All right, all right, got to figure out
how to work this thing.
OK, so cool.
So now we are actually getting to the present moment.
And I thought I would just read two poems from "How
to Be Drawn."
And a lot of stuff is going on in the book.
But one of the things that only gets framed now,
recontextualize based on tonight's occasion,
is thinking like trying to braid those two
things inside and outside, to bear witness to it,
to enact it, to be a victim of it, of spectacle of violence.
So I think, in some ways, I just picked two poems
that I thought were trying to do that on this book,
and then to see what that means for the next, like,
what comes after that is what I'm
thinking about in this last poem that I'll share with you.
But here are two from "How to Be Drawn."
So this one is "The Deer."
I guess, there's not much to say about it.
Muscadine is a little berry that grows in the Southeast.
And it is like--
the joke that I tell is that they would sell them
in Whole Foods like in Tucson, and you would buy them.
But in South Carolina, they're just wild little berries.
But my mother would get them.
And it's like this muscadine wine,
if you know anything about that area.
So I guess that's all you need to know.
And Pataskala is a town in Ohio.
"The Deer."
Outside Pataskala, I saw the deer
with the soft white belly, the deer with two eyes as blind
as holes.
I saw it leap from a bush beside the highway as if a moment
before it leapt it had been a bush beside the highway.
And I saw how if I wished it, I could be the deer, a creature
bony as a branch in spring.
And when I closed my eyes, I found the scent
of muscadine, the berry my mother plucked Sundays
from the roadside where fumes toughened
its speckled skin and seeds slept suspended in a mucus
thick as the sleep of an embryo.
It is the ugliest berry along the road.
But chewed, it reminded me of speed.
And I saw, when I was the deer, that I
didn't have to be a deer.
I could become a machine with the woman inside it,
moving at a speed that leaves a stain on the breeze
and on the muscadine's flesh, which is almost meat,
the sweet pulp of muscadine leaves
when it's crushed in the teeth of a deer,
or a mother for that matter, or her child waiting
with something like shame to be fed a berry uglier than shame.
Though, it is not like this for the deer.
It is not shame.
Because the deer is not human.
It is only almost human when it looks on the road and leaps
at least 30 feet, covering in a blink the deer I cannot be,
the dumb deer, dumb and foolish enough to ignore anything that
runs but is not alive, a trafficking machine filled with
a distracted mind and body deadly and durable enough
to deconstruct a deer when it leaps, I'm telling you,
like someone being chased.
I remember, a friend told me how when he was eight or nine,
a half naked woman ran to the car window
crying her man was after her with a knife.
But his mother locked the doors and sped away.
Someone tell him his mother was not a coward.
That's what he thinks.
Tell him it was because he and his little brother
were in the car that she would not
let the troubled world inside.
It was no one's fault. The mind separated from the body.
I could almost see the holes of her eyes,
the white fuzz on her tongue, the raised
buds soft as a bed of pink seeds, the hole of a mouth
stretched wide enough to hold a whole baby inside.
I could almost see its eyes at the back of her throat.
I could definitely hear its cries.