered
were snugged two or three dead fist-sized clutches of bees
between the frames almost clinging to one another.
This one's tiny head pushed into another's tiny wing.
One's forelegs resting on another's face.
The translucent paper of their wings
fluttering beneath my breath.
And when a few dropped to the frames beneath, honey.
And after falling down to cry, everything's glacial shine.
And thank you too.
And thanks for the corduroy couch I have put you on.
Put your feet up.
Here's a light blanket.
That would be really nice today.
[LAUGHTER]
Here's a light blanket, a pillow, dear ones,
for I think this is going to be long.
I can't stop my gratitude, which includes, dear reader,
you, for staying here with me.
For moving your lips just so as I speak.
Here is a cup of tea.
I've spooned honey into it.
And thank you, the tiny bee shadow perusing these words
as I write them.
And the way my love talks quietly within the hive.
So quietly, in fact, you cannot hear her but only notice barely
her lips moving in conversation.
Thank you, what does not scare her in me,
but makes her reach my way.
Thank you, the love she is which hurts sometimes.
And the time she misremembered elephants on one of my poems.
Which, oh, here they come.
Garlanded with morning glory and wisteria blooms
trombones all the way down to the river.
Thank you the quiet in which the river bends around
the elephant's solemn trunk, polishing stones, floating
on its gentle back, the flock of geese flying overhead.
And to the quick and gentle flocking of men
to the old lady falling down on the corner of Fairmount
and 18th.
Holding patiently with the softest parts
of their hands, her cane, and purple hat,
gathering for her the contents of her purse
and touching her shoulder and elbow.
And thank you to the cock-eyed basketball court
on which in the half-court three on three
we oldheads made of some runny-nose kids a shambles.
And the 61-year-old after flipping a reverse lay-up
off a backdoor cut from my no-look pass to seal the game,
ripped off his shirt and threw punches at the gods,
and hollered at the kids to admire the pacemaker's scar
grinning across his chest.
Thank you the glad accordion's wheeze in the chest.
Thank you, the bagpipes
Thank you to the woman barefoot in a gaudy dress for stopping
her car in the middle of the road,
and the tractor trailer behind her, and the van behind it,
whisking a turtle off the road.
Thank you, god of gaudy.
Thank you, paisley panties.
Thank you, the organ up my dress.
Thank you the sheer dress you wore
kneeling in my dream at the creek's edge
and the light swimming through it.
The koi kissing halos into the glassy air.
The room in my mind with the blinds
drawn where we nearly injure each other crawling
into the shawl of the other's body.
Oh thank you, when I just say it plain.
We fuck each other dumb.
And you.
Again, you for the true kindness it
has been for you to remain awake with me like this.
Nodding time to time and making that noise, which
I take to mean yes, or I understand,
or please go on but not too long.
Or why are you spitting so much?
Or easy, Tiger, hands to yourself.
I'm excitable.
I'm sorry.
I'm grateful.
I just want us to be friends now forever.
Take this bowl of blackberries from the garden.
The sun has made them warm.
I picked them just for you.
I promise I will try to stay on my side of the couch.
And thank you the baggie of dreadlocks I found in a drawer
while washing and folding the clothes of our murdered friend.
The photo in which his arm slung around the sign
to the trail of silences.
Thank you, the way before he died
he held his hands open to us.
For coming back in a raft of incense
or in the shape of a boy in another city looking
from between his mother's legs.
Or disappearing into the stacks after brushing by.
For moseying back in dreams where seeing us lost and scared
he put his hand on our shoulders and pointed us
to the temple across town.
And thank you to the man all night long,
hosing a mist on his early bloom the peach tree
so that the hard frost not waste the crop.
The ice in his beard and the ghosts
slitheen from him when the warming sun told him sleep now.
Thank you, the ancestor who loved you before she
knew you by smuggling seeds into her braid for the long journey.
Who loved you before he knew you by putting
a walnut tree in the ground.
Who loved you before she knew you
by not slaughtering the land.
Thank you who did not bulldoze the ancient grove of dates
and olives.
Who sailed his keys into the ocean and walked softly home.
Who did not fire.
Who did not plunge the head into the toilet.
Who said stop, don't do that.
Who lifted some broken someone up.
Who volunteered, the way a plant birthed of the reseeding plant
is called a volunteer.
Like the plum tree that marched beside the raised bed
in my garden.
Like the arugula that marched itself between the blueberries,
nary a bayonet, nary an army, nary a nation.
Which usage of the word volunteer familiar to gardeners
the wide world made my pals shout, oh, and dance and punch
his knuckles into the lush soil before gobbling
two strawberries and digging a song
from his guitar made of wood from a tree someone
may be planted.
Thank you.
Thank you zinnia, and gooseberry, redbeckia
and pawpaw, ashmead's kernel, cockscomb, and scarlet runner,
feverfew, and lemonbalm.
Thank you knitbone, and sweetgrass,
and sunchoke and false indigo, whose petals stammered apart
by bumblebees.
Good Lord, please give me a minute.
And moonglow, and catkin, and crookneck,
and painted tongue, and seedpods, and Johnny jump-up.
Thank you.
What in us rackets glad, what glad rackets us.
And thank you too, this knuckleheaded heart,
this pelican heart, this gap-toothed heart flinging
open its gaudy maw to the sky.
Oh clumsy, oh bumblefucked, oh giddy, oh dumbstruck,
oh rickshaw, oh goat twisting its head at me
from my peach tree's highest branch.
Balanced impossibly gobbling the last fruit, its tongue working
like an engine alone sweet drop tumbling by some miracle
into my mouth, like the smell of someone I've loved.
Heart like an elephant screaming at the bones of its dead.
Heart like the lady on the bus dressed head to toe in gold.
The sun shivering her shiny boots
singing Erykah Badu to herself.
Leaning her head against the window.
And thank you the way my father one time came back in a dream
by plucking the two cables beneath my chin like a bass
fiddle strings.
And played me until I woke singing,
no kidding I was smiling and singing (SINGING) Thank you.
Thank you.
Stumbling into the garden with a Juneberry's flowers
that burst open like the bells of French horns.
The Lily, my mom, and I planted oozed into the air.
The bazillion ants labored in their earthen workshops below.
Collard greens waved in the wind like the sails of ships.
And the wasps swam in the mint bloom's viscous swill.
And you, again you friends, for hanging tight.
I know I can be long-winded sometimes.
I just want so badly to rub the sponges of gratitude
over everything, including you.
Which is awkward.
Yes.
A little suds going down, your collar behind your glasses.
Soon it will be over.
Which is precisely what the child in my dream
said, holding my hand pointing at the roiling sea and the sky
hurtling our way like so many buffalo who said,
it's much worse than we think.
And sooner.
To whom I said, no duh, child in my dreams.
What do you think this singing and shuddering is?
What this screaming, and reaching, and dancing,
and crying is, other than loving what every second goes away.
Goodbye, I mean to say.
And thank you every day.
Thank you.