It's good to be back in the Southwest.
I had actually, after I went to school in New Mexico,
lived in Kansas for a while.
And now I'm living back home, where
it was 34 degrees when I left yesterday.
So very good to be back in the Southwest.
[LAUGHTER]
I'll begin with a poem which I've actually never read before
at a reading, in Combing the Snakes from His Hair.
It's called "Sustaining This Massive Shade."
It was written on a morning, after a night out
in a Lawrence, Kansas bar, where I was confusing the Rimbaud I'd
been reading with the conversation I
had with my favorite bartender.
So it came out of an odd way.
"Sustaining This Massive Shade."
"Of all that is left to occur when nothing
moves, but beneath my skull a dog
stretches tremulous forelegs.
Cicadas drone in every tendon, while the wind offers nothing
to keep insects from the skin.
And still he returns like the new leaf unfurling.
In sum, what nightfall has in store.
I keep four calendars, he said.
Beneath one moon I am jealous.
Of all that touches him, the rain that doesn't fall
and the woman that lies next to him.
In this age of hands, where are mine.
I am intact and I don't care.
My hands in the garden.
Corn bleached and malformed by drought
beneath the sick of blue.
I have the white-blue eyes of my ancestors, he said,
their narrow skull and their clumsiness in fighting.
Fighting to keep my hand from his belly
where sleeps a double sex.
Struggling not to touch the small bones held in by sandals,
I take note of his every step.
Given confidence and confiding in the agave.
The cactus mourns the memory of feeling
and mysterious delicacies seduce me.
That this night would give up one breath
to stir the downy hairs on his golden legs.
The skin that aches for want of feather.
How I move between rooms, the cattle of longing
and think only of that curve at the base of his skull.
The cowlick clipped to a choirboy's mean halo.
I am happy, he said.
I am jealous.
Of the planets that seduce him with greater success
and the moon that lights his pale alarm
when he rises in the night.
Walk through the night, gently moving
that thigh, that second thigh and that left leg."