Welcome, everybody.
It's a great feeling when this auditorium is full,
particularly at this time in the semester.
Really happy that you're all here tonight.
I'd like to make a few announcements about events that
are coming up in the community of some importance
in the next few days you may be interested in.
Friday night, December 6, the poet Ai and the poet Kimiko
Hahn will be reading at Pima Community College East
Campus at 8:00 PM in the community room.
On Saturday night this week, Steve Orlen
will be reading for Among Other Things at New Art
Space at 9:30, North Stone.
And on next Wednesday, the 11th, Celia Medrano,
president of the Salvadoran Non-Governmental Commission
for Human Rights, will be speaking here
on campus at 7:00 PM next Wednesday in Harvill
Auditorium.
And also, we will have Carolyn Forché's books for sale after
the reading, as well as current issues,
and probably past issues of the Sonora Review.
Most of you know that the Poetry Center's reading series
is generally made possible by grants from the NEA,
the Arizona Commission for the Arts,
the University of Arizona Foundation,
and funds from the Faculty of Humanities.
But tonight's reading, I'm happy to tell you,
is sponsored by the Friends of the Poetry Center,
individuals whose modest or major donations are helping
the Poetry Center to build an endowment so that we can
continue to bring you such writers as Carolyn Forché.
So as you sort through the voluminous year-end
appeals I know you're all receiving,
keep your eyes open for one from the Poetry Center,
and do whatever you can to help us
keep this series both thriving and independent of the whims
and restrictions often associated with grant funding.
Our guest tonight will be introduced by our poet
and faculty member Jane Miller.
[APPLAUSE]
Good evening.
It's a pleasure to introduce Carolyn Forché,
the poet of her generation who has forced her audiences--
certainly those among them who are writers--
to ask the question, what's my relation to these times,
to this historical moment.
Carolyn Forché has brought to our group consciousness a sense
of history, responsibility, and destiny.
And not in the tone of defeat or shame,
but in the language of intimacy, the language of love.
Among her many honors are included
the Yale Younger Poets award for her first book,
Gathering the Tribes; the Lamont award for her second book,
The Country Between Us; National Endowment and Guggenheim
Foundation Fellowships; and the Prestigious Poetry Fellowship
from the Lannon Foundation.
She is also widely known as a translator from the Spanish
of Claribel Alegría and the French of Robert Desnos,
and respected too for her work as an essayist, editor,
journalist, as well as for her participation in Amnesty
International.
Her poetry happily does not get lost among these honors
and organizations.
As you will hear, it has the intensity one demands from art
but seldom finds.
Seldom finds, even in life itself.
In that case, let's live a little tonight.
Ladies and gentlemen, perhaps the only poet of her generation
of whom it may be said, a legend in her own time,
Carolyn Forché.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I'm very happy to be here.
I tried to come last year, and I apologize
for not being able to.
Jane, this one's for you.
This poem.
I was asked to read a poem from my first book
and a couple of poems from the second book,
and so I've chosen a poem particularly for Jane,
and it's called "Kalaloch."
And Kalaloch is a place on the Olympic Peninsula,
on the southernmost tip of the last 20-mile stretch
of the wilderness coastline in the continental United States.
And that is to say coastline, not
accessible within three miles by road.
And that's all we have left, is this little stretch.
So that's what the poem comes from.
"The bleached wood massed in bone piles,
we pulled it from dark beach and built fire
in a fenced clearing.
The posts' blunt stubs sank down.
They circled and were roofed by milled lumber, dragged
at one time to the coast.
We slept there.
Each morning, the minus tide.
Weeds flowed it like hair swimming.
The starfish gripped rock, pastel, rough.
Fish bones lay in sun.
Each noon, the milk fog sank from cloud cover,
came in our clothes, and held them tighter on us.
Sea stacks stood and disappeared.
They came back when the sun scrubbed out the inlet.
We went down to piles to get mussels.
I made my shirt a bowl of mussel stones,
carted them to our crate where they smoked apart.
I pulled the mussel lip bodies out, chewed their squeak.
We went up the path for fresh water, berries,
hardly speaking, thinking.
During low tide, we crossed to the island,
climbed its wet summit.
The redfoots and pelicans dropped for fish.
Oclets so silent fell toward water with linked feet.
Jacynthe said little.
Long since we had spoken Nova Scotia, Michigan,
and knew beauty in saying nothing.
She told me about her mother who would
come at them with bread knives, then stop herself,
her face emptied.
I told her about me, never lied.
At night, at times, the moon floated.
We sat with arms tight, watching flames spit, snap.
On stone and sand, picking up wood shaped like a body,
like a gull.
I ran barefoot, not only on beach, but harsh gravels up
through the woods.
I shit easy.
Covered my droppings.
Some nights, no fires, we watched sea pucker
and get stabbed by the beacon circling on Tatoosh.
I stripped and spread on the sea lip,
stretched to the slap of the foam and the vast red dulce.
Jacynthe gripped the earth in her fists, opened.
The boil of the tide shuffled into her.
The beach revolved, headlands behind us,
put their pines in the sun.
Gulls turned a strong sky.
Their pained wings held.
They bit water quick, lifted, their looping eyes continually
measure the distance from us.
Bare women who do not touch.
Rocks drowsed, holes filled with suds from a distance.
A deep laugh bounced in my flesh and sprayed her.
Flies crawled us.
Jacynthe crawled.
With her palm, she spread my calves.
She moved my heels from each other.
A woman's mouth is not different.
Sand moved wild beneath me.
Her long hair wiped my legs.
With women, there is sucking.
The water slaps our bodies.
We come clean.
Our clits beat like twins to the loons rising up.
We are awake.
Snails sprinkle our gulps.
Fish die in our grips.
There is sand in the anus of dancing.
Tatoosh Island hardens in the distance.
We see its empty stone sticking out of the sea again.
Jacynthe holds tinder under fire to cook the night's wood.
If we had men, I would make milk in me simply.
She is quiet.
I like that you cover your teeth."
[APPLAUSE]
OK.
Barbara.
Thank you.
I would like to read a couple of poems from The Country
Between Us, specifically from the first section of the book.
The first section of the book, In Salvador 1978 to 1980,
is dedicated to the memory of Monsignor Óscar Romero,
who was the Archbishop of San Salvador until his
assassination in March 1980.
I was a roommate of Barbara Cully's when I first met
Claribel Alegría and her nephew and began to go to Salvador.
And I worked there off and on for two years,
and during my last months there, I worked four months
in Monsignor's human rights office called the Socorro
Jurídico.
So he was like my boss, and I think he was a saint.
I don't think I'd ever seen one before, but I think he was one.
And the last time I saw him, we were in the convent kitchen
of the hospital where he was later assassinated,
and we were having an argument because he
wanted me to come back to the United States
quickly and spend my time here talking to Americans.
And I thought, since he was on a death list,
that he should leave too, and he didn't want to.
And he told me, no, my place is with my people,
and your place is with yours.
And so that was the first time I had an understanding,
I think, that I had a people.
There's an epigraph to this section,
and it's from the poetry of Antonio Machado.
And the epigraph in Spanish is "Caminante, no hay camino.
Se hace camino al andar."
And this is roughly in English, "walker, there is no path.
You make the path while you walk."
For Barbara, I would like to read the poem "San Onofre,
California."
When you drive from San Diego to Los Angeles along Highway 5,
you have to slow your car down when you come to the beach
town of San Onofre.
Or at least in the old days you did.
And you had to pass through booths that set up
on the highway that resemble toll gates,
but they are the booths of the US Immigration
and Naturalization Service, an organization you'll probably
be somewhat familiar with.
They want you to slow down so that they
could look in your car and see if you look like an American.
I always thought, I wonder what kind of description
they had of us that they would know what we looked like.
But anyway, if they didn't think you look like one,
they would pull you over and make you identify yourself.
And while you're slowing down, you
can have a little tour of this community.
On your left, on the ocean side of the highway,
are the twin white igloos of the San Onofre nuclear reactors.
They are built on a tributary of the San Andreas fault
line on the beach.
And on your right is a cyclone fence,
which is the beginning of the San Clemente compound.
Do you all remember-- some of you
must remember-- that used to be called the Western White House.
And just up the coast is Camp Pendleton,
and then there was a camp for re-educating Vietnamese
refugees who came here.
So I thought the town needed a peom badly.
[LAUGHTER]
So I wrote this poem for that town,
but it's really for all of the region down
in this part of America.
And it's, I think, how--
when I was teaching at San Diego State,
we didn't think much then about conditions in countries
to the south of us.
"We have come far south.
Beyond here, the oldest women shelling
limas into black shawls.
Portillo scratching his name on the walls,
the slender ribbons of piss, children patting the mud.
If we go on, we might stop in the street,
in the very place where someone disappeared.
And the words, come with us, we might hear them.
If that happened, we would pass our lives
with our hands tied together.
That is why we feel it is enough to listen to the wind jostling
lemons, to dogs ticking across the terraces,
knowing that wild birds and warmer weather
are forever moving north.
The cries of those who vanish might take years to get here."
This is a little poem.
It's for a prisoner I was visiting in I Ahuachapán,
a prison in the countryside in Salvador which had been turned
into an army cartel later after I left the country.
But the prisoner inside, at great risk to himself,
took me around and managed to show me
the places in the prison where people were being abused
and asked me to make a map and to tell Amnesty
and other human rights organizations about this place
when I left.
So this is for him.
"In Spanish, he whispers there is no time left.
It is the sound of scythes arching
in wheat, the ache of some field song in Salvador.
The wind along the prison cautious as Francisco's hands
on the inside, touching the walls as he walks.
It is his wife's breath slipping into his cell
each night while he imagines his hand to be hers.
It is a small country.
There is nothing one man will not do to another."
I had a friend, Terrence Des Pres,
who wrote a book published in 1976 with the Oxford University
Press, and it was called The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life
in the Death Camps.
And it was a very moving book about the spirits of people
who survived the camps.
A study of their souls, a study of how they were after
and what had happened to them.
And also who had survived the gulag and under Stalin
and later.
And Terrence died suddenly three years ago,
and I would like to read this poem which I wrote for him.
And it's called "Ourselves or Nothing,"
and it's about his work in trying
to write that book, that first book of his about
the survivors.
And so it roams around a lot.
There's some of that book here.
And allusion to the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and her poem
"Requiem."
And there's also something of Vietnam here
and something of Central America,
and it winds up mostly everywhere.
So if you feel yourself sort of pushed around, don't worry.
You are being pushed around.
Anyway, it's called "Ourselves or Nothing."
"After seven years, and as the wine leaves,
and black trunks of maples wait beyond the window,
I think of you, north, in the few lighted
rooms of that ruined house.
A candle in each open pane of breath.
The absence of anyone.
Snow in a hurry to Earth.
My fingernails pressing half moons into the sill.
As I watched you pouring three, then four fingers
of scotch over ice.
The chill in your throat like a small, blue bone.
Those years of your work on the Holocaust.
You had to walk off the darkness.
Miles of winter riverfront.
Windows, the eyes and skulls along the river.
Gratings in the streets over jeweled, human sewage.
Your breath hanging about your face like tobacco.
I was with you even then.
Your face, the face of a clock as you
swept through the memoirs of men and women
who would not give up.
In the short light of Decembers, you
took supper's of whole white hens and pans of broth
in a city of liquor bottles and light.
Go after that which is lost, and all the mass graves
of the centuries dead will open into your early waking hours.
Belsen, Dachau, Saigon, Phnom Penh, and the one
meaning Bridge of Ravens.
Sao Paulo, Armagh, Calcutta, Salvador,
although these are not the same.
You wrote too of Theresienstadt, that word
that ran screaming into my girlhood,
lifting its gray, wool dress.
The smoke in its violent plumes and feathers,
the dark, wormy heart of the human desire to die.
In Prague, Anna told me there was
bread, stubborn potatoes, and fish, armies, and the women who
lie down with them.
Eggs, perhaps, but never meat.
Never meat but the dead.
In Theresienstadt, she said there was only the dying.
Never bread, potatoes, fish, or women.
They were all as yet girls then.
Vast numbers of men and women died, you wrote,
because they did not have time.
The blessing of sheer time to recover.
Your ration of time was smaller than a tin spoon of winter,
piano notes one at a time from the roof to the gutter.
I am only imagining this as I had not yet entered your life.
Like the dark fact of a gun on your pillow
or Anna Akhmatova's Requiem and its final I
can when the faceless woman before her asked,
can you describe this?
I was not yet in your life when you
turned the bullet toward the empty hole in yourself
and whispered, finish this or die.
But you lived, and what you wrote
became The Survivor, that act of contrition for despair.
They turned to face the worst, straight on,
without sentiment or hope, simply to keep watch over life.
Now as you sleep facedown on your papers,
the book pages turning of themselves
in your invisible breath, I climb the stairs of that house,
fragile with age and the dry fear of burning,
and I touch the needle to music to wake you.
The snow long past falling.
Something by Vivaldi or Brahms.
I have come from our cacophonous ordinary lives
where I stood at the sink last summer, scrubbing mud
from potatoes and listening to the supper fish in the skillet.
My eyes on the narrow streets of rain through the window as I
thought of the long war, that misted country
turned to the moon's surface gray and ringwormed
with ridges of light.
The women in their silk ao dais along the river,
those flowers under fire, rolled at night
in the desperate arms of American men.
Once I walked your rooms with my nightdress
open, a cigarette from my lips to the darkness
and back, as you worked through to the morning.
Always on my waking, you were gone.
The blue holes of your path through snow to the road.
Your face still haggard in the white mirror.
The pained note where 10 times you had
written the word recalcitrance.
And once you will die and live under the name of someone
who has actually died.
I think of that night in a tropical hotel.
The man who danced with a tray over his head and offered us
free because we were socialistas.
Not only that he sang, but young and pretty.
Later, as I lay on a cot in the heat,
my friend was able to reach for the guns
and load them, clicking in the moonlight with only
the barest of sounds.
He had heard them before me, moving among the palms.
We were going to die there.
I remember the moon notching its way
through the palms and the calm sense that came
from me at the end of my life.
In that moment, the woman beside me became my sister.
Her hand cupping her mouth, the blood that
would later spill from her face if what we believed
were the truth.
Her blood would crawl black and belly down
onto a balcony of hems and flashlights, cameras, flowers,
propaganda.
Her name was Renée.
And without knowing her, you wrote
all things human take time.
Time, which the damned never have.
Time for life to repair at least the worst of its wounds.
It took time to wake.
Time for horror to incite revolt. Time for the recovery
of lucidity and will.
In the late afternoons, you returned, the long teeth
shining from the eaves.
A clink in the wood half burnt.
And as you touched it alive, ici repose un déporté inconnu.
In the mass graves, a woman's hand
caged in the ribs of her child.
A single stone in Spain beneath olives.
In Germany, the silent, windy fields.
In the Soviet Union, where the snow is scarred with wire.
In Salvador, where the blood will never
soak into the ground.
Everywhere and always, go after that which is lost.
There is a cyclone fence between ourselves and the slaughter,
and behind it we hover in a calm, protected world
like netted fish.
Exactly like netted fish.
It is either the beginning or the end of the world,
and the choice is ourselves or nothing."
[APPLAUSE]
When I was going to Europe for the first time-- and I
didn't go until I was 27 because I grew up in a community
where people come from Europe.
Don't go there.
Maybe they don't go back there.
We weren't junior year abroad people, you know?
But I finally got to go when I was 27
because the NEA gave me an NEA grant,
not knowing very much about me yet.
And so I went to stay with Claribel Alegría for a couple
of months and translate her poetry.
And just before I left, Terrence said to me, well,
you're going to go to Paris first,
so you'll probably go to Notre Dame Cathedral.
Everybody does, so you'll go there too.
But he said, don't just go to Notre Dame.
When you're at Notre Dame, go around the cathedral
and cross over the key, and you'll see a black iron
gate and some white steps.
Try to go by yourself, he said, and open the gate
and go down the steps.
I'm not going to tell you what you're going to find.
So I hate that.
I have to know everything right away.
So I landed at the airport.
I didn't know how to travel yet, so I
had everything I owned in a big suitcase with no wheels.
And I got out of the plane, and I
asked, how is it cheapest to go into Paris.
And the man pointed to a bus that said "invalid" on it.
So he said [? va là-bas ?].
So I thought, OK, I'll get on the invalid bus.
And it took me to Invalides, this place
in the middle of Paris.
And I had this big suitcase, and so I
knew that I wasn't going to get anywhere very fast.
So I got a taxi, and I paid him the equivalent
of $150 in pretty money to take me about a mile to Notre Dame.
He liked me a lot and was very happy to have had me as a fare.
And I got out and dragged the suitcase
behind Notre Dame Cathedral.
It's far, going behind the cathedral with a suitcase.
And I got down there, and this is what I saw.
And I would like to share a little bit of it
with you because it's kind of a magical story.
The magical part is that--
I'm going to describe what was down
there so you won't have to drag suitcases or worry about it.
And I'm going to read you one little piece of translation out
of this book of Desnos, and tell you that when I got down there,
there was a poem scratched in the wall of this place.
And one, I didn't have any French then.
All I could do was eat and go to the bathroom.
But I thought-- I looked at this French on the wall,
and I thought that sounds like it would be really pretty.
Well so would a grocery list to me then.
But I thought it was pretty.
And you'll see, it is sort of pretty.
So I copied it down, and I thought,
one day I'll learn French, and I'll
know how to say this pretty thing.
And maybe I'll even know what it means someday.
And then my book got wet, and the poet's name
was erased by water.
And I spent about--
well, let's see, exactly--
about exactly nine years looking for this poet's work again.
I didn't remember his name, so I couldn't find it.
In 1986, I went to Paris to have this boy, Sean,
and I had to spend a month waiting for him to be born.
And I was big as a house and couldn't walk around,
so I had to stay in this little atelier.
And I found one poetry book there,
so I decided to translate it to try to learn French.
And on the last day and on the last page were these lines.
And the man that I had been translating was this poet.
"Behind the cathedral of Notre Dame and across the key,
there is a black iron gate opening
to a white stairwell that leads into the bank of the Seine.
Descending one enters rooms hallowed from the Earth,
rounded, austere, and as white as the palpable silence
of this place.
The windows of the rooms are barred
against the flow of the river, whose waters seem invisibly
held back.
To the right, there is a tunnel, and at its entrance,
a black grave marker inscribed, ici repose déporté inconnu.
Here lies the unknown deported.
Along the tunnel walls, 200,000 tiny lights flicker.
At the end, a single light burns like a star in the surrounding
darkness.
This is the memorial to the deportees.
The 200,000 Jews deported from France to the camps
during the Shoah.
It was here that I first encountered
the poetry of Robert Desnos chiseled into a wall.
Desnos, a member of the resistance,
had been among those deportees.
I was young and in Paris for the first time.
I opened my notebook and copied the lines out.
J'ai rêvé tellement fort de tol, j'ai tellement marché,
tellement parlé, tellement aimé ton ombre,
Qu'il ne me reste plus rien de toi.
Il me reste d'être parmi les ombres,
d'être cent fois plus ombre que l'ombre, d'être l'ombre qui
viendra et reviendra dans ta vie ensoleillée.
The name Robert Desnos was obliterated
when the notebook was left carelessly open to the rain.
I knew only that I had been moved
by the poem, which remained for years mysterious to me.
Poignant and moving, lyrical and elegiac, when read as a message
to the deported.
In 1986, I returned to Paris again, this time
to await the birth of my son.
My husband and I were living at 11 rue Schoelcher
in an atelier, overlooking the cemetery of Montparnasse.
In an armoire, I found a small collection of books.
Among them, the Seghers edition of Robert Desnos.
During that rainy March, I sat at a bread table
pulled to the window and passed the last days of my pregnancy
translating this poet.
Toward the end of the book and my confinement,
I was startled to recognize the lines from the wall.
I had found Robert Desnos.
And these lines, under the title Le Dernier Poème,
were thought to have been with him when he died of typhoid
fever in Terezín.
I translated them, 'I have dreamed so strongly of you.
I have walked so much, talked so much, so
much I have loved your shadow, that there now remains
for me nothing more of you.
It remains with me to be a shadow among shadows,
to be a hundred times darker than the darkness.
To be the shadow that will come and come again
into your sun-blessed life.'
For his participation in the French resistance,
Desnos was arrested by the Gestapo
and interrogated under torture.
He was sent to the camp at Compiègne, then to Auschwitz,
Buchenwald, and Floha.
In April of 1945, he was force-marched to Terezín,
Czechoslovakia, where he died shortly after the camp was
liberated by Russian troops.
This past May, I visited Terezín.
We drove the black Teplice road under a white sky
past the cut fields, the tarpaulin-covered hay
ricks, the petrochemical plant spewing black smoke.
Poppies afflicted the hay fields with wounding brilliance.
The people were harvesting cauliflower then from
the gardens near Terezín.
As we neared the town in its fortress prison,
the silence of the deportees memorial
returned, infinite and impenetrable.
It was Sunday.
The town, once a ghetto for 160,000, is inhabited again.
But the streets are oddly empty.
We watched a boy blank-eyed, pedaling a bicycle
back and forth with a naked, broken doll in its basket.
The windows of Terezín were lace curtained,
but the walls were rotting away, and many buildings were boarded
and vacant.
We drove the streets under flowering chestnuts
and circled the empty park.
At the entrance to the prison, a woman
stood holding a bouquet of leeks wrapped in paper.
Two Czech soldiers strolled through what had once
been the women's compound.
Doors swung in the wind.
Swallows dipped into the prison yard and rose,
their cries slicing into the silence without leaving a mark.
We walked the cold, swept-clean barracks,
ran our fingers over the gray wash
basins, the long trestle tables, the tiered bunks.
We found the sign, our bite-marked fry.
We found little drawings and paintings made by the children
of Terezín.
Colorful houses and trees, children and animals, birds,
flowers, butterflies.
We picked forget-me-nots and left them
near a symbolic gravestone.
This is where Desnos died.
Somewhere here, carved into a wall,
are the words Ici mourut Le Poète et Résistant Francais
Robert Desnos, 18 June, 1945.
As a prayer, I said the little poem that had first
opened his life and work to me.
It is in the spirit of this poem that I
offer my versions of his work in English,
that he may be known by American readers and so live again.
One among the many who perished.
The soul of a poet who gave his heart to the world in France."
[APPLAUSE]
[INAUDIBLE]
OK.
I want to read some new work from my new book,
The Angel of History.
And I know this is true because I was here once before.
But I've also been very reassured
that it's OK to read even weird work here.
I mean, you know that this is a poetry audience,
and that it won't matter if the new work is strange.
So I'm going to go ahead.
The Angel of History is a title from the work of Walter
Benjamin, was a German-Jewish philosopher
who died in 1940 trying to escape the Nazis.
And the book begins with a piece of writing from his thesis
on the philosophy of history.
"The Angel of History must appear this way.
His face is turned toward the past.
Where we see a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe,
but unremittingly piles ruin upon ruin
and throws them at his feet.
He would like to stay to awaken the dead
and to assemble that which has been shattered.
But a storm is blowing in from Paradise
that has got caught in his wings with such a violence
that the angel can no longer close them.
This storm drives him relentlessly into the future,
to which his back is turned, while the ruins grow before him
toward Heaven.
What we call progress is this storm."
It begins with a rather conventional poem, I suppose,
but in 1983 I went to Japan.
The Asian Writers Congress invited 12 non-Asian poets
to come to their meeting that year.
And they wanted two poets from each of the six nuclear powered
nations, including, at that time,
South Africa, nuclear powered and recognized as such then.
But Galway Kinnell and I went as nuclear poets
from the United States, and--
[LAUGHTER]
They took us-- the meetings were held in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And so you see, they had sort of a theme, I think,
in mind, or an idea of what they wanted it to be.
And I was very moved to go there.
My father had been in the Pacific during the war,
and let's say that we agreed to disagree during my childhood
about the bomb.
But we were taken to the museums where
they have objects that are on display,
and sometimes you have to stare very hard at them
to know what they are.
And one was-- like, you would look
at this sweep of beautiful, blue-green glass
with little metal pieces in the top of it scattered around.
And if you look at it long enough,
you notice that the metal pieces are bottle caps,
and that the glass, which is now fused,
used to be six little bottles, like for cola or something.
And like that.
And that's what happened to the things in the city.
And we were also introduced to Hibakusha,
literally "survivors of the light."
And they told us their stories.
Their stories were peculiar because they always
began exactly at the moment the bomb was dropped,
and never, ever talked about anything before that.
And I realized one of the reasons--
which is in this poem--
why their stories were a little bit strange.
It was a sweet reason and a painful reason.
But we met this one Hibakusha who
was in an ornamental garden called Shukkei-en.
And that's why she was saved.
Some people were saved because their mother fell
on top of them or a bookcase fell on top of them,
or they were behind a hill or something.
But she was in a grove of trees in an ornamental garden.
And the garden finally caught fire,
and the people from the city were running into the garden
to try to douse themselves in the ornamental lakes.
The garden had been restored since the war
but, she had never gone back there.
And while we were talking to her, she said she could go,
and we could go with her.
And s poem reflects our conversation,
walking through the garden for the first time for her again.
"The Garden Shukkei-en."
"By way of a vanished bridge, we cross
this river, as a cloud of lifted snow would ascend a mountain.
She has always been afraid to come here.
It is the river she most remembers,
the living and the dead both crying for help.
A world that allowed neither tears nor lamentation.
The matsu trees brush her hair as she passes beneath them,
as do the shining strands of barbed wire.
Where this lake is, there was a lake.
Where these black pine grow, there grew black pine.
Where there is no teahouse, I see a wooden teahouse
and the corpses of those who slept in it.
On the opposite bank of the Ota, a weeping willow
etches its memory of their faces into the water.
Where light touches the face, the character for heart
is written.
She strokes a burnt trunk wrapped in straw.
I was weak, and my skin hung from my fingertips like cloth.
Do you think for a moment we were human beings to them?
She comes to the stone angel holding paper cranes.
Not an angel, but a woman where she once had been,
who walks through the garden Shukkei-en,
calling the carp to the surface by clapping her hands.
Do Americans think of us?
So she began as we squatted over the toilets.
If you want, I'll tell you, but nothing I say will be enough.
We tried to dress our burns with vegetable oil.
Her hair is the white froth of rice, rising up kettle sides.
Her mind also.
In the post-war years, she thought
deeply about how to live.
The common greeting dozo-yiroshku
is please, take care of me.
All hibakusha still alive were children then.
A cemetery seen from the air is a child's city.
I don't like this particular red flower
because it reminds me of a woman's brain crushed
under a roof.
Perhaps my language is too precise, and therefore
difficult to understand.
We have not, all these years, felt what you call happiness.
But at times, with good fortune, we experience something close.
As our life resembles life.
And this garden, the garden.
And in the silence, surrounding what happened to us,
it is the bell to awaken God that we hear ringing."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Have time for this?
OK.
Here's the weird one, and it's called "The Recording Angel."
You will have to float.
Just, if you get lost, you're doing the right thing.
That's all I'll say, except that I
do want to say one thing because it means a lot to me.
Some of this stuff came out of time
that I was in Beirut in Lebanon in 1984.
And I worked there for National Public Radio, and the man who
was my buddy and my office mate and my comrade worked
for AP radio.
And he taught me how to use the equipment, and he made jokes,
and he taught me how to use the satellite,
and he got me over my nerves.
And I still, when I hear the All Things Considered music,
get cramps.
I can't-- because I feel like, OK, I have to be ready now.
But that was--
[LAUGHTER]
That was Terry Anderson, and I just found out on my way
here that--
I saw in the airport, on the headline, that they let him go,
and he's on his way home.
And so I'm really happy, and so I want to read this for Terry.
He was in-- seven years a hostage, as you know,
and he's the last one.
So it's called "The Recording Angel."
It's good.
I'm really glad about it.
"The Recording Angel."
"Memory insists she stood there, neither able to go forward
and our back.
And in that unanimous night, time slowed.
In light, pulsing through ash, light
of which the coat was made, light of their brick houses.
In matters, choreography of light, time slowed,
then reversed, until memory held her, neither able to go forward
nor back.
They were alone where once hundreds of thousands lived.
Doves, or rather, their wings, heard above the roof
and the linens floating.
Above a comic wedding in which corpses exchanged vows.
A grand funeral celebration.
Everyone has died at once.
Walking home always, always on this same blue road,
cold through the black and white trees.
Unless the film were reversed, she
wouldn't reach the house as she doesn't in her memory
or in her dream.
Often, she hears him calling out, half her name, his own,
behind her in a room until she turns,
standing forever where often she hears him calling out.
He is there, hidden in the blue winter fields and the burnt
acreage of summer.
As if in reflecting the ruins, the river
were filming what their city had been.
And had it not been for this, lines up behind,
if it weren't for that, until the past
is something of a regiment.
Yet, looking back down the row of marching faces,
one sees one face.
Before the shelling, these balconies
were for geraniums and children.
The slate roofs, for morning.
Market flowers in a jar, a string of
tied garlic and a voice moving off as if fearing itself.
Under the leopard trees, a white siren of light searches.
Under the leopard trees, a white siren of sun.
Two.
The child has gone to the window,
filled with desire, the glass light passing through its hand.
There are tide tables by which the sea had been predictable,
as were the heavens.
But his sickness chose from among us.
We grew fewer.
There were jetty lights where there was no jetty.
What the rain forests had been became our difficult breath.
At the moment when the snow geese lifted,
thousands at once after days of crying in the wetlands.
At once they lifted in a single ascent,
acres of wind in their wing bones,
wetlands of morning light in their lift.
Moving as one over the continent as a white front, one
in their radiance, in their crying, a cloud of desire.
The child plays with its dead telephone.
The father blows a kiss.
The child laughs.
The fire of his few years is carried
toward the child on a cake.
The child can't help itself.
Would each day be like this?
Hours on film, yet only a moment of normal life.
And the geese, rising and falling
in the rain on a surf of black hands, sheets of rain and geese
invisible or gone.
Someone was supposed to have come.
Waves turning black with the beach weed
called dead man's hands.
The sea strikes a bottle against a rock.
Three.
The photographs were found, at first by mistake,
in the drawer.
After that, I went to them often.
She was standing on her toes in a silk yukata, her arms raised,
wearing a girl's white socks, and near her feet
a vase of calla lilies.
Otherwise, she wore nothing.
And in this one, her long hair is gathered into a white towel
or tied back, not to interfere.
She had been wounded by so many men, abused by them.
From behind in a silk yukata, then like this.
One morning they were gone.
And I searched his belongings for them like a mad woman.
In every direction, melted railyards
fell, telegraph poles, for two months
to find some trace of her.
And beyond the paper walls, the red maple,
shirt in the wind of what the past meant.
The fresh claw of a swastika on Rue Boulard.
A man walking until he can no longer be seen.
Don't say I was there.
Always say I was never there.
Four.
The child asks about Earth.
The Earth is a school.
It is a waiting room, a foyer giving on to emptiness.
It is for desires, small but beautifully done.
The Earth is wrapped in weather, and the weather in risen words.
The child is awake, singing to himself,
speaking in a language ending with the word night.
Unaware of the sea entering, of the eternal dunes burying,
wooden matchsticks in a cup, the meaning of an object
or its lack of preoccupation with suitcases
and their contents.
God returns to the world from within,
and the past is circular like consequence.
The Earth tentative, blue, a fire wrapped in cold water.
A sudden gust of yellow tickets, a cold, blue rail,
and some boat lights.
The barrier dunes, blue esters, the parabolic dunes, and wind.
The children have returned to the beach, this time a boy
and a girl.
Hurrying toward, then away from the water.
He is wearing a red jacket, and it is not
important, the jacket.
The child asks if fish have tongues.
The other laughs, giving white tissues to the dog.
A white sail tied over the bay's mouth ruffles the sea.
On the water's map, little Xs across stitched sampler of
cries for help.
And yet, every lost one has been seen, mornings in winter.
And at night, when the fishermen have cast their nets one too
many times.
They surface the lost, drawing great helix of breath.
We on the shore no longer vanish when the beacon strokes us.
The child's boat plies the water in imitation of boats.
Years they sought her, whose crew left
on the water a sad, Welsh hymn.
Voices from a catch, lit by candles.
Days pass, and nothing occurs.
Nights pass.
Nights, and life continues in its passing.
We must try, then, to send a message ending with the word
night.
Five.
A river that later caught fire.
A stone with its own list of names.
Nothing that worked once can be tried again.
That's what he told me.
I didn't know.
I worked as a housewife, then bound
to the passing meals, the need for linens, a demand to return
fallen clothes to their hooks.
At night, I found myself in a pasture of refuse.
After the city vanished, they were carried on black mats
from one place to another, with no one to answer them.
Vultures watching from the white trees.
A portable safe found stuffed with charred paper,
an incense burner fused to its black prayer.
In the city's perfect emanation of light,
we lost every alternate route.
We were there, ill, there, in the new birthplace of humanity.
In the last of the world's open cities, rain begins.
The china cups are cleared from the chiming tables.
A garden of black silk blooms.
Forget the fish, the bottle, the bath towels stiffening
on the great, sleeveless pajamas, skirts of fire,
and flowers.
A girl's face turned toward a cup of water with no mouth.
Hello, child.
Hang your coat here.
This is what she said after so many years.
This was all she said.
Six.
Then they all got drunk.
Sylvia continued to mourn her brother.
Madam, please, a bit of newspaper.
I would like to relieve myself.
He sings to the work-for-nothings,
the die laughing of hungers, as if his voice
could grow a pumpkin out of the white ground.
Even the sign warning us away implied an obligation to go on.
A bottle, a red bandanna, a yellow bucket
of bones behind the gate.
We find a shovel near all of this,
and as these were our final months, a radio.
It was an island wrapped in white fog.
Angel Island.
A wingless rock, a way station.
Now it isn't possible to go further.
Paper thin and floating, each small act of defiance a force.
There would be blank winds in the debris and palm
carnage in the half-life.
Our faces are there.
Mine bears the mark of your palm,
yours the marks of gelignite.
A bar of light touches the floor of a house
long since torn down.
Where the walls were, silence was.
The playing cards you clipped to a window fan
to imitate the sound of helicopters all
those nights, so as to return to the ruins of a wished-for life.
Their flesh like fallen snow, leaf shadows burnt into a post,
burns of bamboo on bamboo canes.
These ruins are to the future what the past is to us.
Someone has written fuck with dog shit
on the walls of Simone's atelier.
A pall of exhaust over Paris.
The woman with a shaved head seen twice
in different arrondissements And on the Rue Victor Considerant,
a boy with a white toy M-16.
The day's march shouldering their little events.
Tiny birds on the dining tables flew from spoon to ball,
and as far as anyone knew, no one drowned.
The hotel is no longer there.
We were its final guests.
A stone wall, white roses, birds and the whine
of bright aerial antennas.
Every window casement an empty portrait.
Radiant, formless, ancestral in which
he longs for her, whomever, her white bed,
the remote possibility of another life.
To look in the windows of that little place expecting someone,
the two of us, the child, the two blue boats and the brown.
The child comes into the room and leaves, comes and leaves.
I loved her, he said.
She was the woman of my life.
Her blank eyes, her-- this is what he loved.
She sliced the photographs from the frames,
chose what to bring with us.
Said look what they've done to the windows, to my life.
You are a child.
You think only of love, in whose other arms
you will find refuge.
The man walks on blank and without veering.
Where there are objects, he walks over rather than
around them.
The knife rises in her hand as she wipes her eyes.
Comment vivre sans inconnu devant soi?
He departed with great pledges of love
and went back to his life, never to call her again.
Dear L, I thought I knew what I was doing.
On the island of fuselage, of wrecked plane,
a wing in sharp vegetation, a radar dish
filled with pumpkin plants, the blue wash of a cratered road.
His sickness chose from among us.
We grew fewer.
And so as not to appear in uniform,
he walked in his underwear through the village
as if he were only strolling the asylum grounds.
One morning slides, aqua into the next,
the night beach lit and tired.
Grève painted on the wall.
But what grève?
Nothing to strike for here.
Better pay?
Better pay for what?
Everybody in this no-name named village is chômeur.
It means they would carry your shit for you
from your ass to the pit if they were paid.
They plant flowers in cracker cans on the porch stare.
They plant hibiscus in their wrecked cars.
When you are talking about stupidity,
only the military knows the meaning of the word infinite.
Always he travels without maps, as it is better
to become lost than spend time thinking about the road.
He drinks holy water, then pours some into a bottle in case
he needs it again.
Perhaps you have seen one of them,
a familiar man or woman, maimed, or a beggar who appears
in several places at once?
Why now, and in such numbers?
If there are two doors, then only one
gives on to normal life here in this open field that
can never be a field again.
It isn't necessary to explain.
The dead girl was thought to be with child until it
was discovered that her belly had already been cut open,
and a man's head placed where the child would have been.
The tanks dug ladders in the Earth.
No one was able to climb.
In every war, someone puts a cigarette
in the corpse's mouth.
And the corpse?
The corpse is never mentioned.
In the hours before his empty body was found,
it was this, this life that he longed
for, this that he wrote of desiring, yet this life
leaves out everything for which he lived.
Hundreds of small, clay heads discovered
while planting coffee.
A telescope through which it was possible to watch
a fly crawling on the neighbor's roof tiles.
The last-minute journeys to the border for no reason.
The secret house where sports trophies were kept
that weren't sports trophies.
Someone is trying to kill me, he said.
He was always saying this.
Orange is turning to glass on the trees,
a field strewn with them.
In his knapsack, a bar of soap, a towel the size
of a dinner napkin, a map of the world
he has not opened that will one day correspond to the world
he has seen.
In the spring, lilacs and mud roads, and later blossoming
wind.
Then the drone of beetles and high
grasses if the grass were drowning.
He said, a tongue doesn't have bones.
He said, tit for tat.
Like a sack filled, then emptied, then filled.
He was thin, yes, but when he walked past,
it was not as if a human being had passed.
And always, he thought, this is it.
The end of the world.
God is coming.
We doubt we exist.
We doubt with certain wisdom.
The world, such pains as you took
to convert a bedroom into a fire base
where an angry God, spilled blood itself, lives."
And the last--
"Having taken these rooms for a season,
I imagine, that it might be possible to recover.
For an hour each afternoon, I vow
to sit in meditative expectancy.
The light far on the rock promontory
reaches Paris where an old man's hand reaches out of the Seine,
his wristwatch brilliant enough to catch
the eye of a boat captain.
There are times when the child seems not yet
to have crossed into the world, despite having entered a body.
Memory, a wind passing through the blood trees within us.
Someone was supposed to have come.
He wrote, I tore open your letter
and licked the envelope seal for any lingering trace of you.
In the worst of centuries, a merely difficult week.
Nothing.
Then from nothing.
Something.
I noticed it today while walking to the pharmacy.
They were already selling woolen underwear.
The market was closed.
Monday, there were dead flowers for sale, dead marigolds,
hydrangea, peony.
Smoke rose in a perfect line from the roof.
Then, it wasn't possible to go further.
Everything seemed intentionally placed
where it was, even the garbage bins.
The children marched, holding their booklets.
Peach leaves slipped earthward.
Wind filled the souvenir shops.
Dove, doves painted white on the stopped wind.
Lamps in foglight fingering the canals, and now
the defenselessness, for which there is no cure.
But it is a matter of shared history.
I have the memory of a child in the southern slums lifting
the lid of an abandoned toilet.
And the child on my back, however,
wasn't kept from singing.
And falling back toward night, it was as if someone not alive
were watching.
Slowly, that is, over time, itself a barrier.
And just then, the doves rose and battered
the wind where a notebook was kept once during a visit.
This is my cap.
This is my coat.
Here's my shaving gear in its linen sack."
I'm going to end this with a little elegy,
and it's for Terrence.
It's for Terrence.
I think I imagined one night when
I was writing that he went back to that place in Paris.
His soul went there.
"The page opens to snow on a field.
Boot-holed month, black hour.
The bottle in your coat, half vodka, half winter light.
To what, and to whom does one say yes?
If God were the uncertain, would you cling to him?
Under a tattoo of stars, the gate open, so silent,
so like a tomb.
Descending the city you most loved, an empty stairwell.
On your clay breath as the next rain
lifts invisibly from the Seine.
With solitude, your coat open, you walk steady,
as if the railings were there, and your hands
weren't passing through them.
When things were ready, they poured on fuel
and touched off the fire.
They waited for a high wind.
It was very fine, that powdered bone.
It was put into sacks, and when there were enough,
we went to a bridge on the Narew River.
And even less explicit phrases survived to make charcoal
for laundry irons.
And so we revolt against silence with a bit of speaking.
The page is a charred field where the dead would
have written, nous continuons.
We went on, and it was like living through something again
one could not live through again.
War will no longer be declared, but only continued.
And the shadow of eternal armament color the heavens.
The soul behind you no longer inhabits your life.
The unlit house with its breathless windows
and a chimney of ruined wings, where wind becomes an area.
Your name, voices from a field.
And you, smoke.
Dissonance.
A psalm.
A stairwell."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]