And I want to thank Frances, who is not here,
and Gail, who thought of me for this series.
I haven't read in Tucson in a number of years.
But I think the time is right.
The last few years I've had the honor
of working with an unbelievable number of talented
and great hearted and smart students, and a number of you
are here.
And you have made my teaching life a joy,
and so this reading is for you.
And I want to thank you for all that you've done.
In fact, I'm going to start out by reading
a few poems, prose poems, published
by some of those students.
The nice thing about working with great students
is they turn around and publish your work.
And I like that.
CUE is a new prose poem magazine.
This is the inaugural issue.
It is edited by Morgan Schultd and Mark Horosky, recent MFA
poetry graduates, with a lot of help from Stephanie
Balzer, a current MFA poet, and an undergraduate poet,
who finished off a year ago, Miriam Benadi.
And there are people in here from James Tate
to Barbara Cully to David Young to David Lehman, Alison
Deming, Aloysius Bertrand, who began
the form, French middle 19th century poets and translations
of this.
It's for sale.
Buy the copies up here when I'm done.
I'm going to read one poem titled "The Healing Arts".
It's a two-part, two paragraph poem, a meditation
on my dog sleeping.
"The Healing Arts".
"When the dog's sleep is untroubled,
I put milk on the stove to boil for a good cup of coffee.
I turned my back on it.
In the sewing basket my grandmother willed to me
I find just the right buttons for eyes
to sew on my niece's rag doll, the one I promised
to repair months ago then left hanging
on a hook in the closet like an accusation,
but as it turns out, a tender one
because I grew accustomed to asking the doll's opinion
when I dressed in the morning and tried after several weeks
to make her laugh when fresh from the shower
a pathetic stick of a man, I puffed out my belly
like a pregnant woman.
Such a labor though.
Such a promise left unfulfilled, that should my niece
grow to adolescence without the doll I said I'd mend,
who'd become a haunting, whose source
I could never put my finger on.
But when the dog's sleep is troubled,
her paws scramble on the painted pine floor.
She's digging for a mole or chasing pigeons inside her head
when she dreams.
So I sit by her for a while.
I take out a book I bought at a yard sale
on impulse, stories, old ones from a time when villages were
common and all who lived in them knew each other's business,
putting up with this or that if no one involved complained,
agreeing without a word to poison
the murderer bit by bit at the Inn
where he drank evenings since his uncle, the Constable,
would take no action.
Stories from a time when idiots wandered into whatever
houses they wished, sleeping where they fell,
and placing their filthy fingers into
bowls of soup with the impunity of the innocent.
It seems unfair to invoke God.
You can't really believe in a know-it-all presence
who was in charge.
Yet in such stories, simple and dark,
in which the character's obsessions and perversity
are like those we tuned to daytime TV talk
shows to hear today.
Such behavior was folded into everyday like currents
into dough one plans to bake into scones.
Reading them beside an animal in silent turmoil,
an animal in love.
Who can help but feel the kindly embrace
with the terrible revealing of force beyond human reckoning?"