Thank you, that was--
it's just so great to be here.
I know everyone says that, but it really is.
I've known TC for a while, love TC's work,
I love Solmaz's work.
I feel like there's a real camaraderie there,
and I only met Solmaz for the first time last night,
but we'd been writing to each other for such a long time that
when we finally met it was like, oh,
it was sort of confusing that we hadn't--
like we just sort of hugged, and then only
like five minutes later, I was like, it's nice to meet you.
Or so anyway, this is great.
Thank you.
This is a true honor.
I'm going to read some new poems from the book TC mentioned.
It's called Trebuchet.
Comes out in November, and I'll also
read some poems from American Barricade which I
guess I'm still touring behind.
It's the tour that wouldn't die or something.
We were talking about film a lot today
and I didn't know that Solmaz loves film and I love film,
and I always want to only talk about film when
I meet poets who like film.
So I thought I would start with a poem that's
very filmic in certain ways.
If you are an INXS fan in the '90s or the '80s
there's a little lyric tossed out there for you.
And it also sort of starts with this weird three line prologue
that sort of just bastardizes a John Ashbery line.
It's called "Cold Open."
It was the thought that if you could watch,
if I could leak to the public the film of when
I needed to reach you, that would be one way.
From a little known bluff overgrown last summer
with wildflowers, if you could watch a family of turkeys,
a mother and 162 poults, if you could watch them
abandon their roost on the lowest
branch of a cottonwood tree, and lugging 163 tow cables
behind them when they departed, if you
could watch them dragging the tree through a field
overgrown last summer with tangle head grass,
and discarding the yellow tree piteously across the rails
of the Sunset Limited which was carrying that day exactly 162
passengers west to their sentencings.
It could be one way, I kept telling myself,
to awake in summer when everyone sentenced and film myself shot
of those dead to me.
If the lights came up on my train in a field overgrown
last summer with tanglehead, or if we
could slow to a halt in front of the yellow tree
obstructing our path, there could
be a smash cut, an establishing shot of the bluff where
you knelt cutting wildflowers, and off camera the cottonwood
could start hemorrhaging yellow termites.
If you could see the mites glowing yellow
having drunk the yellow blood of the tree.
And if I could leak to you what the camera work couldn't.
In a hand-me-down suit, an unsavory man,
he's inside a Renaissance cherry casket,
and that casket's buried eight feet beneath the Sunset
Limited's engine room, and that casket's
rigged on the inside with a hand crank generator
with Christmas lights in five colors.
If we could leak red first, then blue, and green
before we leaked orange and last yellow, the light of which
illuminates the interior of the casket enough for the man.
He's alive.
Enough for the man to watch his face decompose
in the mirror that's rigged to the ceiling.
If we could cut to the sentence handed down to the man
many years ago, that any unsavory man is a man who
should watch himself die.
If there was a slow zoom on a woman's hands
typing eight words in first class, and a slow
dissolve to a child in coach.
If he opens a text that says, don't change for you,
don't change for me.
If there's no ellipses and no period at the end,
if he doesn't even need to ask who it's from.
Then and only then, from a little known bluff,
you could stand up with a fistful of wildflowers.
You could watch the faces of 162 passengers darken unannounced
as if from a lightning storm, and the cottonwood
could stand up from the rails and dust off her own blood
herself, and resume her cold work untangling the grasses.
And if you could watch my train resume its terrible campaign
for the west, then, and only then, unseen for you
I could stay buried here beneath 162 suitcases
with the rest of the stowaways.