Thanks.
I wanted to read one point from that.
It's about Bellows.
Do you remember Bellows Beach.
It's a beach that has actually--
you can only go there on the weekends
because it's occupied by the military in Hawaii.
It's the only thing I was going to read.
I lived in Hawaii for many years.
And I felt like I needed to give homage to-- because it was also
part of what helped me to really think about nature and culture
issues in different ways.
But I'm super happy to be here.
And thank you.
Thank you, Gail.
Thank you, Jonathan.
It's been wonderful having a discussion over the last month
with you.
It's a really great way to have this exchange.
I hope you do that with more writers.
It's been a really wonderful experience.
And I love Tucson.
So I'm very glad.
In fact when Laynie was moving here,
I was, like, you're so lucky.
You get to move there.
It's so beautiful.
And I just got a tour of the amazing center, which is also--
now, I think it's national exceptional.
I'm really interested when state universities actually take up
to give something back to the community and something that
kind of has a mandate to both serve the university community
but to bring other people in and it
doesn't happen all that often.
I'm sure you guys all know that better than me.
I'm going to read two pieces, one
that I think might be more traditionally fitting
the themes of the series and one that, perhaps
less traditionally, but also I think still--
I don't know.
I'll talk about it in a few more minutes.
But the one that I feel more traditionally
fits is this poem that I wrote called "Gentle Now,
Don't Add to Heartache."
And it's about--
I'm from this town called Chillicothe in Southern Ohio.
I moved to Hawaii and I was like,
oh, I was writing a lot about Hawaii.
And I was interested in what I would write about Hawaii.
Chillicothe is one of those towns that
has a lot of prisons in it.
It had a big paper industry.
Paper industries don't exist in the United States.
I mean, it still exists, but it's not
the same kind of economic shape the way
it had shaped the town economically
for so long in many ways for the worse
because paper is very dirty.
But most of that industry has moved south.
And so Chillicothe replaced that with prisons.
And it has four prisons, including the jails, so three
prisons and a jail.
And it bids on them.
The northern, richer part of the state never wants them.
And so Chillicothe is always trying to get them.
And it's one of those towns that has more people in prison
than residents.
And I kept wanting to write about it.
And then I couldn't.
And I think it was part of it because I haven't lived there
since this transformation into a prison industrial complex town
had happened.
And this is a long story to get to why
I was writing this poem, in some way, which I was still trying
to think about what was happening
in that place in some way or what it meant.
So, "Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache."
"One.
We come into the world.
We come into the world and there it is.
The sun is there.
The brown of the river leading to the blue and the brown
of the ocean is there.
Salmon and eels are there moving between the brown
and the brown and the blue.
The green of the land is there.
Elders and youngers are there.
Fighting and possibility and love are there.
And we begin to breathe.
We come into the world and there it is.
We come into the world without and we breathe it in.
We come into the world.
And we too begin to move between the brown and the blue
and the green of it.
Two.
We came into the world at the edge of a stream.
The stream had no name but it began from a spring
and flowed down a hill into the Scioto
that then flowed into the Ohio that then flowed
into the Mississippi that then flowed into the Gulf of Mexico.
The stream was a part of us and we were part of the stream
and we were thus part of the rivers
and as part of the gulfs and the oceans.
And we began to learn the stream.
We looked under stones for the caddisfly larva
and its adhesive.
And we counted the creek chub and we
counted the slenderhead darter.
We learned to recognize the large, upright, dense,
candle-like clusters of yellowish flowers
at the branch ends of the horse chestnut.
And we appreciated the feathery gracefulness of the drooping,
but upturned branchlets of the larch.
We mimic the cat-like meow, the soft quirrt or kwut,
and the louder, grating ratchet calls of the gray catbird.
We put our heads together.
We put our heads together with all these things,
with the caddisfly larva, with the creek chub
and the slenderhead darter, with the horse chestnut
and the larch and the gray catbird.
And we put our heads together on a narrow pillow, on a stone,
on a narrow stone pillow.
And we talked to each other all day long because we loved.
We love the stream and we were of the stream.
And we couldn't help this love because we
arrived at the bank of the stream and began breathing.
And the stream was various and full of information.
And it changed our bodies with its rotten, with its cold,
with its clean, with its mucky with fallen leaves,
with its things that bite the edges of the skin,
with its sand and dirt, with its pungent at moments,
with its dry and prickly, with its warmth,
with its mushy and moist, with its hard flat stones
on the bottom, with its horizon lines of gently rolling hills,
with its darkness, with its dappled light,
with its cicadas buzz, and with its trills of birds.
Three.
This is where we learn love and where we learn depth
and where we learn layers and where we learn
connections between layers.
And our hearts took on many things.
Our hearts took on new shapes, new shapes every day
as we went to the stream every day.
And our hearts took on the shape of well-defined ripples
and pools, clean substrates, woody debris,
meandering channels, floodplains,
and mature stream-side forests.
Our hearts took on the shape of the stream
and became riffled and calmed and muddy and clean
and flooded and shrunk and dry.
And our hearts took on the shape of whirligigs
swirling across the water.
And we shaped our hearts into the sycamore trees
along the side of the stream.
And we let into our hearts the long pendulous polygamist
racemes of its small green flowers,
the first formed male flowers with no pistil
and then the later arriving hairy ovary with his two
curved stigmas.
We let ourselves love the one day of the adult life
at the mayfly as it swarms, mates in flight,
and dies all without eating.
And we shaped our hearts into the water willow
and into the egg spawned in the water willow.
And our hearts took on the brilliant blues, reds,
and oranges of the breeding male rainbow darter.
And our heart swam to the female rainbow darter.
And we poked her side with our snout
as she buried herself under the gravel.
And we laid upon her as she vibrated.
We let leaves and algae into our hearts.
And then we let the mollusk and the insects
and we let the midge larvae into our heart
and then the stonefly nymph.
And then a minnow came into our heart.
And then we let the blue heron and fly in,
and the raccoon ambled by, and the snapping turtle
and the water snake also.
We immersed ourselves in the shallow stream.
We lied down on the rocks on our narrow pillow stone
and let the water pass over us.
And our heart was bathed in glochidia and other things
that attached to the flesh.
And as we did this, we sang.
We sang gentle now.
Gentle now clubshell, don't add to heartache.
Gentle now warmouth, mayfly nymph, don't add to heartache.
Gentle now walnut, goldfish, butterfly, striped fly larva,
don't add to heartache.
Gentle now purple wartyback, narrow-winged damselfly,
spruce, pirate perch, three-horned wartyback sumac,
don't add to heartache.
Gentle now creek heelsplitter, mulberry, crane fly larva,
mountain madtom, oak, bank swallow, wabash pigtoe,
damselfly larva, don't add to heartache.
Gentle now whirligig beetle larva, hickory, sparrow,
caddisfly larva, fluted shell, horse chestnut, wartybark,
white heelsplitter, larch, don't add to heartache.
Gentle now stonefly nymph, dogwood, warbling vireo,
sow bug, elktoe, marsh wren, monkeyface, central mudminnow,
fir, gray-cheeked thrush, don't add to heartache.
Gentle now king eider, river darter, sauger, burning bush,
common merganser, limpet, mayfly nymph, cedar, turkey vulture,
spectacle case, flat floater, cherry, red-tailed hawk,
don't add to heartache.
Gentle now we sang.
Circle our heart in rapture, in love-ache.
Circle our heart.
Four.
It was not all long lines of connection in utopia,
it was a brackish stream.
And it went through this field beside our house.
And we let into our hearts the brackish parts of it also,
some of it knowingly.
We let in soda cans and we let in cigarette butts
and we let in pink tampon applicators.
And we let in six pack of beer connectors.
And we let in various other pieces of plastic
that would travel through the stream, and some of it
unknowingly.
We let the runoff from agriculture, surface mines,
forestry, home wastewater treatment systems,
construction sites, urban yards, and roadways into our hearts.
We let chloride, magnesium, sulfate, manganese, iron,
nitrates, aluminum, suspended solids, zinc, phosphorus,
fertilizers, animal waste, oil, grease, dioxins.
Heavy metals and lead go through our skin and into our tissues.
We were born at the beginning of these things,
at the time of chemicals combining,
at the time of stream runoff.
And these things were a part of us
and would become more a part of us, but we did not know it yet.
Still, we noticed enough to sing a lament, to sing
and lament for whoever lost her elephant ear,
lost her mountain madtom.
And whoever lost her butterfly, lost her harelip sucker.
And whoever lost her white catspaw, lost her rabbitsfoot.
And whoever lost her monkeyface, lost her speckled chub.
And whoever lost her wartyback, lost her ebonyshell.
And whoever lost her pirate perch, lost her Ohio pigtoe,
lost her clubshell.
Five.
What I did not know as I sang the lament of what was becoming
lost and what was already lost was how this loss would happen.
I did not know that I would turn from the stream to each other.
I did not know I would turn to each other,
that I would turn to each other to admire
the softness of each other's breasts,
the folds of each other's elbows,
the brightness of each other's eyes,
the smoothness of each other's hair,
the evenness of each other's teeth,
the firm blush of each other's lips,
the firm softness of each other's breasts,
the fuzz of each other's calves, thighs, the rich, ripe pungency
of each other's smell, all of it,
each other's cheeks, legs, neck, roof of mouth,
webbing between the finger, tips of nails and also cuticles,
hair on toes, whorls on fingers, skin discolorations.
I turned to each other.
Ensnared, bewildered, I turned to each other
and from the stream.
I turned to each other and I began
to work for the chemical factory and I began
to work with the paper mill.
And I began to work for the atomic waste disposal plant.
And I began to work at keeping men in jail.
I turned to each other.
I didn't even say goodbye elephant ear, mountain madtorn,
butterfly, harelip sucker, white catspaw, rabbitsfoot,
monkeyface, speckled chub, wartybark, ebonyshell,
pirate perch, Ohio pigtoe, clubshell.
I replaced what I knew of the stream with Livestream Total
Cholesterol Test Packets, with Snuggle Emerald Stream Fabric
Softener Dryer Sheets, with Tisserand Aromatherapy Aroma
Stream Cartridges, with Filter Stream Dust
Tamer, and Streamzap PC Remote Control, Acid Stream Launcher,
and Viral Data Stream.
I didn't even say goodbye elephant ear, mountain madtorn,
butterfly, harelip sucker, white catspaw, rabbitsfoot,
monkeyface, speckled chub, wartybark, ebonyshell,
pirate perch, Ohio pigtoe, clubshell.
I put a Streamline Tilt Mirror in my shower
and I kept a crystal Serenity Sphere with a Winter Stream
view on my dresser.
And I didn't even say goodbye elephant ear, mountain madtorn,
butterfly, harelip sucker, white catspaw, rabbitsfoot,
monkeyface, speckled chub, wartyback, ebonyshell,
pirate perch, Ohio pigtoe, clubshell.
I brought a Gulf Stream Blue Polyester
boat cover for my 14 to 16 foot V -Hull fishing
boats with beam widths up to 68 feet.
And I talked about value stream management with men in suits
over a desk.
I didn't even say goodbye elephant ear, mountain madtorn,
butterfly harelip sucker, white catspaw, rabbitsfoot,
monkeyface, speckled chub, wartybark, ebonyshell,
pirate perch, Ohio pigtoe, clubshell.
I just turned to each other and the body parts of the other
suddenly glowed with the beauty and detail
that I had found once in the stream.
And I put my head together on a narrow pillow
and talked with each other all night long.
And I did not sing.
I did not sing otototoi-- dark, all merged together, oi.
I did not sing the groaning words.
I did not sing otototoi-- dark, all merged together, oi.
I did not sing the groaning words.
I did not sing o wo, wo, wo.
I did not sing I see, I see.
I did not sing, wo, wo."
And then this last one, it's actually
something-- it's an entirely different pace.
[APPLAUSE]