Well, thank you so much.
I can only echo to what Jay said,
you guys know how to do introductions around here.
I should just go home, and you should just listen
to a lot of introductions.
Thank you so much.
Thanks to all of you who've had a hand in making this happen.
Diana and Paola, Tyler, Julie.
Thank you, everybody, for all the warm welcome
that I've had here, and that Jay's had remotely.
This has not been said explicitly
but maybe I should say it right now.
Jay's my husband.
And so one of the interesting features of this moment
is that he and I both have books coming out at the same time,
and they are both responding I guess to the same set
of biographical circumstances.
But I thought that it might be, I don't know,
a useful thing to do to step into a different mode
for a few minutes.
So because I'm in Tucson, and you people know your deserts
as I from Utah know my deserts.
So I'm going to start off with the desert
poem called Three Bouquets.
One.
What awful love worked this superfluity?
My US Geological Survey map grids the haphazard landscape
into restrained geometries.
Bulges and sandstone hoodoos smoothed by the benign cursive
of contour lines.
But look at the chart's least cluttered corner.
The cartographer abandoned his strict piety
to boutonniere the desert.
A compass rose.
Its free hand arabesques transgressed the quadrants,
A Baroque whimsy of the official pen.
I imagine him gripping silent his staves and theater light.
Stumped by some unmatchable beauty, it bucking his measure,
efflorescence in him.
Heart struck, he tricks out the plateau in posies.
Two.
Fond romantic.
I've followed the map farther than asphalt. Taken myself
up to the bare coordinates where the compass rose blooms.
I'm quick to see the cartographer's flourish
as a Valentine.
Quicker to want what beauty forced its mark here
to lose my bearings by it.
Let my North be this rosy seduction of sandstone
flashed with quartz.
My East, that far high mountain shining like all the kingdoms
of the world.
Three.
My dear cartographer, how misplaced
our faith in the compass rose?
As if its love not could fix beauty.
As if it marked anything but the heart's excesses.
My own heart surges to pitch its rococo
against the map's hard facts.
It is willing to break itself to flower.