Here's the end of the pentalogy.
This is from Shimoda's Tavern.
"Shadow dragger, voices there, waiting in the kitchen for you.
Why was each song a room like this
above the resigned factions of the dead.
Between swamps crossed the pikes as if over an isthmus.
If I wanted to iron my clothing I
would have let the rainy coast of Trabzon do it.
I found only what I wanted to have made through shadows
and it was lit from below with fresh snow on old ice,
upon a young Earth spinning apparently so told,
and so visited by infinite callers.
Not visible exactly, yet undeterred
by a storm wind and its storm.
What light so intervened along the cactusy street
and spinning still it goes bird to spark.
The boat wobbling to a cleaving coast.
Not another fjord to call back a father's name
as my father's father held a baby skunk for his son
as a friend.
This was in Colorado in 1949 or so.
And the sun was up in the snowy linens,
alive with the hex of what took my family's
names to an untoward horizon.
Dreaming loud, dreaming up in the undecidable airs.
And my matchbook folds its fruit fly
crushed here down to the last two strikes tonight.
The courier's prince breathing in the mud of the easement
and what's here is hidden.
And what's hidden is find by night, billed by the hour,
collected by a banquet of ghosts whose mouths remain open
that you may know them from the sound of their slavering song.
Could you turn the radio back up and close your eyes.
I want to show you the secret spoils in the wall.
How they shown and what they recast.
I'm coming by train car to visit with the brothers
in your lungs.
So if you're not home when I arrive then may
the moon grow into my chest and I'll
return to the clapboard walls back into the muck from which I
rose.
You like poison?
Say I do.
Would you like to come over tonight?
Indeed, how I would.
The cordial motion of what giving saps from you.
No apology trues itself out unless it
veers toward the impossible.
Holding one's breath just to hear the beat of blood
under your ears, alive, and unlivable.
Darning, and unraveling, and skewed rates,
untranscribable even to a minus sign.
Now, who is that in the river?
All of my dead friends waiting for the moon
to get on its hoist.
What are their names?
The electricians of sleep.
The humiliated.
The escutcheoned.
The trust tilled mark.
The partly [? roofed. ?] The muddied
collective, and my brothers, and your brothers,
and your brothers also, and yours, and their dogs.
In the white field of black manure to a tentacular sky
getting its yellow dust over our so-called fortress.
Oh, was it getting it on to your necks?
But yes.
Getting it into your scalps.
Why yes.
You thought your soul had careened crooked.
Was it that you thought it could be so.
Now, the noise trails off so this must mark the ending
from the messenger girls lost routes to her passage
out through the wooden woods.
The stenographers child translator
to the plastic owl on call to the legendary child thieves,
thieving.
Deer in the bog at Shelby Bottoms
when the heat index talked us back to the Cumberland swamp.
Hello isthmus owl heavying up, up.
And did the crumbs show the courier where went a friend?
Well, the lightning is open in the ground.
The ground's song can refract the circus of your blood.
And you can burn just about anything with neglect
and an ignorance of a few basic principles.
I haven't gotten most of the proof that I need.
It was unlimited language on the hunt for what won't
tarry with us at the edge.
The ocean just wants a bathtub, friend.
Like any untethered satellite looking
to be known to an unclothed body.
I was in the wet green of ranula, breathing beer.
Breathing this briny island air.
And of the islands.
Those nearby scuttled in a bit closer, young slasher.
And finally I have a song to share and one's roiled drunk.
The others are distracted with indignant white news
items including pleasure and complicity.
The question becomes how to lift your eyes out
of the shitty horizon of experience that matters
at you from afar within.
Not to be overcome by voices, but for the voices
to find a quiet scape to don their invisible ink.
So says the dead woman in her calm ways.
And she goes, what won't oppose you.
What won't actually mend to you.
What won't call your despicable behavior what it truly is.
And softer she goes.
[INAUDIBLE] for [INAUDIBLE] you.
Warmed in the gossip by the kitchen match
of the saint hearing what I'm covering my cuts for.
That an eel might not drift up through the waters
and find my sleep a pleasing place to live.
I couldn't get the newsprint off my face and neck
after having fallen asleep on the 147 express
from foster to the water tower.
And what's here is still hiding its hands.
Now, it's Indiana's dud spring malnourishing
a warped thrashy cold Colorado's snowy autumn's
wicked and smooth.
And all of God's children hungry as asphalt growing vacantly
in the skylight.
So you could hear your name in the current.
The public house in the dream was called Shimoda's.
And the life of the trench was lit
with a little throne of madness also known
as Saint Mandelstam's palace of shadows.
What century did you mistake this one for?
Well, I thought that maybe Edgar Huntly could reappear and do
some quality sleep lurking and betray us his dreams, OK.
A wedding cake of sawdust, some orange methadone
in little foam cups.
And what the guests came to gather around sank the sun
and brought from a pit of fire some warmth to their fingers
and to their necks.
So what do the animals drag on into the fold?
What motion detecting devices popped on exactly
and what could they thus detect?
The moonlight drapes the field.
The field drapes a memory.
And we were kissing, and crying at the passenger drop
off at a shitty little airport in the black snow.
Well, what were the messenger's messages?
They were not diamonds.
Then what did she carry?
Can you not keep from asking.
So I ask her and I go, what stops you?
The woods, she says.
What begins you then?
The woods, mother fucker.
She says, I wanted a loose tooth to suckle the day through.
What's pain but customizing yourself.
When they sent the drop light on a cord down to the attic
through the roof, I mistook it for a snake,
startled, and fell down a flight of stairs only to break my wing
like a rib.
And this was 1802?
No.
This was late last night.
What became of the spoils of the meadow.
A heaven of storm water called runoff by the above
and the diarist's pond shed raised for a bistro.
The courier's legion of sparrows asleep in [? Arroyo Chico ?].
Mandelstam's ghost awake yet in the ornament.
Sometimes I lay half aligned wishing
I could re-enter the memories from your vantage point.
To feel some shred of what you had discovered,
in decent memories, yes.
Those you summoned to drag it out in the morning
before showering for work.
Perhaps a voice was indeed there waiting for me.
I thought I could access its timbre like the sky
by stepping into the sunlight.
I just figured I'd hate it.
I could not truly enter it but I slowed
into the certain words that were off limits or those words that
were shrouded with a little--
a little Nimbus of ignorant grime.
All those words want to be one word.
Those are the words.
And what were the words?
They were human, of course.
Well, were they universal?
I must have thought that they were.
Oh, wet night.
Asphyxiate of bees.
A honey of falling through a dream course cloth
to dry the face, and arms, and ass, and legs with.
The white vanquished sheet brought up
what spun the airs chestward.
And we were out for the night again,
known to the appendices and tables of content to the blogs
through feed but not to the imaginations lonely obsessions.
Don't I have anything I might set up
against the time I borrowed to believe in what I'm doing here?
What is it that you think that you want?
Well, that somebody could come into the room
to court a transformation through fucking.
That only bits of wrong language should be needed for a collapse
to be fucked so well as if to be dragged by a current.
To be fucked as if by a wall or by a school of fish.
Obliterated indeed to the point of laughter
against my neighbors singing pouring up to the floor.
Finally, to just climb a tree on the sidewalk,
to sit in the branches and watch the Chicago trash
flutter by for a while.
We took to the--" I should-- maybe
I should have said there is going to be some adult content.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, if you're coming to hear Ariana then maybe--
I don't know.
I'm a fan.
My bad.
OK.
[LAUGHTER]
They say he was the number one poetry critic online.
Oh.
Number one.
Good.
Yeah.
I look forward to that.
It's going to be good.
All right.
It's going to be good-- it's going
to be a great Sunday morning.
Finally--
[LAUGHTER]
--finally-- all right.
Here you go.
I just-- Ariana, I am clearing them out for you, baby.
I'm clearing them out for you.
[LAUGHTER]
"Finally to just climb a tree on the sidewalk
to sit-in the branches and watch the Chicago trash
flutter by for a while.
We took to the snow for an early afternoon beer
at the Edgewater.
Anything to not sit at home with the selves I
tried to ditch in the bushes like a stolen bicycle.
What a long, winding sheet to feel
through the news horde out, not unlike the tinder
sticks to wipe material.
So let us out, or let us back in from without,
for us to begin our set of unthinkable tasks
to separate from one another.
Not baby from breath or even fox from lilac, but like sink water
from hand cupped in a sorrow from the sinew of the 4,000
ligaments of the neck.
To each Saint, a passage, an accompanying
set of obstacles, to each a difficulty in pleasure.
To entrench the hunt.
To endeavor against the V of piss in the snow field.
Each box of bees.
Each delivery the courier holds to her ribs
like a trembling pup.
Each map taped to the ceilings of her rooms.
Each of her handwritten journals set above the bar
at Shimoda's Tavern.
Each crinkled hex and promise made
by a boy used for a bit of packing,
bunting her unlovely ways into the spit.
But did you solve the problems that you had set out, plan to?
So I did.
And thereby set enough temporary solutions
of fire in the pregnant dilemma where of each word
exceeds its own purported aim, tactic, and signal.
But for whom was the song sung?
Not possible yet to say.
Then by whom was the song induced?
It was a song called Kansas City by the singer Damien Jurado,
and I'd put it on in the mornings
after I came in with my dog from the snows
to dream back the child in the old house who dreamed himself
into a future that sparked him off on his own song work.
Each morning a new unknown name on his tongue.
But why did it end?
Because I'd said that it had to.
Was it a lie?
It was.
The vision was just to evince the approximation of an ending.
That if by performing it a little ceremony
of feeble invocations we might-- could
feel death's riven sent uncoiling through mere gesture,
hollow as a cordial, hollow as air full of dust.
And why was that the song you had chosen,
or did it just bring you weeping into the easement?
Flying home to Tucson, I ran into [? Corea ?] at Midway,
and he said I could call him late.
He said that Bei Dao used to and would wake him up
at 3:00 AM to talk a while in their beds together.
The demands of the Midwest on an exile.
Sleep plus, sirens plus, a coyote going tippy,
tippy, tippy through the slashed lot of a strip mall
looking for bunnies.
And what steps you'd made decimated
by some old future weather coming
to say goodbye and good night.
But can't you thread a moonlight's texture
through the song book's lyrics archived
at the edge of the messenger girl's meadow swamp
to slash us?
Your noise was here, but where exactly were you?
Spring is out for a weak beer and some hearth smoke.
I want to place you like a cousin
next to the courier with her sisters before the ghost
of their own mother triangulating
a tarpaulin in the river to drag it's slow music back
to the Hi-Fi up on Fritz Cove road.
And then to where?
I'll tell you then to where.
From Ravenswood Avenue to lost lakes at Colfax and Monroe,
back to Dunbar Spring to a Thunderbird
in the carport at about Eastbourne
and Exeter on to the Arroyo with Jess last night under no moon.
Another candle flicker to anchor us
to the warmth of a dead room's [? glows ?] nice lacquer.
Is that how you wanted the ending to open you?
All the little characters lolling up on the roof smoking
and laughing.
The courier devoured by coyotes up
from the wash in Lost Barrio.
Are any of you me?
No.
I'm pretty sure I don't think so.
And what of the courier's humming
and what of her archive?
Their lesion too numerous to adumbrate.
So should we go back?
No.
No turn.
No Volta.
No nothing.
With a bamboo box of Mandelstam's
dead bees to restring.
Now, rinse your hands to begin again
and begin to bring your cautious lantern into the field to break
the path by foot over nettles.
Whosoever is alone with it has at least their hands.
Was it Dickinson's frigate you borrowed and set on
to the stream's good surface for passage out of your father's
father's palace of shadows?
It was.
And it mostly lasted until I mistook
the moon for a friend I might could
come to depend on for a while.
Through the glass of the windshield, under the
boughs, and the fronds of the palm
at the end of the easement."
Thank you guys for listening to me.
[APPLAUSE]