[APPLAUSE]
Wow.
Thank you.
Done.
I sound wonderful.
It's an illusion, but I do sound wonderful.
Thank you.
Thank you, everybody, all for your hospitality.
What an impressive damn place this is.
This is something, not just the art of it,
because I'm really hot on architecture too.
But the heart of it has been great.
There have been wonderful souls at every turn.
And I thank you.
Including this afternoon, I met with the most cherishable
bunch.
I will hear that I'm not loud enough, but thank you.
It's good of you to care.
I did meet with the most wonderful bunch
of undergraduates today in a classroom
right up there, which I can also see from my bedroom, whereupon
I spared them much and lowered the blinds.
[LAUGHING]
They'd been reading Eyeshot, which was a collection of poems
I had published in 2003.
And now that I have a new book about to come out,
I thought I'd give you some glimpses of that.
It's called Upgraded to Serious, which is-- oh good,
a few people have been in the hospital.
That's always lucky.
It's a kind of literary one upsmanship,
too, since one presumes, of course,
that the critical is a few notches down, one or two,
anyway.
I'm not sure I know the whole taxonomy,
but I think critical is under serious, right?
Serious is on top.
I just want to make sure because I live in English departments.
You understand, I need reassurance on this score.
They won't know either, which is just as well since I
live among them, the critics.
Despite the "serious" in the title, much in the book
is meant to be funny.
So you're allowed to laugh.
I'm always bursting with something.
And bursting is my modus operandi.
And in life, you've got to have the bursts of hilarity
to counterpoint the bursts of severity.
There's a kind of ratio right of laughter to lachrymal,
and it's one.
It better be one.
You've got to work it out.
You joke to keep from jumping.
You guys know.
Because the dark is always lurking in there
when you're making light of things.
And, like, I just read on the plane,
the leper says to the prostitute, keep the tip.
[GROANING LAUGHTER]
Oh, I know it's the groan that makes it funny.
I know, I know.
It's horrible.
But you burst out.
It's uncontainably horrible and funny.
And I did laugh at a funeral once.
And I've never forgiven myself.
On the other hand, it's the story of my life.
So here's a photo negative of some light studies--
"The Gift."
"From underwater you can't see a thing above--
a sun, or a cloud, or a man in a boat.
You see the bottom of the boat.
And everywhere below it-- flocks of glitter, brilliantly
communicating schools.
You see the calm translucencies and groves,
a sway of peaceful flags.
Above is silver impassivity--
reflective lid.
So why look out?
No out exists.
The sky, each time it's wounded, heals at once.
A zippering across it instantly dissolves a wet suit's foot
or a long black line behind a plummet, or the sudden angling
boomerang, of a murre in a hurry to zigzag down.
All come as pure surprises, passing thoughts
that leave no afterimage.
But we have lived above it all instead,
our feet on the ground, our heads in the clouds
where there's no ceiling sealing us from heaven.
Drawn into the storybook of stars, the spark-lit universes,
countlessness of dust--
we think along those phosphorescent ways
there must--
brain lights up a schoolroom rule--
live others like ourselves in worlds as mirror-mesmerized.
As mine, let's say, or hers.
And so it was around the 57th month of her life's underlife--
a mindless blind metastasis of cells--
we sent each other messages by email,
sudden, simultaneous, because of dreams.
In hers, the ancestors were waiting just across a lake,
but she found no equipment in her circumstances of canoe.
The paddle on the water drifted far and farther off.
She saw it.
Touch my boat, she said.
She saw me shove it back across the surface,
safely to her hand, so she could get where she'd be found.
Dear god, give me a faith like that.
In my dream we both drowned.
[LAUGHING]