WEBVTT

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That sense of identity
endure is something

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that floats around a
great deal with me.

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But every once in
a while, I feel so

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stuffed with a kind
of self-knowledge

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that's incredibly
anxious or uncomfortable.

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This is a poem about that.

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Self-knowledge is however often
dependent upon the weather,

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right?

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This poem begins
with the weather.

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It's titled American Landscape
with Clouds and a Zoo.

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Was written in the
Pacific Northwest

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after something like literally
60 consecutive days of rain

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when I was living up there
in a writing residency.

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The only important
thing for you to know

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just so you don't
think about it is

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that there's a zoo
mentioned within the poem.

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It's a mental zoo.

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There are two animals
that are brought up.

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Only one of them is mentioned.

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The second one is not, the wren.

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The second one we
don't talk about.

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American Landscape
with Clouds and a Zoo.

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You can be walking along the
beach of a quaint Northwest

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and coastal town.

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On the one hand, the
Great Pacific Ocean

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held placid restless
and the sound

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when it comes over like those
immense wool and gray clouds

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layer upon layer that
pour from their Pacific

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composure, suddenly troubled
moving troubling roaring

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easterly overhead
for the inland.

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America is in trouble.

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And you're too fucked up to
even understand it and buy it.

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Is America fucked up because
it understands itself

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only too well as you do you?

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Every time the girlfriend chucks
you a lusciously coy smile,

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your beside yourself
like a sailboat.

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And every time you think
happiness is just like this

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forever, you fooled like a kid.

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America, I'm glad
I'm hardly you.

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I've got myself to think about.

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In my zone is a
fairly large zoo,

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plenty of room to
walk around shade,

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and the shade that is
increasingly bitterly

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called shadow.

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Of animals, they're
a bit too, arranged

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in unpredictable
cadence and sequence.

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One of the renowned
leopard of the snow,

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lazy, humorous,
speckled pepper a bit

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like the wren that flies
from shadow to cage

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to shade to shadow.

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When I mistakenly
awaken at night,

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I dread both the darkness and
the inevitable increasingly

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querulous birdsong of the
inevitable increasingly wide

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stun of light.

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Everything is too brief,
eternal, stable, unpredictable.

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Everything always says I'm
all there is forever chum.

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Just see it my way.

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And I do Thanks.

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