This next poem is very--
I don't know how to explain it, so I'm not even going to try.
But I will say that in the middle of the poem,
Sally Mann makes an appearance-- she's a photographer who was
a very controversial figure.
She photographed her children, often naked,
on their farm in Virginia.
And her work, especially the Immediate Family photos,
coincided with the family values agenda
and disturbed a lot of people.
And if I end up talking about the photography,
I will end up talking about Sally Mann.
"And still I speak of it.
This.
This in which, in which, of which, with which this will.
A mother giving way to the electrical.
The seeping unrendering, her heart rendering blood
not reaching anymore.
A father giving way becoming gradually
moving this way and that by a wind no one can see.
A grandmother down a rabbit hole.
Hello dear.
She uses words to cover the gaping, 'Who are you?
And who am I?' until the tubes into every word hole sustain
her and malinger.
This will help.
A damp towel you use to wipe the table for the next meal
shreds and remains itself everywhere.
Becomes its own matter to clean and remains a shoe's solvent.
This will help you.
Arrange the words.
See them into something.
Shape, meaningful, predictive, protective.
How they were maybe at the scene.
The scene to hold it, to reconstruct, to stem.
The diverted, the made way for the giving way.
Words make you watch.
A grandmother surrounded by family and live musicians.
There is nothing surprising in this,
except everything you are feeling.
The giving way, the way, the predictable but never before.
You, this, she.
Smaller and smaller.
The healthy, the skin looser.
Afraid to mention, to say what is happening.
As soon as you think you know what is happening.
You know you do not know what is happening.
But it is not happening to you.
Afraid.
It is happening to you.
What?
Your son says into the dark from bed.
What?
You're telling me that I will cease to exist?
Isn't there any way to stop this?
How can this be?
This will help you to be there.
Watch, stay, wait into the dark or the dim light,
into the whatever light there is.
As the breathing changes.
Yours, the mothers, the fathers, the grandmothers,
the other grandmothers, the other mother.
The machine, to hear it, to stay here
when you want to go out screaming
into the diminished environment.
The way we have ruined everything and the we that
wants desperately against everything you know is true,
to be anything other than I. You need to stay, stay here.
See what is happening to that one.
The diminishing, giving way, giving away.
Need your words to reach into where there are no words.
There are no words, people always say.
Those are the words, they say.
Those words, stay there, stay in the unmade room.
In the still, cardiac place inside the inside.
The loosening skin.
The polar ice cap slowly giving way.
The way the world warming the bodies one-by-one losing heat.
Inside the giving way, inside the way for a brief time.
He, she, they, we, treated each other, their selves.
The polar diminishing, animals, the vanishing.
When were once hardy with a sense of smell, touch, vision,
feeling, taste, future, that's it.
The belief that there will be something more.
Something that does not warm or cool.
One second more of--
After the initial success and controversy, and the following
success and controversy surrounding
her immediate family photographs,
Sally Mann decided it was time to stop
taking pictures of her three children
and move on to something else.
But what?
She looked.
She waited.
One day standing in the kitchen of her Virginia farmhouse,
the sheriff called and told her there
was an escaped convict on her farm and she had to get out.
At that very moment she saw him.
Running.
Running toward the house.
Police running after him as he ran toward the house.
He shot, they shot police shotgun.
Hit to the hip, the convict turned his pistol on himself.
Later she touched the pool of blood near the convicts head.
It was surprisingly dark, she said.
When she touched it, it moved, she said.
She saw the ground take a sip.
She began to photograph the place where he died.
She began to go to the places nearby
where many had died, long or short ago,
and photographed those places using
the materials photographers had used during the Civil War.
Then what?
What remains?
She was given access to a facility
in which someone was studying the decomposition
of human bodies.
A facility in which human bodies were strewn,
laid out in the open, fly-eaten, maggoted, at various stages.
Sally Mann made photographs of these bodies, plate
after plate.
Then the close-up long exposures of her children again.
But not children anymore, rather living subjects and similar.
Like her face, but not her face.
Living in a serial from the old timey process and the lens
open.
Stay.
All the prints made and framed, years of work crated and ready.
And then the Pace Gallery in New York
canceled the show at the last minute.
Who wants to hang photos of dead bodies from their walls?
Who would buy these?
It is the only time in the documentary
that Sally Mann cries on camera.
Not when speaking about the death of her father,
or her favorite dog, or the threats
to charge her with child pornography and take
her children and all her equipment into custody.
She says, I think my work's important, but maybe it isn't.
Maybe it's important, but no-one wants to see it.
She wipes her nose.
The inclusion of this information
helps you navigate the aboutness of this poem, and maybe
the whyness.
It is a transmission from the poet to you.
A kind of decomposition of the poet, for the poet
is not the you, and is no I either.
The poet takes this opportunity to say the following.
This morning, standing in a hot shower hoping the heat
would enter her body and be trapped there somehow.
Even for an hour, even minutes, but knowing
that it would dissipate.
Unlike the arsenic, mercury, BPAs
that her cells won't give up.
Which is the poem?
Which is the poet?
How does anything get inside anything else or anyone?
And how does anyone, anything get out?
You're telling me I will cease to exist?
The boy asks into the night, into you, pressing his face
into you, into the dark, his breathing catching, uneven.
Not for a very long time, you offer.
It is a short time.
It is no time.
There are rocks and trees and polar ice caps.
It is no time at all and it is too short.
It will feel like a long, long time, you tell the little boy.
Maybe you will be ready, you tell the boy.
Maybe you will feel ready to give way,
to let your muscles give way.
Even your heart to stop beating and let
go of a sense of future.
Away from the invisible, holding tight, the clutching to others,
we cling, the way you cling to the little boy.
The night.
The voice.
His words.
The poem will help you.
The mark you make in the present, the weight
of your body, the way you press into the present, the way
you with your in and out of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen
make a kind of gravity that holds you to this planet.
A clinging to others, even as you
repel as single bodies and entities.
This is the meaning of anything.
The fabric of imaginary between owning perceivable
which are past and future.
This poem will help you die, asserts the poet,
who is not sure of anything.
Take it, she says.
The music of the room, the live musicians,
the nurse reading a book into the space, the stranger,
the doctor, the daughter, the friend, the gurney down
the brightly lit.
The home bedroom with hospital bed,
the box, the plot, the visiting hour, the hours, the breath.
What did you think was going to happen?
What did you think?
There was another way of bearing up,
a giving way, the giving way to what?
The suddenly, the slowly, the you, the using.
Someone else's pain is worse, is other, is lesser,
is a blessing.
The you who dreams, the gone away souls, back again.
The you who goes on toward your own room, bed, stranger,
daughter, doctor, friend.
We have made paintings of this.
And all the stories in the world, and none of them.
None of all the stories in the world
are the stories of what happens next are the stories of we,
in face of.
You wrote in fact of, but it is the face of it.
The fact of it is not faceable.
You never can know what it was like for anyone else.
You never knew fear, bat, birth, pleasure of anyone else.
You have always been alone in a dark with a young boy
asking, how is this possible?
You have always been alone in a room wanting anyone,
any small other to ask anything of you, which
is the only thing that makes you sure, you're you.
There.
Here.
Hearing a you.
The you, you are.
Hasn't anyone ever tried to stop this, the boy asks?
Yes, you say.
People try but--
What happens after, the boy asks?
No-one knows, you say.
After all this time, really, he asks?
Really, you say.
And you're doing nothing about this?
Later you write a poem called, this poem will help you die.
To hang on the wall for no-one to buy.
It is this poem.
Take it.
Take it in."