I realize I've been reading poems of setting forth
origins of in some ways irremediable departure,
and it was a joy to meet somebody
around dinnertime who is designing
the future of Poetry Center.
And it made me think that the relation to poetry
and architecture is very much alive in the material as well
as a metaphorical sense.
Of course, we call stanza stanzas
because it's Italian word for rooms.
And so the idea of somebody designing rooms for poems
sounds entirely appropriate and wonderful.
And I'd like to read one poem, which is called "Head".
It's in response to an African head,
which is placed in an art museum in Yale actually.
And Yale asked a number of its graduates
poets to write poems in response to works of art in the museum.
And they have a fantastic collection actually.
Great French impressionist works up
to the contemporary works, Rothko and so on,
and Renaissance works, and they sent me
up a list of all of reproductions.
I saw this African head and immediately just established
its permanent claim on me.
And it led me to think about the inevitable question of what
one is doing when one is looking at African art out
of its original context.
What museum is?
What ritual objects are when they're moved into museums?
What is the space that we inhabit
when we're in the presence of works of art?
And so too when we're in the presence of poems.
So the head became an interlocutor
that allowed me to explore what the space was
that we want to share.
And it was an African mosque from the Congo
and was made out of the solid block of ivory
that looked like wood.
And it was carved after the experience of slavery.
This is written in very long lines.
"Head".
Simply to hold back the fraying stem,
bundle, scale, blur, winged, tooth, I flat
water that will burn before the other signs give way.
Earth-beaten carved into the single route
your eyes now looking back at my shelled sockets.
Shallow ships drowned out to carry
their own cargo stripped and hunted, here search a harvest.
Wind comes over us unsung if not for other sounds
ancestral laboring the memory of river water blades
of quick tension led away.
That battleground you fastened over you, your skull,
your face of fiber hearing it if you can listen far enough.
There is a continent before the gods.
There is a cure of bone between behind you
now the field is opening its jaws below the ridge.
There is no hollowness through which this whispering can fall.
No peace filled re-imagining now it is yours.
Repaid a monument through which no bird calls seep.
You have to see it here.
The place reserved for craft for prayer
in which you pause unknowing.
So these pieces of the tree not life not
replication grow around us thickening however
much we cut them back.
The branches of black ivory the leaves that open elsewhere
to descend ungatherable around another generation's thirst
for everything between itself and its own end.
Do not come home they say.
Begin again, take all the time that's left.
Take Africa.