WEBVTT

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Thank you, Jane.

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Thank you, Tyler.

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Well, that was a bit of poetry.

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It's always delightful
to come back to Tucson.

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I can just feel it in the air
that your hearts are rich,

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and your souls are open
and ready to receive.

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And this space,
this Poetry Center

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is just absolute
concrete proof of that.

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So you got a good
thing going here.

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OK.

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Here's where I unpack everything
and see what I've done.

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Not much.

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But I thought that what
I would do tonight.

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And it is true this
Collected Poems has come out.

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And it's a big book.

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It doesn't fit in
my purse anymore.

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But I thought I would
take you on a journey.

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I promise I won't
read all of them.

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But I thought I would read
chronologically and end up

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with some new poems
that are not in it.

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And I thought what I'd do
would start off with a poem

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that I wrote while I
was at the Iowa Writers'

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Workshop with Jane.

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And I don't remember, Jane,
if you were in Stanley's form.

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You were there in that formal
poetry classes on sequences.

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And this was one
of the first poems

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that I wrote for a
sequence of poems

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about slavery, which went
over really well in Iowa.

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The House Slave.

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The first horn lifts its
arm over the dew lit grass.

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And in the slave quarters,
there is a rustling.

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Children are bundled
into aprons, corn bread,

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and water gourds grabbed, a
salt pork breakfast taken.

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I watched them driven
into the vague before dawn

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while their mistress sleeps
like an ivory toothpick.

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And Massa dreams of acids,
rum, and slave funk.

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I cannot fall asleep again.

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At the second horn, the
whip curls across the backs

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of the laggards.

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Sometimes my sister's voice
I'm mistaken among them.

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Oh, pray, she cries.

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Oh, pray.

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Those days, I lie on my cot
shivering in the early heat.

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And as the fields
unfold to whiteness,

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and they spill like bees
among the fat flowers, I weep.

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It is not yet daylight.

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