Thank you all for being here and thank
you Rick, for that introduction, and Demetria, for your reading.
And to Gail and the Poetry Center
for putting together this wonderful event.
It's amazing amount of people out there in the mall.
Well, it's interesting.
I always like to leave my readings open to the accident.
And so since Rick caught me in my own words,
I'm actually going to read a long sequence
from this book, which I haven't really
read before because usually there's
something about the attention of the audience that
seems to preclude it.
But I'm going to read this line sequence from "Wild Tongue."
On the Island of Bones.
Predictably, for the wound did not begin with us:
my left temple throbs.
The first Europeans found this island scattered with bones
as if a scavenger bird had sat on my shoulder all night,
cayo de hueso, trying to eat its way
into the most intimate spaces.
Connected to the continent by a ligature of reef, of myself,
its claws so grasping.
A siren shore to those explorers, their desire,
and their fear--
(though I could call it my harpy husband),
into the interstices of my muscles
full of the enchantments of erasure,
that I seem the bruise of his insistence,
so many shreds and wounds of meaning
that I can barely look through the white sheer panel
that veils the sea.
The poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.
Round eye, round island.
And so they found the shining mirror of the sea.
But I am not a man so I have to look at the ocean
as if I, by following the lines they memorized as if I,
as if I existed, as if I am.
The word cayo altering on many lips.
And so my fingers are as gentle and as hesitant
into a word that in another language
as if I touched the wound in you sounded like the word
for a key.
Swimming into the blue of the water, the body of the world.
Oh mastery.
Of signs, of doors, of maps, and made the world and something
within me into a graveyard rising from the dead where
once was paradise.
Oh yes it's paradise.
For yes, I think that form inflicts a kind of violence.
Perhaps the repetitive step of the iamb,
that girl I am for whom it was named in every Greek tragedy.
The one whose cry interrupts everything enchanted or in pain
was caused by shackles upon her shins.
Oh I remember those women waiting
outside the gate of the Alhambra always
waiting outside the gates to capture me
with a weight of sprig of rosemary
they placed upon my open palm.
Though perhaps the apologists are right.
I don't think so.
And she wore nothing but the finest gold chain of privilege.
As if to captivate with intricate o
verde te quiero verde,
my walking through the world a drowsy somnabulist,
full of the almond dust of Granada.
Perhaps there was no other way for her to move
and what we call order is a wounding
like hobbled horses in a meadow, a dragonfly tied upon a string.
For I am thinking, the body of the ocean.
Yet you could not know when you sent me
this charm of the Gypsies how I would cast it.
I would stand in the aureole of any candle and say to any you--
Outside my room is so fluidly and chaotically beautiful.
The light so random and impending.
Warmth of heart and passion fire,
to be blessed by the heavens is our desire,
that I feel nothing can correspond
to it except my feeling for you though it would always be I,
full of the crushed petals of that flower Eros gave
the god of silence, like drops of blood
my slightly cut finger left upon the floor.
For depth and subtlety of feeling,
and how can one ever write the idea of order?
Oh, they wanted me to cross their palms with silver
and have my fortune read.
It's like thinking of the anchorite's penance
or the flagellant's whip while daydreaming
in the arms of the beloved.
A clay heart, a spell of fire, a feather,
and a taste of the magick potion like salt upon the tongue.
Oh beloved, I keep thinking some other idea is needed.
I keep waking to the impossible.
A talisman of terracotta, a child's toy, a game
incised with a symbol that is one shape or is two.
Hour, at the very moment, the obscure body of the night
begins to fill with impending light, inverted
cross that rises out of an x but viewed if framed by the heart
shape, an x rooted in the Earth.
When the depths are no longer mistaken
for the cold compression, the vacuity that we have made them,
and the I, having adjusted to the shades of its absence,
and flaring out of the rising stem
could be a child's depiction of a flower,
as the eye adjusts to perceive the phosphorescent and
transparent forms of the fish that thrive within the depths,
for the spell you sent me is a spell already cast.
Underwater, vents of volcanic steam surrounded
by the waving meadow of sea worms,
the brain coral in its aquamarine electric halo
that seems to think in bodily terms,
so that its many creatures form one green continuous thread,
a kind of unraveling nimbus, and each creature
is so rarely formed that I marvel at it as if it were
the unique body of the beloved.
Oh you, it's only you.
That freckle on your arm, each creature bearing
its own radiance upon its head.
A hook, a lantern, a shimmering veil.
With the innocence of sharks resting together in the waters,
if I sat in midnight and watched the water move,
I could not write these words, which abide in the dark
and watch the water move.
You who are evening, you who are dusk,
you who are every hour singing to me in some constant
or in constant tone.
For in this world I want nothing but you,
and the round eye of the moon looks to me
as if it were sick of all the stories
it has been made to bear.
And the seabirds that dive and arc over the water each morning
are silent, though they make of themselves a weaving.
Whatever sound they make is the sound of wind,
the sound of wave we try to cast a spell upon.
Who could sail these waters, so hanged
with sun and blue, the delicacies of these breezes,
and land upon this shore of serrated leaf and black ringed
dove and plant a cross and a gallows.
Two shapes of order and inquisition.
And architect the shadow of what we mistake for passion
upon the living mangrove islands where the nurse sharks lie
in basking herds, their brown and blond coiled
ease in the blue shallows, a nestling of shape and length.
Where the trees themselves are so rooted,
extending into coral.
Each rootlet finding their way in and so entwined
that in their knotted hands the Earth itself is caught.
All the dust blown by the wind, debris
of leaves and scattered shell, and so the land
takes form in that embrace.
So multi celled and polyformed that the coral
glows with the electricity of its own being
and wears the veils once attributed to the divine body
of the goddess.
The veil that draped the rioting hair of the woman saint
so she could enter a church and not
disturb those praying with the protean quality of her hair
or thought, and the anemones in their long and jointly swaying
seem part grass, part wind, and mostly finger.
So swaying back and forth through the currents,
so that being in seems to caress itself
while outside the most expensive window
a plastic heron with its open crook of neck planted
on the top of some beach house has replaced
the gallows and the Pontifical sceptre
at the top of the beach umbrella.
Its toothed crown above the collappased--
Yes, I've misspelled that but leave it.
Let language bear its own ruin--
glaucous width of the parasol that
has replaced the shadow of the cross.
Its implication of miter and the gunship
that goes by full of tourists, full of blanks.
Though out there beyond our sight
we know the actual vessel of war carries
its red crosses and guns full of live death dealing ammunition.
He said that he thought his poem was
about another kind of colonization of the mind.
But when he went past and cast his look like a net
upon the tall blond woman I was talking to,
someone else's wife who looked like his wife,
I understood that he did not mind the other forms
of colonization.
That even speaking as a man who had been deprived
of the prerogatives of men, all that European pride
in a history that pained him, how he'd gone back again
and again to Italy trying to resist its seducation,
it was really sort of laborious, someone
had said earlier that writing poetry was
like flying through concrete but I
had the feeling I was watching a man turn
into a monument of himself.
Cell by self the aggregation of authority and celebrity
until there would be a sun basted statue with his name
upon it in some square, ponderous with the details
of the tourist, which came alive when it stirred
for a moment with something like anger, remembering
how quote, "with his prodigious ambition one begins" unquote.
They were so lovely, so generous arriving in their canoes
to weigh us down with fruits and flowers and the sweet warmth
of themselves.
And I knew by this they would be fit for servitude,
so sweetly obedient they already were, even
to the gentlest breezes of their paradise
that they did bend and sway like the anemones
who in those shallow depths do swirl and move,
opening and closing like the hands of women
caught in another's tide.
Angels they seemed in kindness, but bodily enough,
being no more than human.
Their qualities of being angelic so marked them out as slaves
that it seemed to me those first manacles were
but the bracelets to anchor them to this Earth, which we must
make groan with our labor and our discipline of gold
and emeralds and all the salts and spices that alone
can make life palatable to us.
Its penance become many piercing flavors
expiring on an exhausted tongue.
And so I leashed them.
As once in my native country when I was a boy
I tied great eyed iridescent dragonflies
to filaments of string and watched
them fly back and forth all morning
while my mother's laundry dried on the line
until their wings tore off as their hearts failed.
I thought the heron, its neck crooked so
that the beak angeled--
I meant to say angled--
at 45 degrees into the air as if the air were water,
as if all being were an ocean where the heron fished,
was real.
But it was not.
As I saw only when I drew nearer to the world that
seemed so framed by my expensive view--
the sheer drapes, the plastic solar blocking panels,
the frame of window, the frame of doors,
opening onto the balcony with its frame of wrought iron,
for when I drew nearer, I saw the heron was equally fixed.
It too was part of the frame, architecture of the I,
so that the Atlantic blued by the sun
would be caught in the angle of its motionless neck.
So do we try to still the world, to make
it rest in lyrick and obey, thinking
that it floats like water upon the eye of God,
and try to find in ourselves some equivalent
moment of dazzling and fixed stillness,
and mistake it for what we call peace.
Yet we make a corpse of world and self, banish real herons
and bring in their disposable replicas and posited signs,
then try to benedict the corpse back into breathing.
Farther on I saw that the man who
had been standing on the concrete dock looking
into the water
(I'd mistaken him for a homeless guy) was not alone.
I'd been all wrong from the beginning.
Another man was in the ocean, beneath the framework
of the dock, at work upon something
in his t-shirt and jeans.
I knew he probably floated in some raft or skiff bobbing
there to reach the dock's underside.
But from my vantage it seemed he had
stepped into the water, his arms over his head reaching
with great effort to hold up the dock, the underbelly
of the world.
A ceiling that pinned him in a world of waves
and tossed him in the ceaselessly moving water.
So the evolutionary poet is rare.
In actuality, it seems to me many of my contemporaries
are niche exploiters.
Each one attaching itself to some crevice of the reef
to make a feast of whatever predictable scrap drifts
its way.
At dinner thinking this, I became too feral, I think,
in some conversation,
I said something to the effect that no matter how
complicated my view I always read a poem as if it were
a matter of life and death.
That I was usually disappointed, that the evolutionary poet
was rare.
And whatever it was I said, it made
one woman go off and burst into tears
and made the other attending poet disappear
into another corner to begin another conversation
as firefighters might ignite a backfire to try and stop
the forest fire that threatens to consume a picturesque town
in the mountains.
Later, the same poet came back and suggested that I was drunk.
So I laughed and said no, at this stage
of my life I don't need to drink to be intoxicated.
Doesn't anyone notice that the great poet is simply
a stricken bird?
Though his missing teeth, the gap
of the smile that suggests a twisted beak
make me feel better about him.
All poets should have a touch of the monstrous.
But he is only a celebrity, not that rare one
who can barely breathe between the land and the sea.
Who moves not knowing if fins are fins or wings are hands.
Who finds these selves, who can she be who is herself
and her own muse.
Who can she be but you, so easily confused
in all her fluid swelling with the murk and mud of being?
In absolute statements poetry perishes.
Empathetic imagination when required
makes one fill up with the dead.
The distinguished hand is frigid as
if it were the hand of a corpse dreaded, dredged up
from the sea.
Ah, it's the feral that interests
me, the animals in the room, like the feral cat,
the chicken, in almost any yard: that poet,
for instance, who has the eye of a living possum caught
in the shine of a flashlight in the branches
of a tree on the remotest hill of an Arkansas back road.
Any paradise becomes too quickly swindled and expensive.
So when his charge card machine doesn't work
and I have no cash with which to pay him,
the British guy at the internet cafe
begins to endure a kind of torment
between his desire to trust me and his
fear that I'll stiff him of the $17
that I owe him just for talking to you.
And as anxiety becomes a gray upon his face, some cement
of reluctance in which his faith in another tries to rise,
though there's no help for it since I have no money
I can give.
So it's hopelessness that he gives in to.
Having no choice but to trust is not a choice to trust.
Perhaps he senses in himself the way
in which I'm lying, for I do have a $20 in my pocket,
though it's all my son and I have
to eat on for the next two days until the money I've
been expecting finally arrives.
And perhaps it's some deeper current between us,
some way of knowing what he cannot know,
that makes it more difficult for him to trust me.
So when I come back in the next day,
the new money having arrived, he's
sitting outside on a break in the lounge chair and adrift
of dreams between customers.
And when he sees me coming back to pay, oh how he smiles.
Oh love, he calls out to me as if this paradise, real estated
and pirated into limbo, were paradise again though
in a different way for being merely human,
for all our faltering and our lies,
some hovering shape in the air around us,
our selves opening as if we were free,
snaggly toothed man who plays songs requested
on his violin, guy who spray paints himself in warship gray
and stands motionless on a corner,
young girl who paints a plate with a place name,
the obligatory palm tree and wave of water,
middle aged fatso who'll tell a dirty joke for $0.50,
ex hippie who has a parrot ride on his dog's back while the dog
wears sunglasses,
young woman, her face fainted white
and fluttering, dress and feathers
of a Victorian angel in an elaborate pantomime,
pleading to heaven, scraping gratitude,
elaborate over the amount of money
dropped into a tin, it's all the racket of teeth chattering
together,
showtime for those couples who come down
the gang planks of the cruise ships
like lumbering animal couples of an ark gone wrong, filled
with replicas of the same species, hippopotami,
shrewd weasels, so when the boy sitting on the curb
shouts to the sleepwalking couples who clot up
the sidewalk with the maneuvering of their rumps,
those whose eyes are fixed on some invisible and distant
horizon by all that they have drunk, he cries out
We don't want anything, we have what we need.
And he means by this the sandwich that his hands are
still full of, its brown bread and overflowing lettuce
and turkey as if it were the plenty of the earth itself,
a kind of cornucopia.
We don't want your money.
All we want is a little acknowledgment here.
I look at him and smile and say hello and ask how are you.
He says fine, how about you?
And our eyes are equal, so fixed upon each other,
until the drift bears me away, how are you?
How are you?
In land's end bight all the ships
were tied, the replicas of sailing ships.
The turtle kraal images of slaughtered turtles
and only one very small living turtle,
a female with an injured fin, floating in the rescue tank
just inside the door.
And outside the ocean too is full of junk.
The scattering of seaweed like burnt straw upon the water.
A dead pelican, its head folded into the water,
and a small jellyfish, which at first I took for a plastic bag
and then seemed dead
but then my son threw a pebble into the water
and at the sound of threat, the jellyfish
pulsed and began filling itself up with water and contracting
frantically to get away.
So hard for a creature made of water
to make a way through water, for its road was everywhere.
And as it pulsed and quieted, letting itself relax back
into its drifting, it moved with the muscular contractions
of the human heart that does not move in linear ways
but drifts and is taken and pauses and stops
and can only open or close.
As a dream that lapped, as the water does,
at the labia of every form.
For what is it?
Should I say it's the muse?
For all that it brings me is the page
trembling upon that pirate chest, which
has been turned into a piece of decorative furniture
in this expensive room.
A page torn between the wind that lifts up
like a wing and the force of gravity that
makes it press against the surface of whatever it rests
upon.
Or perhaps more realistically it is the phantom of my own desire
that shapes out of nothing but its dreaming self and nerve
endings.
All the cells open into the night
as the anemones open to water.
Caught in the longing for what they are not, for in that sense
every Helen is a phantom, dreaming in her Egypt.
And if so, why call at you?
Why not give it tthe more easily defined
shape of the body dancing on that corner or the one
who will show me her breasts though I do not want her to.
Or the one who says laughing my eyes are like chispas,
those sparks rise into the air though they are full of fire,
as if they might take flight.
And yet it is you and your words that wake me.
Not in your voice for I don't know what your voice sounds
like and so cannot hear it even in a dream.
It was just the words themselves that were embodied,
a kind of presence with gravity and subtlety of feeling,
the wind, the weight, I don't know how.
And so it's odd how I wake up as if you had just spoken to me.
The dead of night beginning to fill with the impending glow,
just where and how do I live, what
is the location of the soul, and does it even
have an ordinary address.
For I am no one's if I am not yours.
For it seems to me when your dreaming body
lies in my dreaming arms, that I held you,
most truly you, that body which the Tibetans believe
walks out of the corpse after death
and goes on craving cigars and candy.
It seems to me so you that I could believe you
dreamt your way to me as I was dreaming you.
Oh, please.
Give me a break.
The truth is, oh phantom, form of the uncanny,
the correspondence of word and tongue,
the silken form in all the depths, that serpent's
labyrinth of being,
I'm sitting here listening to the song of how I am amazed.
But the truth is if you were in the next room I'd
be rushing into you, perhaps slowly as a fish snagged
by the hooks of its own desire, being reeled in by myself,
but rushing into you like the breath breathing from my lungs.
I could not not this minute touch you.
I could not not kiss you.
I could not not have my fingers in you.
I could not not be this vulnerability of you or me.
The world itself would fall to the floor like the last article
of clothing.
There's no heaven I would not give up to enter you.
I could not not touch the tips of my wings, my fingers,
my tongue, my nose, to the tips of your tongue, your fingers,
your eyes, your nose, your--
I could not not be, could not not be yours, could not not be.
How can the body remember what it does not know?
What phantom wakes me at night to the unknown feeling
of your body, my chin tucked into your neck,
my hand cupping your breast.
A dove dreaming in my dreamt hand
so that I wake to this real room where
while I slept a drift of turning fan and rising wind
has turned my notebook to a blank page
that restless flutters up on its spine, vibrando,
with its white space, its blue lines.
As if with love, as if to rise.
Trembling with the impending sense of the impending
of the note there.
As if in some phantom embrace (I meant to write only embrace
but let the word remember) it felt
the sea surging beyond the window,
its black rhythm rushing around the shores
to which it is bound, as if the ocean were that ancient river.
A phantom nestling against the back
of the Earth, a serpent of desire encircling the world.
Why do these gestures inhabit us?
Why did I wake up thinking of my tongue running
like a quick snail along your side.
That side that if you were a creature made of water
would be your dorsal side.
If people were fish from hip to arm
so that I could taste the subtle saltiness of you
as if the dream brought to me the faint flavor of all
the ocean outside my window, the salt
of your most distant molecule to my most distant tongue,
that intimate space where paradise lost begins.
Thank you.
[LAUGHTER]