I'm just going to read one more.
No, it's really long.
It's really long.
It takes about 10 minutes to read this poem
and it's on the fax.
I got to read the poem on the fax.
This poem is really in honor of Jesse Holmes.
I was really upset that I didn't have any poems that
had any kinky sex in them whatsoever,
and that I couldn't possibly offend anybody.
And I wanted to honor a community that raised funds
in spite of the threats in Congress
against our freedom of expression.
And so I tried to write a poem that had
something pornographic in it.
I tried to cover all the ground that the NEA is upset by.
[LAUGHTER]
And it's not in my nature.
So I'm almost embarrassed reading it.
But I figure there isn't ever going
to be a better audience for kinky sex.
[LAUGHTER]
Actually, you're going to wait a long time before you
get to anything sexy, and then it's
going to go by so fast you're going
to be really disappointed.
[LAUGHTER]
All right, that said, this poem takes place
while the first is in three sections.
The first section takes place at the Battle
of Shiloh near Memphis.
Actually, it is looking at relics
from the Battle of Shiloh originally
in the Pink Palace Museum in Memphis,
in particular, a bullet that has tooth marks in it.
Sex isn't till the second section.
And in the third section, when you really
can't bear it any longer, it's when
you hear the mention of the peach,
since blossoming of peach trees are
the central object of scrutiny.
But when we get to the actual peach,
you know it's about 10 lines from the end.
It helps to know these things.
It's titled "Marks," and I'll let you guess how that spelled.
"One, Pink Palace Museum, Memphis.
She lifts the bullet out of the gleaming glass case.
What can it harm?
Clock on the wall, ceiling fan on.
Earlier, it was muzzleflash, dust.
All round in the woods, voices and orders,
but you can't be sure whose.
Here's a sunken place by the road for shelter
and the speechless reload, tents that way or is it fog
or is it freedom?
A horse with his dead man disappears.
The line is where that has to be maintained at all cost.
Smoke clears and here's 1,000 peach trees, a massacre
of blooms or is it smoke?
The fire is let go, travels into the blossoming not as fast
as you think, enters a thigh.
She holds up the set of knives in their satin-lined case.
Behind her, the diorama where the surgeon's sawing.
There's the wax mouth held shut.
There's the scream inside.
Peach blossoms fall.
No chloroform, so whiskey is used
and sometimes now lifting up out of the incandescent display.
The bullet, we bend close to see the bite marks on--
three dark impressions whose footprints
on bottomland, whose bodies sticky with blossom, loosening
into the wet field.
The still living, moving the simpler bodies
of the already dead up and down during the night.
Flashes of lightning showed hogs feeding on the dead,
says the captain who hears the wounded rebel under him say,
oh, God, what made you come down here to fight?
We never would have come up there.
Look, he lives to write it down.
Here are the black words photographed and blown
up wall-sized behind the guide.
Do you think these words are still enough?
And the next thing and the next thing.
Where is a mark that stays?
Where is what makes a mark that stays?
What's real slides through.
The body rots, the body won't hold it.
Here's the next room and the flight simulator.
We, the living, run our arms along the grooves
as we walk through.
They are lifted and dropped, experience wing action.
I shut my eyes and try it again.
The museum hums around me.
Something else, something niggardly
letting the walls stay up for now hums.
Something speechless, and dense, and stationary,
letting matter coalesce in obstinate illustration hums.
Here are the theories come to cloak it--
buzz.
Hear the deafness all over the trees--
green.
Hear his scream go into the light.
See how the light is untouched by the scream that enters it.
Dust motes, peach blossom fall.
Where shall the scream stick?
What shall it dent?
Won't the deafness be cracked?
Won't the molecules be loosened?
Are you listening?
We need the scream to leave its mark on the silky down
of the pettaled light.
I lift my arms along the rutted ledge--
lift, drop, try to feel the prey beneath me.
Look down through the trees, only there is no through.
It all being flat ground zero, a fabric, something's pattern.
Then the dropping down fast to try to scratch the emptiness.
I was there.
Or it was a most beautiful evening,
private Leander Stilwell of the 100th Indiana remembered.
It really seemed like Sunday in the country at home.
"Two, Peach Orchard, Shiloh Battlefield
Near the Mississippi River.
She's the scream, he's the light.
They are playing sort of at Leda and Swan.
No, she's the stream, he's the blossom fall.
Do you think these words are still enough?
Something out there on a spot in the middle of the creek, where
the sun hits first and most directly,
where a person can hardly look, where
there's a little gash on the water film.
An indentation almost a cut his foothold are taking there,
though not slowly like rot.
A likeness there, a subtraction.
A dizziness rushing down into thought.
Her, a stream, yes, though not less a girl.
And him, the light become petalled in its lower reaches,
almost cutting the water there where it wings,
or so the story goes, him needing something
he did not have.
Filtering down to make the salt life glow,
down onto the one-way motion, the hard muscle
of the no-turning-back.
All around them, the confused clicking of matter.
Somewhere behind them, a human voice
calling out the time of day like a plea and the insects
whining high and low, buzz, and click without cessation.
So he hurts her a little, hurts her some more.
Can't seem to find her, maybe he'll cut her.
Can't seem to find her, can't seem to find her.
The more he enters, the more she disappears.
The more she takes him, the more he isn't true.
Maybe now they will feel their bodies harder.
Now do they feel them harder?
What is it to always be within oneself, interminable, noon.
Watching for the face to look this way,
the face even then already bored.
Its glance passing over.
Is it death they want to touch or is it invent?
Their difference, a kindling in the endlessness.
Is that what they wanted?
To make a beginning?
To introduce ruin?
An aperture that lets in the minutes, the buzzing, and then
the festering.
Oh, the minutes.
Can't you hear them already behind this blossoming
white page?
Greedy, awaiting the fresh wound.
Black big wings beating, antennae wild, sticky,
and thousand eyed.
Sacks of our blood beneath their wings.
He wants to go into her, he goes through.
The clawed light down hard on the sinewy scream.
He ties her down with his belt, she is not there.
She is asking for it, he is not there.
He promises forever, she is not there.
Do I own you?
She says.
Yes, yes, he is not there.
She is rising up as he descends, then she is not there,
then she is water beneath him, a river is flowing.
He's clawing for foothold, the river won't take his mark.
What can, he sees.
Where she eddies it's brighter for an instant.
Where the scream is, the light is broken for the instant.
Where the light is brighter, the scream is the instant.
Where they thought they could marry,
in which they thought they could touch each other.
The instant, they can't see it.
A scent, in it, the place something
maybe took place, but what?
Perhaps it is a hate they want to feel,
a pure one without cause.
Like a lateness outside the sensation of time.
Like a sunlight beating down or a loud voice
utterly without syllables.
Him, the center of what will I be?
What shall I think about?
With a laundry list, and a nobility,
and a question to ask her when he finally
gets his hands on her.
The whole damn thing here sucking and buzzing
like a silver wrapper he's supposed to get off.
Oh, but get up, get up.
The world is strange.
There is no underneath.
Get up.
The light is blossoming like foil,
but also it itches and is an iceberg.
And now raises its head like a swan like a sun light.
And now raises its head wanting to be alive.
How can the scream rise up out of its grave of matter?
How can the light drop down out of its grave of thought?
How can they cross over and the difference between them
swirl with existence?
Everything at the edges of everything
else now rubbing, making tiny sounds that add up
into laughter.
Something the breeze can lift and drop.
Something that clots here and there and confirms our fear
and the laughter, which you might think
is an angel above them.
The angel composed entirely of the difference,
a body whose ribs are the limits of everything.
Oh, but we are growing now that there's a hurry, aren't we?
Here where nothing is alive and vastly limbed and vastly eyed.
And the future spreads before us, the back of its long body.
For the first time since Homer, whispers his open book,
spine up to the light.
And naturalism was already outmoded when.
And by visible truth, we mean the apprehension of.
"Three, beautiful natural blossoms.
Little mist of broken starlight.
What is this she lifts and puts into my hand?
This little permanence, this stone punched through
with pain, ash of a man's scream still intact.
Strange how heavy it is, I think.
And here are the indentations.
I run my fingertip in them.
Little consequence, darker than the cause.
The war is gone, the reason is gone, the body is gone.
Its reason gone.
The name, the face, the personal identity, and yet here
is a pain that will not diminish.
Is it still pain?
What do we call it when pain gone, the force of the pain
is still intact?
Unwavering, knife sawing the leg, bone breaking.
The opening of the slice, the cold air where flesh had been.
What do we call it?
The air around this gray fossil of pure carnal limit.
Is it free?
Beautiful natural blossoms.
White holes in the fabric of air surrounding us.
I stand with my hand out in front of me.
The others look onto it.
Someone puts his fingers in, lifts it slightly, then puts it
back down onto my warm palm.
Already, it is less cold than it was.
Already, some of the heat has entered its molecule.
Already, our words and the tone of our words,
the exclamation mark, the rising supplication
of the question mark have mixed into the tall ceilinged museum
air.
Some of the heat from our bodies has crossed out
on the back of the words into the pasture of air.
Some small attribute, some gaseous nature
of the thing has changed, hasn't it?
I'm looking as he tries to see deeply the bitten
bullet without lifting his hand to touch.
I watch his eyes focus.
I watch him try to see what there is to see.
The russet cord behind him gleams, the ceiling fan,
the guide's voice, the thing in my hand, the light on it,
my friend's lowered face, the window to the left, the window
glass, through it the blossoms in rain, little mist.
You take the sunlight in and its frequency, which is a color.
You have these teeth, which are molecules.
In them, there is a form of desire
which ascertains which color of the light will do
and into which the molecules must bite down,
taking the necessary nutrient.
The particular aspect of the light, one of its speeds,
not another, into your speed and altering matter
make white and silky by virtue of what you do not apprehend.
What does this young man's bite into the world take?
What nutrient does his bite find?
What grows white, and airy, and almost invisible,
lacy, out of him as of this feeding?
What has he swallowed that will now rise up through him
and blossom up through his back, out through the eyes,
out the hole at the end of each fingertip?
Here is the young man's great grandfather
himself, a young man, who gets off the boat in Jamestown 1764
with a sack of seeds.
This is a peach seed, a pit.
It has come from Amsterdam.
Before, it was in a crate unloaded in Venice.
A new thing for the human mind, a peach
found in Baghdad by another young man
and tasted out of curiosity.
The pit is collected.
An interesting fruit, part apple, part pear,
he writes in his travelogue.
Here's the spring of 1772 and the first blossoms.
And then a good summer, not much war, and then the first fruit.
Here is the wife's face, he is handing her a fruit.
She puts the churn down a minute.
The child is crying in the basket by the fire.
Here he says, try it.
And her mouth over the rough skin,
the fire needing attention.
The child starting to scream.
Here is the mark on the surface of that peach.
Here the note she puts in her journal that night,
the words for it, that taste.
The season it stands at the heart of, that
sweetness not entirely sweet.
A fruit, part sunshine, part water, she writes.
But what she's thinking is his face when he came into the room
holding it this morning.
What was it he held in his hand, that his face could not see,
could not hold?"
[APPLAUSE]