So it's been a huge pleasure to return to Tucson.
I was here over 10 years ago.
And I always wanted to return.
And now I'm back.
I'd like to thank a lot of people.
I'd like to thank Marc, who picked us up at the airport.
To Tony Luebbermann, who drove me around last time, 10 years ago.
And happy to say he's going to drive me
around tomorrow with Karen.
And to Cybele, Julie, Hannah, and Tyler.
Thank you very much for having me here.
It'd be entirely wrong of me to finish
on these short, cheerful, buoyant poems.
So I don't want you to go away with a spring in your step.
[LAUGHTER]
So this is another one of these invented Scots narratives.
It's dedicated to John Burnside.
And I'd like to thank you all very much for coming out
tonight.
This is called "At Roane Head."
"You'd know her house by the drawn blinds.
By the cormorants pitched on the boundary wall,
the black crosses of their wings hung out to dry.
You'd tell it by the quicken and the pine that
hid it from the sea and from the brief light of the sun.
And by Aonghas the collie, lying at the door where he died--
a rack of bones like a sprung trap.
A fork of barnacle geese came over
with that slow squeak of rusty saws.
The bitter seas complaining pull and roll.
A wicker of pigeons lifting in the wood.
She's had four sons--
I knew that well enough.
And each one wrong.
All born blind, they say.
Slack-jawed and simple, web-footed, rickety as sticks.
Beautiful faces, I'm told, though blank as air.
Someone saw them once outside, hirpling down to the shore,
and said they were fine swimmers.
But I would have guessed that.
Her husband left her, said they couldn't be his.
They were more fish than human.
Said they were beglamoured and searched their skin
for the showing marks.
For years, she tended each difficult flame.
Their tight, flickering bodies.
Each night, she closed the scales of their eyes
to smoor the fire.
Until he came again that last time, thick with drink.
Saying he'd had enough of this, all this witchery,
and made them stand in a row by their beds, twitching.
Their hands flapped.
Herring eyes rolled in their heads.
He went along the line, relaxing them one after another
with a small knife.
It's said she goes out every night
to lay blankets on the graves to keep them warm.
It would put the heart across you, all that grief.
There was an otter worrying in the leaves.
A heron looping slow over the water
when I came at scraich of day back to her door.
She'd hung four stones in a necklace,
wore four rings on the hand that led me past the room
with four small candles burning, which
she called the room of rain.
Milky smoke poured up from the grate
like a waterfall in reverse.
And she said my name, and it was the only thing
and the last thing that she said.
She gave me a skylark's egg in a bed of frost.
Gave me twists of my four sons' hair.
Gave me her husband's head in a wooden box.
Then she gave me the sealskin, and I put it on."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]