So that's Wilderness and Razor Wire.
I'd like to read just a couple of short passages
from Time of Grace.
This is my latest book.
This is the book that Dick and I toured with.
It came out in 2007.
It's more nature, but I took the--
the book is kind of framed around my encounters
with nature while I was in prison.
It covers the last three years I was locked up
of my 12 year sentence.
But I also delve into other interests
of mine-- family, my wife Karen, who's here today,
my three daughters.
They stayed with me through the whole experience.
I mean, she did nearly as much time
as I did sitting in that visitation area
all those years.
She didn't like it much.
So I talk about my family relationship, my daughters,
and I also get into this area of crime and punishment.
So I'm going to breeze through some of those,
beginning with this.
In the morning, I sit outside my tent
drinking coffee and looking west toward the Tucson mountains,
toward my family.
My girls will be rising now for school.
Cassandra, always the earliest, will be up and dressed already,
making herself cinnamon toast, lightly buttered,
for breakfast.
Prison makes me feel so helpless, isolated, fermented
by emotions, like I'm the subject of an Edvard Munch
painting.
The anxiety and despair hang on, sapping my capacity
for peace of mind.
I become an ocotillo in drought, dropping leaves and bearing
thorns.
I need to find a sense of place, even in this place,
to find a sense of time.
I need to mark my landscape with more than images
of concrete and steel, to mark my year with more
than discarded calendar pages.
For now, all I have is this place.
But prisons do exist at the margins,
those in-between places where life comes together,
adjusts, and teams.
Even at the desert margins near here,
there is a species of grassland whiptail lizard,
a race of females that reproduces without sex.
Despite the limitations of gender,
despite even the limitations of razor wire and chain link,
there are no real borders, only the effect of edges.
After work and the afternoon mandatory lock down and count,
I walk the track, making perimeter circuits
6/10 of a mile per lap along the edge of my world.
Somewhere a Say's phoebe calls inconsolably.
And I'm looking for the bird, when a sudden flush of feathers
startles me, wings in my face, two pairs of wings.
A dove hits the fence with a metallic ring
and then drops to the ground, its breast torn
and red and heaving.
Last night, a disturbance of birds
alerted me to the presence of a Cooper's hawk here,
an immature female by her brown streaked breast and size,
the first I'd seen at Echo unit.
This afternoon, she's made a kill,
or had until I blundered onto the scene.
Now she's atop a light pole and staring at me.
I back away and wait.
Nothing.
The bird lies motionless but alive.
The hawk watches it.
I make two more laps and nothing changes.
Then as I finish the third, I see
her flying low to the ground outside the perimeter
fence, the dove facing forward and tucked calmly
into her talons, as if only going for a ride.
I think this is the way out.
I follow the pair with my eyes until the two
are part of the landscape, my own bit of mystery
with feathers and claws and edge effect that raises my spirits.
It's not Dickinson's thing with feathers that perches
in the soul, but it's close.