Thanks to everybody who's responsible for having us here,
and thanks to you guys for coming to listen.
I'm going to start with a couple of poems from my latest book
and then read some newer stuff.
And the first one's called "Idioms for Rain."
I think idioms, idiomatic expressions
in different cultures just tell you a lot about the culture.
And so I went down the rabbit hole of reading a bunch of them
online and wrote this.
And a few words here.
"Fallon" is Old English for "to fall."
And then there's a run of words--
"fission," which is nuclear fission, which, of course, is
splitting the atom which was the bomb that was dropped
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And then "fusion," which, instead of splitting the atom,
is putting the nuclei of atoms together,
which was the hydrogen bomb.
And then the third reference--
well, actually, I referenced "thermonuclear,"
which is a fusion bomb.
And then the last one is the cobalt bomb,
which they're developing, and the cobalt bomb basically
can spread its joy everywhere and end all life on Earth.
And then the other thing that's mentioned in here that you
might not be familiar with is Walther,
I think it is in German actually.
And the Walther was a German semi-automatic weapon
that was used during the Nazi era
by the police and the Luftwaffe, German Air Force,
and it's also the gun that Hitler killed himself with,
so there's hope.
[LAUGHTER]
Dictators may sometimes kill themselves.
[LAUGHTER]
Because it's a dark poem, but I'd like
to think that there's hope.
So this is "Idioms for Rain."
Wheelbarrows are falling in the Czech Republic,
but in Wales, old ladies and sticks
are landing on the farms not yet carried off by owls.
Knives and forks are clattering on the barns.
In the sky above New York City--
one dark cloud of dogs, one of feral cats,
one of lawn gnomes lined up with buckets, more clouds erupting
from their corncob pipes, the storm
getting ready to hammer the rooftop gardens and drive
pigeons into the arms of gargoyles.
Gurgle, gargle.
Some dragon is down with the flu asking,
who am I without my Kundalini breath?
Why don't I have any friends?
As soon as I'm better, I'm going to torch an elementary school.
In Union Square, the vendors are packing up
peaches and artisanal cheeses.
Castles and ponds are being disappeared
from the chess players' tables, shitty art reinstalled
in the museums of panel vans.
Umbrellas and hoodies, tarps on the carts
of the homeless hunkering down while leaves skid around.
In Greece, chair legs drive themselves into stone
and sink into the Aegean.
But in Syria, chemical weapons are descending, meaning
raining down like secretaries and restaurant workers
from the towers, meaning metaphor
is being abandoned for the hell of the real,
meaning what falls from the sky keeps falling.
Fallon, fission, thermonuclear but not yet cobalt.
What the rain said to the wind was not,
you push and I'll pelt--
that's Robert Frost.
But, let's see who can destroy the most flowers,
though it may also have said, sometimes I want to weep
softly while you moan over the seedlings.
In Germany it rains puppies, were once
rained Walther bullets.
And in Denmark, shoemakers' apprentices land softly
on the Earth and set off to teach whom they can.