I was so anxious about this reading
that I forgot all my poems in Flagstaff.
But courtesy of the fax machine, I retrieved a few of them.
And Alison got the rest from her magazines.
Now I know what they're good for.
"At the
Cabaret Now."
"The Americans are lonely, they don't know what happened.
They're still up and there's all this time yet to kill.
The musicians are still being paid so they keep on.
The sax pants up the ladder, up.
They want to be happy.
They want to just let the notes come on the mortal wounds.
It's all been paid for, so what the hell?
Each breath going up, up.
Them thinking, of course, will he make it?
How far can he go?
Skill, the prince of the kingdom,
there at his table now.
Is there some other master?
Friend, also there.
At a back table, a regular, one we can't make out,
but whom the headwaiter knows.
The one who never applauds so that it's not about the ending
you see or where to go from here.
It's about the breath and how it reaches the trumpeter's hands.
How the hands come so close to touching the breath
and how the gold thing gleaming is there in between.
The only avenue, the long way--
captivity.
Like this thing now slow, extending the metaphor
to make a place pledge allegiance by which is meant.
See, hear, what a variety tonight.
What a good crowd.
Some of them saying, yes.
Some others, no.
Don't they sound good together?
And all around this space, and seed spores,
and the green continuance.
And all along, the musicians still getting
paid, so let them.
And then around that, the motionless.
Don't think about it, though, because you can't.
And then the mother who stayed at home, of course,
because her body.
Farewell, farewell.
This is the story of a small strict obedience.
Human blood and how it rivered into all its bloods.
Small stream really in the midst of the other ones.
In it, children laughing and laughing,
which is the sound of ripening, which the musicians can't play.
But that is another tale.
Someone invited them in, humanity, and they came in.
They said they knew and then they knew.
They made this bank called justice
and then this other one called not.
They swam in the river, although sometimes it was notes.
And some notes are true even now.
Yes, they knew each other.
Then a winter came, which was a curtain.
And then spring, which was when they realized
it was a curtain, which leads us to this, the showstopper,
summer, the Americans.
I wish I could tell you the story so and so holding
his glass up, the table around him
jittery, and how then she came along gliding
between the tables, whispering, it
exists, enough to drive them all mad, of course,
whispering sharp as salt, whispering straw
on fire looking at you.
And the one in the back, no one knows
starting up the applause alone.
A flat sound like flesh beating flesh, but only like it.
Tell me why did we live, Lord?
Blood in a wind, why were we meant to live?"
[APPLAUSE]