Thank you, Jane.
Thank you, Tyler.
Well, that was a bit of poetry.
It's always delightful to come back to Tucson.
I can just feel it in the air that your hearts are rich,
and your souls are open and ready to receive.
And this space, this Poetry Center
is just absolute concrete proof of that.
So you got a good thing going here.
OK.
Here's where I unpack everything and see what I've done.
Not much.
But I thought that what I would do tonight.
And it is true this Collected Poems has come out.
And it's a big book.
It doesn't fit in my purse anymore.
But I thought I would take you on a journey.
I promise I won't read all of them.
But I thought I would read chronologically and end up
with some new poems that are not in it.
And I thought what I'd do would start off with a poem
that I wrote while I was at the Iowa Writers'
Workshop with Jane.
And I don't remember, Jane, if you were in Stanley's form.
You were there in that formal poetry classes on sequences.
And this was one of the first poems
that I wrote for a sequence of poems
about slavery, which went over really well in Iowa.
The House Slave.
The first horn lifts its arm over the dew lit grass.
And in the slave quarters, there is a rustling.
Children are bundled into aprons, corn bread,
and water gourds grabbed, a salt pork breakfast taken.
I watched them driven into the vague before dawn
while their mistress sleeps like an ivory toothpick.
And Massa dreams of acids, rum, and slave funk.
I cannot fall asleep again.
At the second horn, the whip curls across the backs
of the laggards.
Sometimes my sister's voice I'm mistaken among them.
Oh, pray, she cries.
Oh, pray.
Those days, I lie on my cot shivering in the early heat.
And as the fields unfold to whiteness,
and they spill like bees among the fat flowers, I weep.
It is not yet daylight.