WEBVTT

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Adam, thank you very much
for that introduction.

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I'm very moved and
honored to be here.

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Thank you all for the invitation
and for your presence.

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Is that sounding about
right, in terms of volume?

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A little bit up?

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OK.

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I'm trying to work
off a six-day virus,

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so if my throat comes in and
out of audibility, stay with it.

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I think I better
start with the poem

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that Adam requested
in case I forget

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to do so during the reading.

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But actually it does
make a nice beginning

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since it is called Threshold.

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And my sense is that poem needs
to work its own way to cross

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the threshold out of
one kind of silence

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into the other kind of silence
that underlies poetic speech.

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And the experience of
crossing a threshold

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is so multivalent in terms
of its experiential freight.

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I don't need to say that to you.

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How many kinds of
thresholds we're crossing,

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second by second.

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But also from peace to
war, from war to peace,

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from justice to injustice.

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Threshold, if I can find it
here, is a poem from Necessity.

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And one of the issues that
this book is working through

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is how a particular
quest, an individual life,

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a national life, a
civilizational enterprise

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inevitably moves between
poles of innocence and guilt,

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and has its sense of
origin in a place where

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innocence and guilt are very,
very difficult to separate.

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The notion of original sin
obviously comes to mind.

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Where the choices begin.

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That seems to be the
place where we are quickly

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departing for innocence.

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Do they begin at
the bodily level,

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at levels even lower
than that of the mind?

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Threshold.

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The body quarreling,
as if from inside it

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can know of its place.

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Heat, opening its mouth,
the rapid occupation trying.

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Salt, crusting in the
aftermath, lowered to the ground

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over remnants of bright mulch,
the splinted fingerings,

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the swallowed memory.

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Sweet Link, sweet Finn, glancing
in the friction of the mist

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through which it moves.

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Each mineral takes back
its trace of blade and bone

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of first affiliation in
the nib and ticking out.

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If there is choice, this
is the lining under it.

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Unpierced.

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If there is choice, it
strikes each particle

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that hangs and spins
in the near weightless

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filament, sweet
whisper of electrum,

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where the wheel must turn.

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But soon, only the ghost is
visible between the trees.

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And other ghosts, already
in to penetrate in seed,

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in through the needle's eye.

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A little further off,
a little throatless

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after-whistle
devoutly to be wished,

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the trickle and the taint of it.

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And what they, too, had
taken for and taken back out

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of the hard residual
innocence of life.

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