So the second thing I'm going to read this evening
is an excerpt from an as yet unfinished and untitled work.
I think that's all I'm going to say about it because I don't
really know what it is yet.
"White squares and white squares and white squares:
A landscape of silence.
The way glass breaks into tines, triangles,
the way it is aqua green and blue all at once.
How it reflects light or drinks it in.
There were persimmons on the tree, velvety orange
like tongues.
The dog is a slump in the shade.
Coffee sits unwanted on the window ledge.
This is summer, this fluttering.
Willow branches are here, red, cranberry reeds calling.
And the snails and what is dark.
There is always a looking.
Each night, the candle and circles on the ceiling.
The dark stone and the translucent one.
There is always an aching, always that lack.
Each day we lose what is most important.
And the leaves still falling from the tree.
I watched a woman caught up in a remolina, that twist
torrent of wind and dust, on the street yesterday.
No one could help her.
She was in its maw.
It twisted and twisted around her.
And she swayed and tried to cover her face.
What is true is that what we have is each other.
No one got out of their cars.
No one tried to help.
The body at its edge happens only alone.
Though connection with each other is what we need,
sometimes it has to be pushed on us forcefully,
as when Robin Williams says "I love you"
over and over and over until Matt Damon finally breaks down.
If there is a silence at the center of everything.
If there is no way to ever go back.
In the sun the world becomes white.
Bleached desert, no play of shadow and light.
In Argentina we walked and walked
and here too we walk and walk.
Terra finisterre. If what were to matter were a sort of light
or shatter, a distillation of color,
the reflection of 1,000 shards of light off the ocean
at the world's end.
And what blue offers, eyes upturned to ours.
If our walking and walking will somehow
carry us into something.
The tower bells chime in the distance.
We are this turning, flickering, licking inconstance.
Who.
How.
[? Bhikkhus ?], the Buddha began.
Everything is burning.
We are the way the sun bleaches everything in the afternoon,
the way even flowers droop, then regain their stance.
We are quiet children.
We are left behind.
Shooting, sparking spitting flame,
and then the ash that remains.
We are the snapdragons outside the door,
the way the ants swarm into each spot you've just stepped.
The afternoon monsoon.
The bells of Loretto Chapel in the heavy, warm afternoon.
The weight of the air yesterday felt like ocean
here in the middle of all this land.
We are the Lorca poem in the afternoon.
The Spanish Civil War, the woman curled over,
moaning, her breasts cut off, the broken snow falling,
the woman white upon the tree.
Gaudi is still the only person buried in the crypt
of his Sagrada Familia.
Many of his three dimensional models for the church's design
were burned during the Spanish Civil War,
of which Lorca writes: "A night of reclining torsos
and of stars with broken muzzles waits for crevices of dawn
into which it may tumble."
City of Musk and sorrow with your cinnamon towers.
When Marina Abramović stopped for her 2010 exhibit,
The Artist is Present, she was in a chair in a red dress.
Between each audience member who came to sit across from her,
she dropped her eyes to her lap, perhaps closed them.
Once someone had taken the seat across from her,
she raised her gaze.
On one of these days, Ulay comes and sits in the chair across
from her.
He is restless, nervous perhaps.
Hasn't seen her in years.
Stretches out first one leg and then the other.
He looks at her.
When she raises her face, a wave of shock flits across it.
She holds his gaze.
He closes his eyes, shakes his head as though in disbelief.
Opens them again.
Tears streamed down her face.
She leans forward, stretches her arms far across the table.
He does the same.
Their hands meet in the middle.
Only for a moment.
She sits back again.
He stands.
She wipes the water from her cheeks.
Her hands stay over her face for a long time.
Finally she sits up straighter, drops her hands,
raises her face to meet the gaze of the next person.
How do we shift from choosing to asking?
The question blossoms along the lines of the bone and then
spreads, droops, like a spent bloom vines, expands,
climbs up your throat.
And after all, the sagebrush in the dense sun outside
the window and the tree, which keeps trying to grow.
Scarlet and thirsting, scarlet and thirsting.
Doesn't this describe every moment of us, every atom of us,
small light smoldering through all the cracks?
We are in that stillness, which is also a kind of gathering.
In Cage on Cage, John Cage speaks of his belief that
for our survival, we will need to become a we instead
of billions and billions of I's.
He's speaking in the shadow of the Cold War.
Today we stand beneath a different shadow,
but still in the shade.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whom the Catholic church prohibited
from publishing his writings while he was still alive,
also believed in this singularity, this unity,
that our knowledge wrapped the earth,
almost an enervated layer of skin.
In the film last night, an entire flock of birds,
thousands of small black birds, swirling and turning back
on themselves, swelling and curving like a crescent of ink
dropped into water, expanding and curling in on themselves,
taking up the whole sky.
A we instead of 1,000 separately.
Voices like a throat full of joy and deep.
Thanks.
It's been such a pleasure.
[APPLAUSE]