Good evening.
Welcome, everybody.
Before we get started, I'd like to announce
that the new issue of the Sonora Review
will be for sale after the reading as will old issues
out by the refreshment area.
So take advantage of that.
We also have copies of Boyer Rickel's book, Arreboles,
just out from Wesleyan University Press.
And that's for sale also by ASUA bookstore 10% off
if you are a faculty or student or staff
of the University of Arizona.
Donald Hall has said that the history
of writing, of literature is also
the history of friendships.
He was speaking I think of the encouragement writers give one
another, whether in an academic or a more informal situation,
of the audience we give each other, those of us who
are committed to that perpetual apprenticeship, which
is the writing life.
So it's a happy night that we are here
to celebrate the publication of Boyer Rickel's first book,
because he's been an educator whose specialization is
encouragement, and a friend who's
been, for many, that kind of careful reader
we all need and want.
Boyer's poems have appeared in such journals
as Antioch Review, Field, Poetry, and The Yale Review.
His book is just out from Wesleyan University Press.
He's recently won a $5,000 poetry writing
fellowship from the Arizona Commission on the Arts.
Rumor has it he hopes to spend it
in Italy with great style in the near future.
We hope that rumor is accurate.
He also received an honorable mention from the Tucson Pima
Arts Council Fellowship Competition,
and has been recently nominated as one
of 15 national artists of various disciplines
for the Doers White Label Emerging Artists Award.
Please welcome Boyer Rickel.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
The last few weeks, the last couple of days
have been a little boggling.
There have been a lot of photographs and newspapers
and articles and it's been almost unnerving.
People have started asking me who my publicist is.
And in fact, I have a publicist.
[LAUGHTER]
If you saw one of the photographs announcing
the reading in which there was a big white dog sitting next
to me, my career is in her hands.
She pulls all the strings and I do whatever she says.
It really is wonderful to be here, and a lot of people
have said very kind things to me about recent successes,
and I'm very grateful.
If wishes can make things work out well,
the evening should go very well indeed because many of you
have been very good to me.
I want to start by reading a poem that
grows out of some recent prose I've been writing.
I've been working on childhood stories the last year
and a half in nonfiction pieces.
And in that process of going back 25, 30, 35 years
and finding the stories that gave the form to a life,
my life, I've discovered, as many, many writers and others
before me have, that when you ask
others who were involved in those kinds of events,
those family events what happened,
that each will have a very different story.
Each of us will have created a meaningful story,
but one that is somewhat personal.
The characters will have even switched around.
No, you didn't fall out of the car.
I fell out of the car.
It goes on and on.
So this poem sort of addresses those complications of memory.
And there are a couple of places where people speak--
without the text in front of you might not be obvious.
So the first time I go like, that it's
my brother, and the second time it's my aunt.
I have dispensed with he said she said, which works
when you see it on the page.
The poem is titled "Exactly."
"No one remembers what the hour was, simply
that it was morning.
Rushing her things together in a pile in a suitcase,
my brother offering a blanket as my mother
slid down on the cool vinyl car seat,
in case your water breaks.
I've always imagined absurdly that in that small Mormon town
mid-century, the family rode in a taxi, my father at the wheel.
I had time for breakfast, my mother remembers,
or I didn't have time for breakfast.
I can never remember what she says she remembers.
To do my astrological chart, of course, Aunt Olga in her '80s,
must know the time exactly.
It makes all the difference.
The certificate is no help, and the hospital now
gone to the wrecking ball for a strip mall.
No delivery room can I ever imagine,
no doctor certainly putting his hands
in that place in my mother, no image
of the first time I was brought to her bed wiped clean,
wrapped no doubt in a soft blue blanket,
or of my father standing by.
The tiny me burning never, never,
never to leave her side."
Well my brother who was so very helpful the day of my birth
remained very helpful throughout my early childhood
until I figured it out at about age 12.
He was four years older.
So I depended a great deal on him.
He was my hero.
I respected and counted on and I asked him in fact
to be my teacher.
There were things that I didn't understand about being a guy.
And he had lots of friends and seemed always
to know how to do things.
So I would ask him to teach me, and he would always
say, yes, if I would pay him.
[LAUGHTER]
And I didn't know any better.
I figured that's the way brothers worked.
And so I would agree.
And oh, an example.
When you're seven, eight years old, at least
when I was seven or eight years old,
it seemed very important to know how to do cool things like make
arm farts.
[LAUGHTER]
He figured that was worth about three weeks allowance.
[LAUGHTER]
I didn't see much allowance.
OK.
He was also the person I turned to then when
I didn't understand a word, I would ask him
for the meanings of words.
And he made me pay for that too.
And this poem is about that.
It's titled "Education of the Poet."
"I must have been four.
Our California summer, a broken tamarisk in our sandy backyard,
the sight of many mysteries, diarrhea
of a hobo dribbled at its foot, the foot of a gopher
chewed off in a trap my, father said,
who grew ill at sight of this work of his hands.
Hands that at the piano keyboard played the same Bach four note
phrase 100 times to hear the possibilities.
I heard beneath the tamarisk my brother's explanations.
Prevent, he said, means to start something, to begin it--
in answer to my question about Smokey the Bear,
only you can prevent forest fires.
[LAUGHTER]
Only you can start forest fires, I said to myself over and over,
head down, adjusting to the weight,
this was a world of responsibility.
[LAUGHTER]
These were the days when Buffalo heads and Mercurys could still
be found in dime store change and steel pennies
from World War II blackened as if charred by war's fires.
Our cardboard coin albums with punched out circles
seemed valuable according to their weights.
As pages filled, the albums grew heavier, difficult for me
to handle, reaching on my toes to slide them
from the bookcase shelf.
Home from shopping trips, we race
to see who could empty dad's trouser pockets, who
could squeeze open mom's green football shaped coin
purse first, matching coins with their values
in the red collector's book, a book with new words like mint
condition, uncirculated, and priceless, which as my brother
explained, meant a thing was of so little value.
it was worthless.
If I found one, I should simply hand it over to him."
[LAUGHTER]
We both remember this.
This is not something he has forgotten.
He's a successful realtor.
[LAUGHTER]
And I stand here tonight.
[LAUGHTER]
That's true.
Well, I'm going to jump coasts and about 25 years,
read a poem from the book--
if I can find it, titled "Two Mothers in The Cloisters."
If you're not familiar with The Cloisters,
it's an extension of the Metropolitan Museum.
It's on the upper end of the Manhattan Island
in a beautiful park overlooking the Hudson River.
Somewhere around the turn of the century,
somebody got some parts of cloisters from Europe
and brought them to America, which
is what people were able to do, I suppose, with lots
of money in America then, and put them together beautifully.
Collected a remarkable medieval art collection
and housed it there and then at some point,
it ended up in the hands of the Metropolitan Museum.
I went there one day by myself some years ago.
It was my first visit there.
You go to the very end of a subway line.
And then you walk through beautiful park.
And it was pretty magical.
The artists is pretty powerful.
Some of the pieces there are real important to me.
But I had had a very disturbing dream that day
which ended up mixing in with some of the things
that I saw in the museum and some of the things
that happened to me there.
And some years later, it became a poem titled
"Two Mothers in the Cloisters".
"One eye half covered by the lid, the other open
to the world.
The cracked 500-year-old Madonna,
a headless baby in her arms, smiled,
while the other mother, gray and gap-toothed
talked about her crazy son to anyone who'd listen.
Her voice broke off and I could see the Madonna had no feet,
and the guide ropes were covered in sky blue velvet.
The living mother's eyes never fell on objects,
but searched the open spaces.
On dreams, there's no consensus.
Half the day, I walked around sick from a dream
as though I'd swallowed a toxic substance.
For centuries, people thought of them as omens.
Now we're told we are what we create.
I am my loved one, her lace trimmed, water colored skirt.
Forbearance.
Not the ancients' notion of fate,
though I can feel it in Oedipus' demeanor
at the end as he walks blinded out
of Thebes or in the grim composure of the 15th century
Madonna, as if to say, since we can't will the knowledge we
need to live we make, and when the thing is done,
acknowledge its beauty and its brokenness.
I dreamed I carved up my mother with a hunting knife.
The mother with a mad son smiled past my face."
I have a couple of poems now that I don't think
need any real introduction.
They are just about fairly everyday things.
I'm going to read them together because a good friend of mine
who helped me a lot with the poems
in this book over the years insisted
after I wrote the second one several years after the first
that they were a pair, that they spoke to one another,
that they had to be in the book, she said, side-by-side.
And I don't argue with friends who are so sure.
So I will read them side-by-side tonight.
The first is titled "Our Names."
"This morning, finches picking at saltbush seed
startled at the motion of a trowel
as I did at the high white scream
of the deaf boy next door shaking from his dreams.
Where was he moments before?
I wondered, that waking should unsettle him so,
so little land, so little yard for him
and all the others to adventure in, in summer.
Five families in shacks on a lot the size of ours.
Just room enough we calculate for two grown men, a garden,
and cat to discover together their individual selves.
This evening, sipping drinks on the porch, the cicada buzz
and heat and alcohol, so intermixed, we
are an endless coil of sound.
We almost fail to hear our names.
The next door children walking along the railing of the fence,
climb the chinaberry tree.
And now they're on a roof.
The deaf boy trailing a cape is standing
on the very ridge whistling as he waves."
The second poem then is titled "Downpour."
"The garden lush with poppies, anemones,
reds on blues on yellows is during this the first hard
storm in months, a marketplace spatulate leaves
and wind tossed buds, a bartering purposeful throng.
And the man who tends it, who just stepped out,
who stands on moony nights or even in this daylight downpour,
slack as if listening for the need of growing things.
This man, If you could see him as I do from the kitchen
door in secret like a cat, is love in flesh and bone
for all his giving.
The almost glow imparted to the iris
blade, he runs like living ribbon through his fingers,
is emptiness.
The one beside me here this afternoon and mornings as I
roll my pant legs up to wade the low cool household lake
between his dreams and mine."
I can read a poem now that--
it began as a short story.
Ill-fated.
There wasn't a story in it.
I-- several years ago experienced a very
special evening with a friend and a partner of his.
I was in New York visiting friends and someone
that I'd known for years had a new partner who
was suffering from illnesses related
to HIV infection and AIDS.
And they wanted me to come over to their very small apartment
for dinner.
And so I was delighted and went over for dinner.
And there was some spirit of regard and respect and care
that I sensed in their relation under very, very
difficult circumstances that I had never experienced before.
And it was very moving.
And some months later, I tried to write a short story
about it.
I couldn't name it.
I. Have not named it now.
I got about four or five pages into the story
and realized that it wasn't a story.
And I started whittling and cutting
back and working with it.
And I ended up with these 16 lines.
And the poem is titled "Nights Sweats 2."
"Two men lie folded in sleep.
A blue sheet draped over their bodies.
One awakening to the other's sweat
slips out to get the damp cloth they keep refrigerated
for nights like this.
If the other wakes, he'll weep and shake.
So the one does the best he can to gentle him
through the delirium and back into dream.
Tonight, the other tries something different.
He holds his breath releasing the air so gradually.
He finds he can almost keep the shaking away.
He lies so still in the arms of the one
he loves that the one who loves him imagines for an instant
as he drifts into sleep, that the other no longer breathes."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
That is not an elegy.
This is an elegy.
I wrote an elegy for my grandfather, who lived here
in Tucson for many years.
My brother and sister were both born here,
and I was always pissed off that the morning my mother could
tell that I was on the way, that they didn't jump in a car
and drive down to Tucson so that I could be born here.
I ended up born in Mesa and growing up in Tempe,
which was fine, I suppose.
But I have always loved Tucson.
I got to know it through my grandparents, who
lived over there at about Mountain and Helen.
And when I returned then to live here,
what may well be permanently, it was
through especially my grandfather
that I knew that I understood something
about this part of the state.
And so this is titled "Summer Elegy"
and it's for my grandfather, George Rickel.
"August morning, dog days and a last blue river overhead
snaking westward where our weather comes from.
Low gray clouds close in, overheat drugged to sun.
Cypresses outside my door are bent dazed by the threat
or merely skeptical live things grow
non-committal in the desert.
I see neighbors watering lawns on my way
to buy the morning paper.
Last July, one downpour washed out
houses built too near a ravine, a bubbling river
where moments before a dry arroyo lay,
palo verde branches, shoes, and Coleman coolers bobbing
in the front-page photographs.
A broken line marked the path the woman's body
took, torn from the porch that overlooked the wash.
Today, after hours of thickening clouds, sheets of rain
sweep over town.
Sirens, I hear them from my living room,
race aid in all directions.
Often after summer storms, my father's father
would walk along the residential streets
to smell wet creosote and sidewalks being swept.
Stooped, leathered by the sun, I thought of him
as what's left standing when lightning strikes a tree.
He'd fold my fingers into his papery hand
and show me how things blurred for months
by relentless heat become distinct,
the suddenly rational palms and sky reflecting puddles.
He taught me to love such clarity, and said it was a lie.
The rains are good, but the land's
no good at taking them in.
Distrusting God, he hardly slept his last few months.
What I can't see, he said, I spent the nights imagining.
After the storm, I look out from my covered porch,
the atmosphere so clarified.
I see zigzagging lines, children's voices,
and bird calls visible in the air.
My father's father waits beside the ornamental orange tree,
by the gate.
Turned from kin and you'll go spinning till the end.
So I stepped down.
Two grown men, we walk the quiet streets hand in hand."
Another Tucson poem.
Those of you who have known me over the last 10 to 15 years
won't believe this, but when I first
moved to Tucson, my first few years
here I used to stay up late.
And I had a real good buddy.
We would go nights to The Shanty,
or to the Golden Nugget, or a place that's not here
anymore, Mrs. O'Leary's Cow.
And it would start to close in on last call.
And we would still have energy.
You know it's a long time ago if you know me now.
And we wouldn't want to stop, just talking--
the drinking didn't matter by then.
And there always seemed to be two choices.
One was to either head that way, in which case,
we would end up on the top of Mount Lemmon.
And we wouldn't be back until practically daylight.
More often we would head that way,
and we'd end up toward Gates Pass.
I'll bet some of you have done that at night.
This is a poem that begins on one of those journeys.
It ends up with another subject matter,
about the power of memory.
But this is an authentic night that we had some years ago.
It's titled, "The Watchers."
"Around midnight a full October moon,
the sky not deep but flat and low and black,
and six clouds fully lit, white, without disappointment,
with visible depth.
The kind of night, my friend Michael
says, when the small planet's light warms your skin yet
the dry fall air gets under it.
He shivers.
As we drive, blue, green, white neon signs
burn cool, independent of us, the way our dreams sometimes
are.
The bleeding lamb's head floating in the air,
or hubcap someone skimmed along the lake top.
In this light, we drive the length of Tucson's longest
boulevard out of town and blurt out
random daily disappointments.
Moon above the Rincons, what do you
care for Mike's wife, who is probably sad tonight?
Or the letter I put off writing to a favorite aunt whose
husband died?
High above Tucson, the ground, our skin,
the leaves of desert shrubs plated silver by the moon.
In the valley, city streetlights stitching in every direction.
Nights like these are outside time,
Mike says, like family photos you've known so well.
You were there, until your mother told you
in your 25th year, you weren't yet born.
In one snapshot the split hand-set horizontal fence
logs, the banked white snow stretching
to the farmhouse and beyond.
Smoke curling from the chimney, so familiar
that in his favorite flannel shirt, Mike carries its smell.
All this from a time when he was just a vague idea,
a pill of thought, the outcome of one night's
unexpected swell in his father's Air Force uniform.
Mike smiles to recall his mother's enthusiastic voice
and side-turned blushing face.
He still sees his father's bomber jacket,
the pleated khaki pants, and calf-length coat
with golden buttons.
I see them, because Mike was there, and is.
None of this is speculation.
The moon will slip behind the mountains.
The sun will rise and warm the air,
and Michael and I will not be and always will
be there and here."
[AUDIENCE]
Let me drift to another poet.
I'd like to read a poem by George Herbert.
He's a poet whose work I love.
I'm not a scholar of his work.
I have a personal understanding of it.
He's a 17th-century poet, a devotional poet, a country
parson.
What I love about his poems, many of them,
is that they begin with very plain images and metaphors.
And sometimes by the time he's through working them,
they have almost radically expansive perspectives.
Actually, I'm not going to read you a poem like that of George
Herbert's.
I'm going to read you another poem, that has always
been my favorite by George Herbert,
partly because of its difference.
It may be radically expansive, but it's not
through development of a single metaphor or image.
It's in fact a poem that is a list.
It's a kind of catalogue.
And it is, to me, endlessly beautiful and inscrutable
and mysterious.
And I'm going to read a poem afterwards that I wrote,
that was sort of an imitation or out of this poem.
The poem is titled "Prayer."
And it's a sonnet.
It's short.
And the first word of the poem is also prayer.
"Prayer, the church's banquet.
Angel's age, God's breath in man returning to his birth.
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage.
The Christian plummet sounding heaven and Earth,
engine against the Almighty, sinner's tower,
reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear.
The six-days world transposing in an hour, a kind of tomb
which all things hear and fear.
Softness and peace and joy and love and bliss.
Exalted manna, gladness of the best.
Heaven in ordinary, man well-dressed.
The Milky Way, the bird of paradise.
Church bells beyond the stars heard.
The soul's blood, the land of spices, something understood."
I cannot share George Herbert's religious convictions.
I cannot speak to God in my poems as he did in virtually
all of his.
But I can try to talk big--
[LAUGHTER]
--through a kind of catalogue and list and sense
that I may have something, or may arrive at something
through that kind of process.
So my poem isn't titled "Prayer."
It's titled "Night Singing," and it
goes after love and death and the whole shot.
But it's not narrative.
It's a kind of catalogue.
"Night Singing."
"Not the thought an eye blink can decide.
Not the depthlessness as you sit in the yard at night
staring at the blackness around the stars.
A body hurled into space might never stop.
If something small, small at the center like a flower.
If something felt could take the shape of lupine or foxglove
and be flower and not a flower.
Late one night a bird song stopped me.
I was just out walking.
I felt lucky.
It sounded like a secret, a song a child
might hum measuring his uniqueness,
until I remembered the mockingbird's uncommon habit.
Clueless along an edge, as though a knife blade
might rest an hour on a wrist.
Love's a gap into which hate also precisely fits.
Love shakes a leg and sits.
Love knows the sun will burn five-billion years,
then blow the galaxy to bits."
The poem that the title of the book, Arreboles, appears in
is titled "Winterreise."
Forgive me, if you speak German.
I do not.
I do, however, listen to the songs of Franz Schubert,
and "Winterreise" is the title of a song cycle
that he wrote in the last months of his life.
He came across a set of poems by a contemporary--
a young German romantic poet, Wilhelm Mueller.
And Schubert fell in love with the poems
and decided he would set them to songs.
It's usually translated, Winterreise,
as a winter's journey.
And in the poems a young man is walking on a winter day.
And as a romantic German poet writing
about a young man walking on a winter's day
could well imagine, he thinks about mortality.
But by the end something else occurs to him.
He begins to see possibilities for the spring
and for renewal and for life.
And so the songs embody that tension
of a recognition of mortality and the great beauty
and magic and richness of life.
So the poem begins with that spirit and talks a bit
about Schubert and then goes places.
"Winterreise."
"Schubert walked a path, a song he
sang, not morbidly or in fear, but in contrast
to what might come, to what would not,
in his voice a gladness.
I hear this song in the spastic blind wriggling
of worms that eat the agave root, the agave's
outer blades shrinking inward, yellow, unable to stand.
And in the gap between the dog's God-powerful nose and the cat's
flattened ears, each animal poised at the absolute limit,
one angstrom unit beyond which they'd wrap themselves
fang and claw into a nuclear cloud of hair.
There's a color that is many colors, in Spanish a word that
sings--
arreboles.
This color you see in clouds on the horizon
opposite the setting sun.
Not the fires that bring tears, but the color that
moves opposite these brilliances, akin to mauve
and rose and violet.
Like musical overtones, strike the piano's middle C
and hunch down close to the spray of strings
down by the sounding board.
Listen, the others, not God, but something nameless,
like ghosts or angels, more felt than seen or heard.
The hope that hovers pure above the written, the drawn,
the legislated plan."
I'm going to make a turn now, probably
for the rest of the reading, to a prose piece.
I said at the beginning that I've
been working for about a year and a half on prose pieces,
primarily, recovering childhood stories.
I'm not writing an autobiography.
It's a matter of trying to find those moments
and those characters that give some sort of dimension
to a life.
And I have this belief, in having
read these kinds of pieces by others
and having read a fair amount of literature
that we, in fact, do have overlapping
concerns in our lives and in our stages of maturing and growing
older.
And so I've got about 16 or 17 of these pieces.
And they've begun to gather themselves into subject areas.
And those have become, for the time being,
four parts of a manuscript.
And the subject areas are on family, on sex and sexuality,
on death, and on ego and art.
And I'm going to read a brief piece from the on death
section, which seemed to be the most finished of the 16.
I'd like to explain that in working on these prose pieces,
I'm working with the aesthetic that I use when I write poems
and not the aesthetic that is often taught
and that I often use in writing essays.
I tend to think that in the writing
of the traditional essay, we teach and we
write an essay in the image of a snake that
swallows its own tail.
You know how we begin by introducing a notion somewhere
early in the piece, and then we develop and complicate
and support that notion through the body of the piece.
And then by the end with this expanded understanding,
this deepened perspective on that opening notion,
we make a kind of return to that notion.
And I think of that as the snake swallowing its own tail
image of writing nonfiction.
And it's wonderfully serviceable,
but it doesn't serve me in these particular kinds of pieces.
The image that I have for a poem I get from a long time ago--
7th century-- a very famous analogy.
In trying to explain to the king the human lifespan,
a counselor said, King, imagine that there's a great feasting
hall.
And it's full of light, and it's full of warmth
and the activities of feasting.
And then imagine that outside this hall is all darkness
and cold and storm.
And the counselor said, then the small sparrow
that flies out of the dark through one
door briefly into the light and warmth and out another door
is like our lifespan--
that we're the light in the middle of two darknesses.
Well, I think of a lot of poems as really working that way,
that they enter through one door,
and they very rarely circle around
and go back out that other door.
And yet they feel right when they go out whatever door they
go out, if they succeed.
And I'm trying to write prose pieces that
work in that way, that follow their paths
to inevitable conclusions but don't draw conclusions
in the ways that often in nonfiction we expect.
So let me read this piece to conclude the reading.
A few details.
This is about halfway through the manuscript at this point.
And it might be helpful to know that I was born in 1951.
And so at the time of this piece, of the experiences here,
I'm six, seven, and finally, eight.
And I did grow up in Tempe when it was small.
When I was born there were probably
no more than 8,000 people living there.
And it was a college town and a farming town.
It was defined by those two activities.
If you've been to Tempe recently, you won't believe it.
But that's the way it was in my first years there.
I was connected to the college community,
because my father taught on the faculty there.
He's a pianist and a harpsichordist.
Anything else?
I don't think so.
OK.
This is from on death section.
And the title of the piece is "Soldiers."
Oh, it's not really important, but I
went to a school affiliated with the college.
And someday I'm going to do something with this.
Maybe you can give me suggestions.
It was an experimental school-- a lab school--
and it was called Payne Training.
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
Well, it was after Ira.
D. Payne, you know.
[LAUGHTER]
But when you don't see it on the page you don't know that,
do you?
All right.
The title of this piece is "Soldiers."
"In the late '50s, we hid from Nazis.
The safest place was Grady Gammage Jr.'s house,
at the heart of the college campus,
with broad concrete steps up to a front
porch and enclosed with tall, narrow, multi-paned windows.
This dignified two-story house was unlike any other I knew--
probably a Queen Anne or Anglo Territorial
from the turn of the century.
All my other friends lived in one-story ranch-style houses
like ours.
Grady was the college president's son,
the shortest boy in class, with fine black hair
parted on the side and greased to a lacquered shine--
perfectly combed, as if painted on his head.
I remember his face as always serious--
the deep-set dark eyes and long thin nose producing
angularities most people's faces take on later, in adulthood.
His house was the traditional president's family residence.
When I'd visit on Saturdays an aging housekeeper, whose
accent made me think her German born
and whom Grady called Gram, would fix us
ham sandwiches with the crust sliced off.
She'd place these, with small cups of canned fruit
and glasses of milk, on the tiny table and chair
set in Grady's playroom.
He had one whole room set aside for toys
and a substantial carpenter-made treehouse right
on the property-- so unlike the rickety scrap-wood structures
made by my older brother and his friends
in the cottonwoods that stood along canals in town.
After lunch, Gram safely out of the way in the kitchen
washing dishes, we'd tiptoe to the house's central staircase.
In the wall along the upper level
was what Grady called his secret door, behind which
rose a set of steps--
a passageway into complete darkness
where we'd hide from the Nazi stormtroopers.
Each time Grady led me to the door,
I was thrilled by the secrecy and danger,
by the enormity of what was at stake-- life or death, which
we comprehended only vaguely.
The passageway itself was so dark,
no matter how long we waited for our pupils to adjust,
we saw nothing but absolute black--
a blackness that pressed up against our eyes.
We'd touch the wall to steady ourselves
as we walked a few steps up.
Then, we'd sit and whisper about whom we'd lock out
and whom we'd invite to join us and thereby save.
After several minutes of this, we'd creep back down
and listen at the back of the door,
making sure no one was on the stairs before slipping out.
Another game we played just once.
We were now eight.
I don't remember if it was a weekend or holiday,
but I was home in the morning when a call came.
Could someone bring Boyer to play with Grady,
the caller asked.
His father had died of a heart attack,
and Grady would be spending the day at a house near ours.
I contemplated the enormity of this news--
the first human death of my life--
as I rode in the back of our car.
I ran my hand over the seamed blue surface of the car seat
and tried to imagine life without my father or mother--
a desperately painful fantasy.
Grady met me at the front door.
His eyes were not red from crying.
His voice was steady.
But I could tell he held himself in absolute reserve.
Some invisible force maintained the expressions of his face,
the modulations of his voice in a middle controlled register,
the way some people act on tranquilizers.
The day, as I remember it, was without adults.
I don't recall who took the phone call, who drove,
or why I sat alone in the backseat of the car.
I don't recall who other than Grady was at the house--
a low, red-brick bungalow--
or how Grady and I found our way to the backyard.
There, both of us in a kind of trance,
we played with small toy soldiers
and did not talk about his father's death.
We dislodged with trowels and then lined up
in two parallel columns diagonally
at the center of the lawn bricks that had circled, ornamentally,
several tree wells.
Then, we marched battalions of army men along the brick roads.
When we got to the road's end the first time,
I was at a loss.
There was no purpose to this game.
We didn't have a story to go with it.
We were simply doing things mechanically,
to keep ourselves occupied.
After a pause Grady commanded, march back, and so we did.
At home that evening, I lay down in the cool grass
of our backyard staring up at the sky.
And as the stars pierced through the growing darkness,
I imagined eternity, my body hurtling through space
without end, the Earth tiny, insignificant.
[RECORDING CUTS OUT] --any traditional religious training.
My parents had once been Mormons--
my mother from a Mormon pioneer family,
her mother's father fleeing US marshals into Mexico
to practice polygamy in the late-19th century.
But my parents, before I was born, had left the church.
For years we dreaded the visits of church elders
who dropped by unannounced to discuss scripture and bring us
back into the fold.
They seemed like comic figures to me
in their uniformity-- black slacks, white shirts,
long dark ties, their voices steady and too sincere.
Their faith struck me as something quaint, left over
from distant history.
If I was home alone when they knocked, I wouldn't answer.
I'd run giggling from the door to the bathroom, where,
by standing on the edge of the tub,
I could see them out the high window.
I grew eventually to think of religion and everything
associated with it, including religious painting and music,
as foolish.
Until I was in my 20s, I couldn't
stand listening to choirs, which I associated
with church and voices raised in praise of God's creation.
Mozart's C minor mass made me embarrassed for the naivety
of such a genius.
To regain my equilibrium, then, when
seized by death terrors, terror I suffered for many years,
I created my own ritual--
a private exorcism.
Running to my room lying on my back on the bed
whenever the fear struck, feeling as though my body were
hurtling through space through infinity, I'd chant,
Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow.
I stiffen my arms at my sides, my hands clenched into fists,
and shut my eyes tight, chanting the whole verse over and over
under my breath, until my consciousness was so
absorbed in the rhythm and music of the poem,
death could find no place in me.
Gradually, I'd feel as if my body were returning, falling
from space now toward Earth.
Aware finally of where I actually
lay bound to the planet, my arms and eyelids
would relax a little, and I'd begin an internal journey.
My body would feel as if it were shrinking,
or as if I had two bodies, one inside the other.
The inner body would then grow smaller and smaller,
falling into my real body, into the inner space
of my own empty self.
I'd have to begin a new chant to call it back--
a counting chant--
1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3--
until the words were pure sound, a filament
of sound running through my veins.
At a point of near unconsciousness,
I'd explode into a standing position
and walk frantically to and fro in my bedroom, shaking my hands
and head to expel the evil feeling of oblivion, anxiety
draining from my muscles.
If it was night, I could now lie down and sleep.
If I'd suffered a daytime terror,
I'd look for somebody, anybody I knew,
and strike up a conversation in hopes
of re-entering the normal unselfconscious
rhythm of life."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]