Two more poems.
And then, I will happily yield to my dear friend, Luci.
There's a poem in here that's a sequence.
It's about salt, and I don't have time
to read it all to you.
But I sat next to this guy on a plane who works on ions
and tries to understand what they're all doing inside
of our bodies, and it got me thinking about salt,
and how important salt is.
And so, I'll read you the last section of this poem.
It refers to an artwork by a artist named Michael Joo called
Salt Transfer Cycle.
A very strange interaction at the end
of this poem between the man and deer.
"Salt."
"The God of Abraham made a religion of salt,
because it could protect things from spoiling.
But first, the people had to gather it from the Dead Sea,
building star-shaped rafts of straw--
so the Internet Zealot of Salt writes--
to give the crystals purchase on something solid,
as the ropes and nets of fishermen
will serve when drying on shore.
Can everything sacred be described
by things and their emergence?
Romans paid their soldiers in salt, their salary.
So valued were its assets.
Salt and gunpowder, the planks of civilization, not gold
and books.
A city of five hundred people needed one ton per year,
trains one-thousand-camels long, crossing the Sahara.
And now at the sad, mad end of wealth--
let them have dominion over the fish of the sea-- fish gone,
I read and hold up as tithe to the church of science-made-art,
the story of the man who swam through salt, emerged
on land to crawl his way upright,
then sat so still in a field at wood's edge
that the wild deer came and licked the salt from his skin."