Thank you for that wonderful introduction.
When you feel known, that's a great moment.
I was going to start by reading an excerpt from a poem
by Saadi Youssef, who's an Iraqi poet.
"America, let's exchange strange gifts.
Take your smuggled cigarettes and give us potatoes.
Take James Bond's golden pistol and give us
Marilyn Monroe's giggle.
Take the heroin syringe under the tree and give us vaccines.
Take your blueprints for model penitentiaries
and give us village homes.
Take the books of your missionaries
and give us paper for poems to defame you.
Take what you do not have and give us what we have.
"Take the stripes of your flag and give us the stars.
Take the Afghani mujahideen beard
and give us Walt Whitman's beard filled with butterflies.
Take Saddam Hussein and give us Abraham Lincoln
or give us no one.
Now as I look across the balcony across the summer sky,
the summery summer, Damascus spins
dizzy among television aerials.
Then it sinks deeply in the stones of the ports and towers,
in the arabesques of ivory, and sinks deeply, far
from Rukn al-Din, and disappears far from the balcony.
"And now I remember trees--
the date palm of our mosque in Basra.
At the end of Basra, a bird's beak, a child secret,
of summer feast.
I remember the date palm.
I touch it.
I become it when it falls black without fronds, when
a dam fell hewn by lightning.
And I remember the mighty mulberry when
it rumbled, butchered with an ax to fill the stream with leaves,
and birds, and angels, and green blood.
"I remember when pomegranate blossoms covered the sidewalks.
The students were leading the workers' parade.
The trees die, pummelled, dizzy, not standing.
The trees die.
We are not hostages, America, and your soldiers
are not God's soldiers.
We are the poor ones.
Ours is the Earth of the drowned gods, the gods of bulls,
the gods of fires, the gods of sorrows,
the intertwined clay and blood in a song.
We are the poor.
Ours is the God of the poor who emerges out
of farmers ribs, hungry and bright,
and raises heads up high.
"America, we are the dead.
Let your soldiers come.
Whoever kills a man, let him resurrect him.
We are the drowned ones, dear lady.
We are the drowned.
Let the water come."
That was written in Damascus in 1925.
This is a wonderful book.
[APPLAUSE]
Now, I'm just going to read a long, actually--
it won't be boring, I hope--
a poem from my new book, which is just out.
And I haven't even seen a copy of it
yet from UC Press, which is called Gone.
G-O-N-E. And this is the last section of the book.
And it's written in 14 parts and is called "The Passion."
"Sun-blinded on a dark road, it must have been me that must
have been he.
If you stood there, if you were where
I did, as I guessed he would do, for me, for never without fear,
would each approach the other so without eyes.
Who of which one was the more winning?
And who the colder and who the warmer?
Who was my you, or was it a you who
was an ear, inclining to lips like the lips of someone else?
Pluraling as one into someone I missed?
Not you.
Yes, still you.
Yes, you.
No, you.
"I'd shed.
She'd shed.
She was shed from the end of the land, eye looking,
one eye looking.
Hard of hearing, hardly hearing.
It was weird how he left no clues as
to where or whose you were anyway.
It is both.
It was both of us looking, of her looking,
of one looking at the other, the other's way.
To see him from afar, no father you farther.
You're farther, no farther than when you were not farther than
this from me than this here.
That, there, went on.
"At each turn, we held on tight as if
in danger, each error a correction, a hole in the air.
So far from the center that a blooding together of us
feathers, world-heavy under the breast and wheel,
was necessary for the homecoming.
"The grass that scents a man's skin comes from a land
where he was born and was one person.
Ire as a beating wind, his dirty hands.
But the bird and new-mown hay aren't with him now as linen,
ash, and I was.
"Come back to three lines of light on a little river--
one pink, one green, and one aluminum.
Come back to being.
"Where there was a current but no currency--
wait, this didn't happen yet--
where there was a current on a sweet and a salt
lagoon, intersecting diameters, a painting of a place
hanging in my mind, gilding a frame
for my rich neurotic eros, there was
someone like someone else, concocted extra spatially.
Like a day's delivery of everything past and nothing
to hope for but recollection.
The sky had the last word.
It was imagination dying.
"Home is the water I call home, blood thicker than brick,
the river red with it, and walls supported by spirits.
When the marches of marriages ended the days in jail,
the way was work.
In late night hours, work on the soul was the way.
But a third way holds the second,
and the first holds the third.
And all are cold dark when there is no work.
"Two children in winter wheel and chill in the silver
carriage in the stony town.
"What would Father say if he ever called?"
He'd be a quote from a book with its solar jackets out of range
because that's where he stays.
"The dead do not converse.
A snowlike still, a concrete sill,
squares squared everywhere.
Blocked-in reflections on windows
gush into saffron, figures in stained glass.
Those groans from the street and the gruffness of early Sundays,
pills and water, will get me to the railing.
"In the old way, the old wood gathered its shadows and twigs.
But they wouldn't burn.
They wouldn't burn, because of the ashes and ice
and the snapping.
It was the month of red berries.
And the sister and brother held hands and ran away laughing.
"Once on a summer night in a humid tunnel,
sex was scheduled.
But no baby faces looking up at the time.
Pure lust, like a tulip budding between our chests.
And it was fun.
And I would do it again.
"Blood when I dreamed of love.
Love is the dream's blood.
Blood on the way to the past.
Red path, red heart, white dusk.
"From the curling of the thumb, a plumb-line
straight up and out to its blue tip.
With other woes, we can't control or de-exist,
pulled tight at the end of the stress.
"This is scattered, I guess, to free
the last string of wishes--
given an easy turn and thankful, too,
for what I didn't get in the same breath as what manic
I did.
Was it luck or a plan to crawl out alone,
to spin a thread of spittle as into a closed dark petal?
"The heart-mark of love was a tulip
and the eyes of the pupil a perfect cut for someone
scarlet and doubtful.
"What did you say to him?"
"Nothing.
I loved him."
"A belly of snow under a Moonday sun,
a shiny cap, a grinding cap, and the black
of a hedgerow of his and hers, sooty like fur.
He was gray-complexioned all the way down the forest hall.
Suits and coats made out of smoke formed holes for his arms
to pass through.
"He managed his agony, but lost his looks and all his currency.
For, him time was a vacuum filled with his visions.
They held him above history like Valium or something
flat in heaven.
He was always gone or leaving claw-lines--
white across a brick building.
"A political laugh flattened like linen,
rolled apart but still a haunt.
Now strips of dust filter over the prison a man is leaving.
Broken locks and wood that reeks of halfway cut rotten books.
Half a sun and half again of it, burning white, unhomelike.
I don't want his things to see me.
"Leave him hanging.
Never call.
His coat is open.
His belt would fall.
These are the actions in hospital, woman, or jail.
When the camel's knees fold, it's the end of poetry.
"Hope-wired to the purple tulip in my heart,
I should meet and not hate this heavier knowledge of terminal
days.
Let out my mind like mist over the treetops,
poetic stitch with little dots to punch
on either side of space and twigs.
Summer bunting made out of nothing but relationships.
"The shadow is an angel of a maybe.
It travels like river water on streets in the city,
as much as wherever things are pretty.
I wish I could get it off of me or out.
It's unbelievable the way it doesn't see but feels me.
Maybe this is addiction.
Maybe a salvaging.
Maybe I'm shedding my skin or yours, cold-covered skin
trying to warm.
Maybe the angel is almost airborne,
a woman who survived starvation because her blood was so thin.
I don't mean to be depressing, but I
wanted to haul and wrap you like a nibbled shark-white kin
of mine.
You flailed your way back into the engine.
Don't you know what you've done?
That was a soul you injured.
It's now beyond weakness.
It's adaptable.
"Heart pressed in the book--
ink its hard horrid wordstain, engraved as a tulip.
This heart cultivates resistance,
a culture of powerful worms.
"And the transverberation, your heart
is pierced with such a piercing, you leave the sphere of doubt.
Take heart.
Lose heart.
"Your heart is your tongue and the sweet jam that loves it.
Your heart is your shoe, your place on the sod.
Your heart is your baby cribbed in your ribs.
Your heart is a tumor with a tulip sign on it.
Your heart is your brain.
Your heart is a troubadour singing to wood.
Your heart is a camel plodding along.
Your heart is your ring that was reddish brown.
Your heart is your sex and your mouth next to burning.
Your heart is my heart that trails you in death
and guides me to the bird, a heart named Only One Song.
"She put her hand inside of his and they
held on, two wings on a bird.
Then he let go, willing to sacrifice to a little nest
at a higher position.
Give me a bucket full of colors and not
this melancholy gray memory.
If a goldfinch can pick up a bucket full of water
with a tiny stream, her mind can lift her hope again.
"Shiny light that lives inside the skin--
shining, always shining and the rain.
An umbrella in the hall corner signifies her brother's dream.
He sleeps on the floor under his raincoat
while the dog's tail thumps.
"Her ghost batted at the glass.
She didn't understand it wasn't her corporeal self
but her numinous inner body that he had pinned to his chest
and the wires pulled on his skin whenever he turned in bed--
the stains on the palms of his hands red.
"The knees tremble, but she touched the veins
and pulled the skin on that heart expansion.
His little wounds, his dirty fingernails,
the beard he wouldn't clean, and frayed hems, the sunset cheeks
and sweet skin, smoke in his hair,
himself naked as a movie screen.
Get out of this morass, poverty of spirit.
She can't.
Who names you but your teacher?
"The family ended in convulsion of overeating.
Then began the new fasting--
love everlasting as a vow of sex,
home abandoned for revenge.
The children orphaned until each dirty boy with rough nails
and wrists as soft as a girl's became
a man both rude and prudish.
The sisters wrote about this, but only one of them
never put quote marks around the word "love."
"He went astray, his pen tossed down into a well
with a little stone splash.
A bottle of bitters became his system,
killing others who died unwillingly while he
was killing himself for fun.
Every day was unday for this one.
There were no words but winter nothingness
between piles of loving embraces,
his legs curled in fear.
"The wind drops when the sun sets.
A yellow cottage, a ceiling like curd.
The west steps into starriness--
no comforter, no hand to draw her own.
She hesitates, stiff at the lintel, gone again.
"Left bereft by her/himself but not died out to anyone yet.
The winter skies are rough on wires,
scratching on this twelfth night.
Somewhere, he's not crawling, near or far before or behind.
The erected cities await the turning since the dead precede
the living and also the becoming.
"Snow-moss silvers the trees.
Its tent is cold the way it sinks into a milk
and then joins a pallid scrim over the skyline.
Why does a heart wear its eyes into hell
like slivers of full sunshine The rented
wall, the human back, heaving at the edge of the bed.
"The spirit cried, "Here I am!"
standing with her hands held up to greet him.
"Don't you see me?"
Her brother turned his back and put her
in the past, blank world of the unable-to-have.
But her little fists pounded out the ice cold tally.
All will be well, if only.
"One angel's efforts to cross the pond
were long-limbed, winged in foam,
loved before, guided and ruined many,
with a salt-slinging bow to history which stings, martyrs,
and burns.
He didn't feel me.
I hate, therefore, the word "prayer"
since every word is one.
The angels must be laughing at paper, crouched to examine
the pink flower, petals bending over a thorn and pen.
"In this grove, there is only one patient.
His heart, like a berry, bleeds an aura onto ice-white sheets,
his eyes glassy, his chest cold.
Even his tongue is cold.
He has eaten so much meat, the beasts feel an affinity
and lick him where his heart is spilling.
His eyes are lifted.
Nobody knows she is following him,
but he has left the light on for her.
She follows the imprint of his womanly feet.
"Homeless, he depends on his own arm to cover him with his coat
by closing it.
Outside, the wind chill has brought the temperature down
below zero.
His sisters wait at the night gate.
One has eaten raspberries from the patient's mouth the other
is drinking the milky air.
"I was looking for you in some arcades."
The sky is merciful, a Virgin Universe.
He has a thorn on his brow, as if he's a unicorn, or Cain,
the woundable one.
"Hand bells ring.
"Whose voice is this who laid to rest
the fear of being abandoned?"
He opens his johnny to show her the evidence.
How does she know it is him when his throat and lips exist
somewhere else?
He might as well be a sleeping drunk in a war lobby or bar.
Up above, all is calm, All is clear.
It came upon a night at midnight clear.
The sound of one voice speaking into some holes
and coated wire.
"Oh shouts of stony light across the desert!
A donkey's nostrils blow white air.
One hand freezing, one hand open, all her senses
coiled around the telephone.
"I want to call someone, please."
She is informed the line is free.
Now she could hear his laughter echo
through the plastic handset.
Or is it a hand banging a stone against
a tongueless Celtic bell?
"I watched him disappear.
This was the first station, the one where you
can't believe what's happening.
At first the sun shone like a dime and cinders
wouldn't stop falling until the last one flew up.
Eyes cleared the lights through thin branches, brittle
and burden.
Red spots on ice, dirt spots, ashes
like feathers from seed-eating birds
who fly close to the ground.
Across the harrowing span, a pond would be ice and rough.
Like to die might be nice enough.
"His wings were a whole-cloth first, folded around his chest.
So it hurt to rip apart this revolutionary red breast
and make him spread and fly.
All his singing actually was a cry of protest.
Have lived!
Not this!
Have died!
"The stations of my humiliation traveled from telephone
to telephone machine.
Then I hit a knob and lost every message
to an illuminated blackness.
A prayer reminds me of a telephone call.
It represents the way the end of things is on the ground.
The rain comes whenever it will because it's dark
where the mountains mother.
And being stuck in one spot is something to ring bells about,
while the white goose travels thousands of nautical miles
with one map and partner.
"I am giving you the most wonderful present one
memory can give another--
a bridge of illusions, or snow as hard as the hood of a car.
Some people are radiators even when
their skin is thin and cold.
Often they are drunk on memories.
He, for one, carried a red bag by a string
to remember socialism when he had no person to care for him.
On his beat he went from ice to heated place,
warming up the short space between lip and cup.
"To die for love, to die of love, to die in love,
to die with love, to die over love, to die without love,
to die to love, to die in the mine
and be a "mine" in the arms of someone's chest wound.
Here I will die of the above.
"Some call it a desert, though it's wet on the palate.
Spiritual dryness makes reptile faces.
The scourge of vinegar, bad wine, bad guts,
who was laughed at and cut and packed into a paddy wagon
driven along the riverbank.
And Officer Judas shouting, "Lock him up!"
This was after he'd exited the Mystic River Bridge
and before either of us was dead.
He said, "Put on your silks and follow me."
"Blood rust on the cement.
Cold, dimpled cement.
Rend your heart like your coat.
Pull the lapels apart and show us the gash.
Light flattening, I forget.
The belly's web and legs of a spirit-infested thing.
I wear a single cross-beam.
I keep forgetting, like my own exhaustion.
She's been hardened by a hard life
in public housing, where the rich keep
the poor that rob them.
Unfortunate girl, always laughing.
"His legs were long and thin, his knees bent
and feet crossed.
I remember him stroking each one automatically.
Soon he would be nailed.
Agony, he begged.
The temptation to suffer is a big quiet one, the kind that
is generated by repetition.
He got good at sleeping outside the same doors
and staring into the eyes of drivers-by,
his empty pockets were stuffed with their glances.
"Rain and wind from the East River to the blood red facade
of St Veronica's.
Two hands clasped in a car.
Not an inauspicious start.
The window panes a metaphor, not a force.
But it won't let me have anything I want.
So what is the relationship between time and the soul?
Time has no temperature either.
He slept on a plank, his blanket was air.
He said he had never slept better.
We must die together.
"Then I'll bear the torch and the needle.
I'll carry and marry the ashes.
They will be mine.
I will be the main mourner, though no one will see me.
I'll know why he died and what was the reason flowers attract
scissors.
"A decent soul comes in rum-red colors.
It's a floating shadow--
not water or air, but something nearly solid,
a hint of cinnamon and bark.
And some people know how to circle their lips
around the mouth and suck the soul away just
by leaning close, taking hold and tossing
their legs around the person.
You have to care for your soul because time is transparent
and slides between you and your soul when someone else has it.
He is sipping my own, a binge of memories
the color of raw sugar.
It tastes delicious with the past.
"I left him.
I lost him.
Gone.
The named person, the tall brother, untamed and shaken.
We forgot to make plans for this eventuality.
No numbers or papers.
I forgot to take the vital information
from his raincoat pocket since there was none--
only stray ends.
"The chest of a robin, reddened, inedible,
like the thorn blood of Jesus on the mouth
where Judas kissed it and made him into merchandise.
The fallen angels folded their dirty wings across their chest
and lowered their heads to peck for oil,
as if they didn't notice.
"To the western wing of the Mayo Clinic,
she traveled to keep his back warm.
Automatically, he raised the blanket.
Useless jealously.
Either you're loved or you aren't.
"Skin icy, nipples bit, the little scrabbles and scores.
His gums are sour grapes.
And those whom he speaks to clench their teeth.
The plank in his eye is now on his back.
It's awful the way he knows his mother waits and weeps
and it doesn't turn him.
Pain waves over the second station.
Women walk on the third through the 10th stations,
ground into light under the steam and steel, their keening
like inexact wheels.
"Pain is the body's grinding.
Pain sticks to the human brain the way
pollen sticks to a stamen.
If you watch the man disappearing,
carrying his plank, you see dry splinters
in the beginning, then just a cruciform
as insignificant as a broken-winged bird walking
through a pit.
"He swallowed my soul.
So now I know soul is physical.
This was a test.
So can be stolen by a human kiss.
A portion of soul, I feel it missing.
Can it grow back?
Can it fill in the depression, dark and thin?
An oil proportioned to all skins,
soul now boldly bathing in another's pool.
"Open him up and cut him apart.
Hang him up, bind him with string.
And you won't see him struggling.
All heart, he's lost his will.
Poor thing.
Open him up and close him down.
Let him live, he won't protest.
Winter coats and wet hats will never hang on him again.
Open the door and let him out into the sail-white winter
night--
unhinged, unwinged, his coat unbuttoned
as he wants, poor thing.
"He was faithless.
But when it snowed and she had the Weather Channel showing
blizzards where he lived, dread of his habitat
seized her and held her at needlepoint.
His coat was ripped and who would sew it?
Where would he find rest when there was no name for him
at the cage and clinic?
Only a convulsive overhang of wind and snow
splashing across the tarmac and de-icing devices
lifted to his wings, unbuttoned.
"Stations on the wall fly past with vodka and milk
and a watchtower.
Me and the self-loathing huddled together,
averting our faces from each other.
Time is breathing with us when time is air.
"They could never have lived their lives together.
But they did.
Decades separated by yards in the same time and town, lost
in probability, never meeting.
Their souls were at source one, but addressed to some,
intended for any, that lonely.
In old age and young, each like to sleep against something.
The outer wall of a cathedral.
The bend of a back, as if whispering,
"Six pennies and infirmity never mentioned these."
"I went by film to dreary high-rise apartment blocks--
Christmas lights and small cars wires
still shivered in the air, windows
like empty refrigerators.
The man drove a cab as if he were dragging it.
If you nail some white on a wall,
it turns yellow in time Polar lilies
and the gold spray of pollen.
We invented film to see what we were doing.
100% here, 100% there, and 100% space between.
In this triad is the whole stable machine.
"This angel clung to boats and pecked
at workers on their tits.
It pissed and shat on their hair as well as garden tents.
Its song was repetitive.
If the air around it wasn't soft, its feathers were.
It preferred sugar liquor to bread
and was Divine Mother's favorite.
The mystery of preference is never solved by acts.
"Sisters locked into the clasp of his bare legs without fear.
He lay like John Lennon, all over each one of them.
In those days, they didn't operate on babies
or have too many theories.
Narcissism wasn't on the tongue, though.
Other names for not knowing yourself by your own body
must have been.
"His father was an angel.
Her mother, man.
The end of his line began with an organ.
She carried her lyrics around in a bag,
along with some shoes and wings.
Left one pair to pretend she was returning.
But how could she?
Love is the movement towards perfection.
"I was hungry for love.
It was pathetic, the stones I threw or smashed my mouth
on in my pathology of starvation.
This hunger drove me into the vineyards
with their drooping pebble gray fruits.
One mouth opened and sucked out some
of my love, fermented mouth and tongue.
I hung in the tree of that one's torso and bones.
It was the fruit I had been hunting.
"Not the cat or the worm, not the feather duster,
not the slime, not the fowl or the fish,
not the birds of the air.
None of them has a name.
But amen.
Amen in the dark.
"On the day I prayed, no one answered me.
On the day I called, you didn't answer me.
All the days I prayed, but there was a dial tone only.
On the day you called, I was away.
No self-pity.
A week was made of six whole days.
Seven was outside of them.
A name, a number, an actual mean.
Our souls need freedom.
Otherwise, price and kill or kiss and sell depend on it.
"The last image was a misprision.
Black row of bristles and bird-broken snow.
The old way, one pocket for two hands.
A gash on his waterproof skin.
The sole of a shoe open to the snow.
Loss and dishonor.
All this was really a cement apartment block closed
in for the people's dinner.
"He can't get back in.
Terror is what won't let him in.
Terror squared.
Terror circled.
He can't get back in.
Please, Time, make a way.
Only the dead sleep outside the arc of your caravan.
"Stick, sex, amoeba, outline, back.
Stick, tucked under the other's heart and soil.
Tender and unstuck.
Wander, wander alone.
The larger margin of error, now an aura, silver and slick
as a mirror.
"He didn't answer.
The market crashed, rebounded.
And the morning doves cooed.
He couldn't answer.
Between my brain and this silence,
time lifted and measured.
There was no more reason to die."
And then there's a little sort of addendum to that one which
is called the "Shadows."
"It was still daylight, seeing as the rim of the Earth tended
towards night.
When she said, the Messiah is turning,
let loose the demons from his cloth and redden the ashes,
her psyche was shed.
The wind?
There was no wind.
Unseparated from the one before, but when?
Not beatific, not damned.
A float heavy helium that stirred the world
and its own intentions.
"Time began our limbo tree.
It grew in brooding showers.
Light and snow, spirit in a watering can.
Moisture of soul and verbiage, now soil and vergia.
Plant against chance, the evanescent limb.
Get down on your knees, God, and pray all cruelty, ceasing,
will, before your heart is for rent, or sold.
I know it's your heart by knowing
how it feels inside another.
"The meat of an angel was chewed over supper,
demonic elements hovered at table center,
cluster of probable beings, unbottled, unacknowledged.
Lust interrupted discharge, a loaf of flesh as good as gone,
is all real stuff inching through limbo's
unfamiliar weather and language.
Two wings, now one.
Space for cloth.
"He has felt as a feeling.
She feels him.
She doesn't know why he to him being battle-catching mother,
whom she caught at the circulation, still
remembers in her rose-lipped perceptor, love
born or birthing.
There is something between them.
It climbs color like the shades of pain,
describing their skins like a map's edge of ocean.
It laps the purr to him.
They do feel that third person."
And that's it.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]