I saw the article in the High Country News,
and I read the really nasty letter
that Richard wrote to the warden, Warden Fizer.
And I didn't really understand, he had the Jim Lehrer
people in there with cameras inside the prison,
in his workshops, and here was just
because he'd had a photographer out front of the prison,
in the desert--
I mean, if you see the picture, some of you
might have seen it in High Country News,
if you see the picture, you can't even
tell there's a prison in the picture,
it's just a picture of Dick standing
in front of a bunch of desert.
So I don't understand why they would revoke his volunteer
privileges because of a photograph,
especially since all those years that I knew him, 12 years,
he brought all kinds of contraband into the prison.
Contraband books, contraband poetry,
they called it unauthorized writing,
and he talks about this in his book, "Crossing the Yard".
Unauthorized writing, what is that?
Unauthorized writing.
But those books were a window for us to the outside world
and this is a short piece from "Wilderness and Razor Wire",
which won the John Burroughs Medal for Natural History
Writing, it's like the highest award
you can get for nature writing.
And the reason I have this award is because
of that man sitting over there.
[APPLAUSE]
Richard Shelton loaned me his copy
of "Trek: A Man Alone in the Wilderness,"
by Geoffrey Platts, a local guru of environmental causes.
And when I turn to page 92, a single cottonwood leaf
slips into my lap.
It is a gift from the author, no doubt,
although he never could have imagined
the leaf would find its way into the hands of a prisoner.
I'm appreciative, thrilled, there are no cottonwoods here,
and it's been a long time since I've
held one of these untreated tokens of rivers and summer.
There is a pain that arises whenever something reminds
me of what I'm connected to.
I risk the pain of memory by turning the leaf over
in my hand, raising it to the light of my cell window,
pressing it to my nose.
Thin and brown and veined, it is an old vegetable
hand with delicate lifelines of history,
of youth's chlorophyll glory, of life's insect scars,
of death's wrinkles and liver spots.
I hold hands with a corpse of a familiar desert oasis, Sabino
Canyon or Romero Pools, San Pedro River,
and it speaks to me vegetable words.
I open my notebook to embrace it,
to preserve it in pencil, an act of compassion that
loosens my thoughts to drift and settle among boulders, slick
with the mossy breadth of black water,
and risk further the blood of memory."
It was a cottonwood leaf, it wasn't
another kind of leaf that I--
I tried smoking it, no I didn't.