Towards the end of the last century,
I was writing a series of poems called A Book of Witness,
and miraculously, I think, it was a series of 100 poems.
The first 50 came in 1999, and the next 50 came in 2000.
So it was like turning.
And what I was doing here was I wanted
to overemphasize-- to emphasize the first person singular which
had come into some repute among certain poets that I knew.
And the first person singular is the pronoun of witness.
So, yeah, I wanted it-- but it didn't have to be me.
So I incorporated a number of short first-person statements
by other poets, particularly contemporaries, and, of course,
I could say true or I can make fiction and still use
the first-person pronoun.
So I'll read two poems from A Book of Witness.
Oh, yeah, and I started it out with a quote
from the great Mexican Mazatec shaman--
shamaness Maria Sabina.
She refers to the sacred mushrooms
that she uses as the saint children,
and she says language belongs to the saint children.
I didn't say it.
They said it.
They speak, and I have for ALTA people, ALTA,
they speak, and I have the power to translate.
That's my acknowledgment of the ALTA conference.
Maria Sabina, they speak, and I have the power to translate.
"A Cruel Nirvana."
Half dead is still alive, and half alive is, too.
So keep it rolling I declare.
The others mingle in a room atop the city where a fire burns.
They sing.
I sing among them, then I push my way through with my thumbs.
I eke a living from a stone.
Hard knocks are bound to follow.
I can hear a water song close by my ear
and track it where it leads me.
It is summer, but the trees are dead.
They vanish with our fallen friends.
The eye in torment brings them down,
each mind a little world, a cruel nirvana.