The next is a long poem written the time of my 80th birthday.
And 80th birthday means that you've lived for 80 years.
It's not-- it's not that you're going into your 80th year.
You finished your 80th year, so be sure of that.
And I had been asked to contribute
to a Festschrift for the Colorado poet Jack Collom
for his 80th birthday, and I guess
probably the first five or six poems here
were for that occasion.
And then I realized, well if Jack Collom is going to be 80,
I'm also going to be 80.
Yeah.
Yeah, so it took off.
It took off from there.
I'll read it, and then I'll end with something
entirely different.
I call it a poem of miracles, and Jack Collom for me
was also a writer very deeply into ecological issues
and so forth.
The miracle became a sense of nothing really supernatural
in that the--
where we are, the miracle of the here and now I suppose.
And it's in--
27 sections, short lines, and each one as it turns out,
they're all 14-line poems.
Why do I tell you this?
It's a secret I've been keeping for years.
If 14 lines rings any bells for anyone,
that's the way it worked out.
"A Poem of Miracles."
A miracle more ordinary than the grass
under our feet, the hot sun as it dazzles eye and skin.
So many memories blending into one.
We have no place to go but where we are, no nearer to the end
than to the source.
A miracle open on all sides toward which
the mind moves slowly and the eye is in a dream,
opens and shuts.
Clouds without rain cover the sun.
The animal that sleeps over our skylight
knows neither rest nor waking, only a dream.
Turn of the hand by which a perfect bird comes into view
of flight over the heads of some,
no mystery in what we see.
We walk away from it, though soon
are gone when something ever bright, a flash of wing,
assails us heretofore concealed.
The real comes first.
The fancy, a far second hard to tell apart, still harder
in the dark.
The eye too weak, the skin still weaker like the mind.
The origin of species hides its birth.
The contours of the real, the hand feels in the eye,
imagines only later in singular pursuit.
A miracle to make the seen a forerunner of the unseen,
the animal you see its metamorphosis deferred.
Imagination lurks here, brings concealment into light.
The world inside the mind turned upside down.
A miracle to live a life in celebration,
knowing fear and feeling death he
finds the poem more to his taste.
They call it fancy, a game of chance or choice
that pulls the mind back from the literal,
opens a door to the imagined real.
A miracle from which the other miracle precedes.
The owl living night long in the palm tree.
A flight of pelicans, brown shadows east
of where the sun touches the ocean.
A miracle of distant bodies, voices from the sky
sounds absent words.
A miracle, the sun crushed by its clouds.
The mind retreats from blood lines staining the horizon,
raining down.
The word is firmament.
A cracked sky over the sun and moon
imagine trackers behind which light seeps forth
a field of stars.
A miracle, our lives that pass a barrier.
The evil wind is not so evil that brings us
words to string into a poem.
Nowhere to go but up and out.
The miracle, even to know that knowing ends having all
tried and failed against the odds.
A miracle of darkness hides the light itself.
A miracle in which infinity is escapist
and we plunge on in hot pursuit, the ocean
capped by scarlet clouds.
A miracle or not, the sand below is pink or mauve or amber, open
and shut.
A miracle, the light a miracle, the night a miracle,
the sea a miracle, the tree a miracle, the bird a miracle,
the word a miracle, the rain a miracle, the brain a miracle,
the time a miracle, the rhyme a miracle, the breath a miracle,
the death a miracle, the light a miracle.
A miracle to have been here and to vanish as the time
ends no more real than anything we know or run from.
In my hand, all touch astounds me.
Color of the dead is also touch, their faces
and their voices pressed against thee touch by touch.
A miracle that words are green still after an age of dryness
at the rising sap-filled leaves and shoots.
The sun still bright and the engulfing dark
is an illusion barely known, a deeper darkness hiding
all the firmament unhinged.
A miracle from this trench and place, a universe is born.
Sheer accident denotes a further miracle.
The dish falls from my hand and finds the ground.
An apple shows the marks of teeth.
A rush of things more real than words
or less, the time has come to add up what we know.
It floats in air.
I reach for it.
The grass sweats.
Words turn green.
A finger signals a new miracle.
The sky leads into empty space.
The mind is helpless to address or fill.
Only in the little world can we both love and kill.
The solipsist is king here, waiting for the end of time
and knowing that it's endless.
A miracle by which the dead animal and man lie fallen,
never to rise again but sanguine in their dissolution
then slow progression into flesh and out again
continues while the world does.
Only then no trace of mind remains truer than this.
A miracle, the small worlds and the vast, the way the blood
appears sudden and hot, the sun at daybreak lighting the wound.
The firmament persists over the sun and moon the deeper image
that it hides where light and dark change places.
A time that makes the mystery of time and space.
A miracle, to place a foot on solid ground and know the Earth
rotates 1,000 miles a day at the equator, barely
an inch at either pole.
The ordinary rise and fall at how we breathe and move, steps
taken in the rush and crush of galaxies dark more than light.
If time is endless, what we feel as time deceives us
with the miracle of what we feel.
The ordinary push of days against the grain.
A miracle, the lie of beauty dazzles
us, deceitful elf, duende and capriccio hiding pain
and hunger, ready to explode.
A miracle, the Earth collapsing into
ruin while the larger world survives.
There say the human ceases, gone astray, and leaves a trace
behind the breath or whisper ready to become a word.
The picture in the mind is not a picture
until you call it forth a pixel at a time.
A miracle where none exists to call your own mind
into being then to touch the hairs, the skin from which they
spring.
The ordinary smells that sex brings
and the heat rising from the depths.
A history contain, a touch of fingers, not the first or last.
The final letter names the end and vanishes.
The miracle of sound absorbed the body
freed to speak its world.
A miracle, the tread of foot on Earth,
the Earth a further miracle.
The firmament no longer there to stunt our view.
A miracle of sequence, numbers covering a wall.
The sky itself a field of numbers,
numbers as an alphabet, a game of numbers
lightly drawn and lightly peppering the mind
inscribed in dreams, the dream of hunger leading to a world,
counted a number engrafted in the flesh.
A miracle, the flowers in the garden grow tacky and decline.
The path to the miraculous not what we thought or ever
reckoned but to draw breath day by day waiting for the breath
to be exhausted.
The flow of blood to dry.
The miracle of death, the greatest miracle.
A miracle to wake up from a dream
and count the dream itself a miracle.
The flower in the dream as ordinary as the flower
awake and spoken in your voice.
The word is such a flower broken and adrift,
the sound reverberating more a miracle than what the eye sees
or the mind knows.
A miracle to have been spared this far.
The beauty in the little known, the everyday
repeated at a finger's touch to translate
what we know to what's barbaric, vast, and wild.
The book of witness opens.
All the words we have are theirs and lead us
eyeless, whispering.
The years themselves a miracle over against the world of pain.
Coda, for Diane.
A miracle, the unseen overtaking us,
the larger world in darkness darker
than the mystery of birth.
The miracle resides in what we see and touch.
So good to be here and to bow to you.
My dearest friend in darkness.
As the poet said.