I put the newer poems in the front of the book and the older
poems in the back of the book.
Some of you might ask me why I did that.
Don't know.
So I'll now go to the front of the book.
The first dilemma has appeared.
I want to read you some new poems too.
So it's whether I go all the way beyond the front of the book
to the new poems and come back to the book, you'll see,
or whether I go to the book and then to the new poems.
You're all looking nervous.
[LAUGHTER]
That's how I relax.
It's just a poetry reading.
And I want to have time to read you the new poems, you see,
so I'm worried I'll run out of time if I
read too many of the old poems.
I'll read some of the old poems, then some of the new ones,
and then maybe I'll go back to the old poems.
"The aroma of the uninhabited yes."
"And here, an exaggerated arc, see
how its grin exceeds the joke and the featherweight drama
liability of the newly wet swelling the planks.
The list, old among numbers, could be six, seven.
Among these, it could be ideology skulking
at the corner of an age.
Star struck, emulating, singing along with the tune.
That smell of sweet perfume among numbers
filtered into the humid high summer air.
Mouth open, lips in sync, and the question comes up
dropped into the street below.
It could be Caravaggio or the fleshy belief
he inscribed, dense affiliation of desire.
And so, a mythic arrangement is in order
here among these numbers, a story decision on the back lot.
So he comes toward her and says, would you
have a look at this script?
Could you cut my hair?
Would you mind lowering the shade?
The answer, the direction of the first bed, the task.
And now look, far is near.
Next door is another century whose shape reconfigures
the typography of care.
It seems possible to notice a harem gathering
around the stump, wearing boas and slacks,
whispering into the dust.
Shall we address their dilemma?
The anticipated part is only part of the assignment.
Part two is the repeated motif of law.
The nurse said be prepared, strip.
And we thought, given this premise,
that she had seen the thing slain and the unshared part
dealt out among strangers, those in the park, those on the boat,
a few wandering across a bridge.
But this never happens in the city, only usual begetting
as the slant bends into a curl.
The curl, a parenthetical remark or eyelash
on the pillow of dawn.
Riots in the Capitol, Europe destroyed
under its canopy of culture.
This moves across the threshold into that,
because the wind's fitful economy parts only
debris laying claim to the moment,
as if it were a lucky number pulled from a hat."
[WHISTLE]
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
You're so sweet.
[APPLAUSE]
Be careful.
I could stay here a long time.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, there was a request for this poem, which I wasn't going
to read, but I love requests.
My fantasy self is a chanteuse in a dark bar.
And somebody in the back, "read "Melancholy Baby."
[LAUGHTER]
That's really what I--
I'm always dreaming of this moment when somebody calls out,
and it hasn't happened yet.
[LAUGHTER]
Actually, it has happened, when I've coerced it.
So Alison, for you, I'm going to read "Walk."
There's a set of poems in here that were--
some people in Santa Fe got a lot of people
together to do something called the Millennium Project,
which I think has actually been renamed.
And I was asked to contribute to the Millennium Project, which
sounded very dark and something slightly Republican
to me, but--
[LAUGHTER]
No offense.
[LAUGHTER]
But anyway, I didn't really know what
to do with this idea of the Millennium Project.
So I just sent them all the work I'd done in the last year.
And so there's a bunch of them in here.
And one of them is "Walk," which is really a prose poem.
It's more prose than it is poetry.
"Mistakenly on the other side's side, walking along,
thinking this must be change, this discomfort, walking on--
walking as on an island, the mausoleum across the yard.
Thus, a span, uncluttered, available, the dark.
The dark yard's discomfort, the breeze withheld,
picturing and then being the picture, the still.
A red tugboat trolling near the dam, the dramatist walking
by the taxi, no one waves.
Here we accumulate, one, two, among.
There were, of course, too many stories
yoked to the original, too many collisions under the scaffold.
What we thought about seeped back under the foundation,
to become itself a kind of mud, luminous at night,
during the quiet night ride.
We were in the uncomfortable stage, the eighth month,
its enormity a kind of pathos.
The garden bloated beyond enchantment.
Over there, across the bridge, another group
gathered, spying on the generations, summing them up.
Right, they attested.
Sure enough.
Nobody had time to vote, and those that did,
did for reasons only the Op-Ed understood.
They were testing our right to continue.
We pretended to know.
But then there was the uncontaminated filigree
of skin, youthful through an extra pair of glasses,
classically wide-eyed, the world as yet undiminished
by the burden of its authors, that old hymn.
Remember?
Among the disenfranchised, nothing stirred,
and the silt went easily over the new spillway.
And the moon extended her rites of passage
down into the aurora.
Not belonging was a kind of errancy,
a bluff seen by others as a refusal without implications.
In the room, there were small movable tables.
In the room, there was a pair of shoes.
In the room, there was a book on the floor.
In the room, certain things were missing.
In the room, there were no mirrors.
The radio's episodic dial, bourgeois affinities
of the newly polished leather.
The writer in exile speaks candidly
to the reporter eating nuts.
Modernism ends.
In the room, music went on.
In the room, a table was replaced.
It was not a museum.
A flag fell across a stamp, unpleasant expenditure,
body odors, tears, new regulations, undoing privacy.
Saturday, Lake Committee meeting, call from Martin.
Second call from Martin, no number.
Joan's scent in the hallway, Rick's unhappiness
with what he wrote.
Second book received with compliments of the author
on a printed card.
Torrential rain, first parking ticket, call from David,
call from another David, call from Thomas, full moon.
Small yellow pill, small red pill,
note from Elaine mentioning J Crew, refusal
to stay in room 205.
Aggressive male child in the park,
Marianne quotes Rene Char.
Idea of prose, George and Mary sailing, sincerity and sailing,
a remark.
Lilacs, lost wax, cookery, genius as economy
without waste, pictures without captions, pictures of persons
without names.
To excerpt the ordinary from splendor,
the affluent cloister, trapped in a small luminous
box in which everyone knows everyone else.
Could drop some names from the glossary,
delete a few consummations while dressed
in fatigues, the fatigue of need,
the accepted norm, sorrow and reality, the loved person
dying, the leaves lapsed, drawn forward
with autumn's litany of perishables,
book bags, shirts without monograms, the if-then date.
Is it wise to abstain?
Such is the city's grail that the hum is expansive,
shorn from prevailing silence and entrails of light.
Crave thee this dialogue, this touch?
Is an allegory of--
let's walk a little into it.
David says, that generation had something we lack, a calm mind.
David says, perhaps only those from another country
can combine the rhetoric of feeling with--
I have forgotten the rest."
"Legacy."
"I am thinking again of drab fly cycles, roof numb--
I am thinking again of drab fly cycles, roof mumbling
harmony, up in attics beyond deliberation.
I am stunned.
Young man, you have ruined this phase.
I am thinking the window is rotted,
and the flies are crafting their music
under a single nude, seen thither and yon
in as many particulars, the alert dust,
the carefree bonanza of a city.
Waiting in the dark by the side of everything,
paused under a shaft, little pool of blood on the curb,
pink discrepancy of what we imagined was terror.
Then going on into the hills beyond the mall's crude angles,
road stretched, counting the characters not yet proven,
not sold, not released into what we had seen.
Old visitor, hawk, I am waving goodbye.
Shadow range, ekphrastic renovation of a spoon.
Without shelter, the thing delighted is kept.
To follow the once that once said was.
Inscribed on the tongue to ask from the margin,
will you come to the incidents call?
Open the blinds.
Spill sun in his mouth.
Hope's flagrant shine cast back to its arbor.
Stain on the dress, new $20 bill,
malleable space on a page of trials,
clairvoyant current under the paved, clues
to the meaning in the feathers of slang.
Passing a note from fever to ash.
Yes, and here distributed as acronyms for praise,
small attributes here.
All along the way, as if marshaled,
testimony calibrated under the horn,
so that we had seen in a leaf the Spartan vagary
of time, its credentials, here, lasting
under the last permission sought,
its style coming round as a decision
to stay one or three days, here.
Not as the recuperating genius of an age,
not as the swooning female, not as the hieroglyph bomb,
but to ask, who is here?
Who's speaking?
Mr Predictable Rage and Ms Predictable Doubt
dance the Predictable Rag.
Excessive and volatile, from which all detail is omitted,
film me in costume.
I want to be a soldier.
We went to the local store in search of thread.
That is all I recall of childhood."
And there's always the possibility of opera.
This is "The Call--" you've probably figured out by now,
if you're trying to figure out anything,
that these poems are generated from a lot of different places.
A lot of poems are, not all poems,
but it seems that I have to discover
a constellation of a sort, or collect materials not even
as fine as a constellation.
It's just an amalgam of stuff, but I'm
very interested in that stuff coming
from a lot of different sources.
And so the poem becomes the occasion
of the result of that stuff but does not
refer back to it particularly.
But every now and then, there is something
that is referred back to.
And I mean, it's sort of buried in it.
And this poem called "The Call" has, in it--
one piece of it anyway is a painting by Holbein called The
Ambassadors which I saw at the--
it wasn't the British Museum.
It wasn't at the Tate.
It was the National Gallery in London about--
I don't know-- four or five years ago now.
And the National Gallery had gotten this painting,
and put it up, and cleaned it, and done a very, very, very
elaborate disquisition on all of its elements.
But it didn't really--
well, it did need to do that, because they're English,
and they like to do that.
But the thing that was incredible about it is you
walked in, and you saw it.
And the two ambassadors--
I don't know if you'd know these.
Two ambassadors are absolutely frontal,
and the frontal plane staring out.
The French and the English, they despised each other
then, and even--
and there's a lot of other very interesting somewhat hermetic,
symbolic things that I can't really begin to think about.
But in the front of the painting is
this object which, when I first saw it,
I actually was frightened.
I didn't understand what it was.
It's a very realistic painting.
Holbein is very realistic.
And so you probably know that it was an anamorphic skull
and anamorphic in the sense that you couldn't
tell it was a skull unless you went to a very particular place
at the edge of the painting and looked at it.
And then it became dimensional.
It's just an astounding piece of a certain kind of relation
to technology, early idea of technology.
Although Holbein is very ambivalent about the rational
it seems to me, which I guess is in some way related
to technology.
Anyway, so there's this skull, and it
looks sort of like a Frisbee being
thrown across the front of this canvas.
So it's in here.
Long introduction, you'll see it for a second in the poem.
[LAUGHTER]
"The Call."
"Had relinquished the moist tether, arguing the curtains
are spoiled, the car phone calling through new dark, world
scanned into humidity, racing under the floor in torrents,
speculation on elements.
See?
The moth matches the decor.
The call, how it made the roof play
upward out from the skull's itinerary sky heaved, exposed,
so that the grass meandered and the relics blown
from the lips of the sea inscribed the inscription,
we would say.
Calligraphy of the dome of the unknown ceiling, cusp sewn
into moorings at dawn, morphic residue,
holding the soul in its arms, wrapped finger instruction
in stone, passage of the wise, event undisclosed.
What is this dust leaking through a box
at the King's knees?
What is this disastrous blue?
A flower thinking?
The sky reformed?
Can we step through the concatenation of hours?
The will frozen and importuned with objects, dismal Newton
with his fingers engaged, flags edged down from their shelter,
floating.
He has decided to exile the angels,
their false presentation of what comes next.
The gun, however, is prologue to a gun.
Sitting at lunch with the master,
napkin folded over the uneasy patois
of remembrance, the exhibition sparkling into the gray winter
day, painted skull flattened, flung out
into an exactly exaggerated orbit.
In one window, when the curtains are pulled apart,
everything can be read as if through tears a beloved face.
In the other, a cardinal's flight.
These things want to turn--
want us to turn from the fakery, beckoning its shiny sketch
and programmed to bewitch.
And from the ferry, the Monad Peak keeps terror intact.
And on the plane, a man, his jokes whiplash, woo, woo.
The clouds retreat, woo, woo.
Baffled over its interior into the cycle,
where the golden girl pivots to destruction as if, in glue,
things turn slowly from her.
And here again, as if by accident, curtains, car,
torrents, speculation, nets.
And at night, an immense blue shuffled through the shack
like a feathered wind, and she pushed his name
to the back of the shelf, so it could not be seen.
The blue things agitated, like men in need of work.
These are the workers, he had said, his name spilling
across white linen.
Afterwards, description vanished like fireworks following
the path of disbelief.
The body invisible from its velocity,
but the workers had seen nothing, their heads bent,
shuffling among tents.
Something stuck in her hair, something shot full of holes,
something igniting the minnows under the sea's
bright blister, afterlife of silver, wreckage of bronze.
Now the mouth is closed, because it cannot describe,
because dawn is gouged, because they reached the same language.
Desire is a fold, and repetition its music.
The image collapsed, periphery unsettled.
As in a picture of stars crawling through space,
and the slightly moist thing cast onto the reef
a reverie distilled from a kiss, or a shadow
along the edge of an open fan, or along the pattern of vines
extending the night, or the code,
room number X. Because the body survives
to critique its depiction and gives in to the other who
pre-figures the call."
Anybody else?
[LAUGHTER]
In my next life, I'm going to be a very funny poet.
[LAUGHTER]
And-- or a very funny something, possibly dog.
[LAUGHTER]
This is as close as I ever get.
So I'll read this.
"Freesia Errata Slip," it's for the poet Elaine Equi.
You all know what an errata slip is?
Everybody nod, yes, no.
Errata slip?
Errata slip, it's when you get a book--
you probably know they don't do this-- they don't
bother to do this anymore.
But in the old days of publishing,
if there was a mistake, a typo, you'd get a little slip in it.
And that's an errata slip telling you about the error.
I'm losing my voice.
[COUGH]
So this is "Freesia Errata Slip."
It's for all of you who hate revision.
"The flowers, of course, came to a standstill
should read the flowers eventually
came to a standstill.
The flowers eventually came to a standstill
should read the flowers meanwhile came to a standstill.
The flowers meanwhile came to a standstill
should read the flowers, however, came to a standstill.
The flowers, however, came to a standstill
should read the flowers naturally came to a standstill.
The flowers naturally came to a standstill
should read the flowers died."
[LAUGHTER]
I did a little sequence of poems called On, O-N,
with various things inside of them, the things
inside of parentheses.
So on word, on thing, and on dream.
I'll read you two of them.
"On Word."
Two towns in America came into this book.
I mean, there must be others, but the two got named.
One is Columbus, Ohio, and the other one is Tucson.
And the strange thing is that about a month ago, I
went to Columbus, Ohio for the first time.
And now I'm here.
[LAUGHTER]
Name more towns, exactly.
That's the lesson.
[LAUGHTER]
Here's Paris right over here.
[LAUGHTER]
"On Word."
"Oh, but the sky unhinged, junket, junket,
traverse perpetua, the Jays, the trucks.
These are violent times, and our songs are old.
Hast seen a ghost, has fled a tree collapsing on your head,
and the snow rushes, and the storm passes.
Are we mere vocabularies?
I do or do not believe in God.
She does or does not love him.
He did or did not commit a crime.
The hairy armed man is dressed in the flowered frock
of his second grade teacher, a Mrs. Flood from Columbus.
He carries a large, shiny handbag, a gun,
a camera to record their vacation on the East Coast.
He is or is not a woman.
Words turn on the mischief of their telling."
And this is an "On Thing," for Rick Moody.
"And then having to hide under the thing,
the rubber cone or tent at the foot of a virulent tree.
And then she, in Paris, with her hair
newly cut, leaving on a train for some place else.
And I, unable to decide, stranded
at the deception among strange shoes
and the dull ornaments of a regime.
The amber light of the mother is thickly spread
and patches of carpet, shag green, planted on the sidewalk
to imitate moss.
Although moss is never there.
Pushing this aside to get under the floor, below the written,
as in a black winter pond, a cistern, or a pipe,
or a throat, circling purple fish, shadow of an arm,
toy boat, voice thread through stone between the S
and the T and the one."
Stop looking at your watch.
And here's the one with Tucson in it.
It's called "Staircase."
And this is for the extraordinary journalist
Jonathan Schell, who keeps trying to keep us
from moving into a nuclear holocaust,
but he seems to be practically alone at this point.
"Staircase."
"Stay, illegible harmonic twins, the harbor.
There are coral episodes among the sails,
and the kingfishers plunge.
Stay, a petty wind fingers heat like a girl, her curls,
gazing out at the ensuing collision.
A woman staring into floodwaters is
swept into a canyon in Tucson, Arizona.
Had she read Empedocles?
Had she recently wept?
Light infected leaves, then drab, then heavily attired,
the ephemera of heirs sway window to window,
like a disembodied wing, its passage wholly unrecovered.
In mournful arousal, a flame cascades
as if to touch the end.
Something waits in the pristine normal blue, a Saturday,
or love, or a city besieged.
The effects were known.
They were the lived thing, ardently
collapsing into a distant litter, remote pages
to be burned to the wake of a small green boat allotted
to a scrim, or Paris, or a salon.
How beautiful, how untrue, is what historians
would say as the white frothy stuff swept over the bow,
not ever acknowledged, not yet counted, not yet found.
There is the ferret, Luna, lost in the wood
pile in the dog days of August.
Someone called Matthew and someone called Tom move
across time, as across a bright lawn,
while a felicity steers into moonlessness,
where one might say, not a matter of seeing,
a matter of touch.
Homer, for example, finding his way down the staircase."
Skip, skip, skip, skip.
[LAUGHTER]
"And the fire spread.
In case the world changes, in case things
stampede impatiently into view, all arms
expected, and the arcade slings through plasticity,
an odd spell.
In case this is legible, and we are lucky and present,
not nearly asleep, not still in the after you've gone.
In case lesions open, and the manifest swells to be copied.
Everything that comes my way becomes a picture for me
of what I am thinking about at the time.
Bride wrapped in rags, doused with kerosene,
goes inflamed into dusk, drawing the long fog
after her into waters where, of hope, of rapture,
against a distinction, in traveling with nothing
for eternity, in ambush for one, in the hope of an endless
of capture, of song, for a stranger, in the midst
to a certain on it to whom, to whom, to a doubt
of being, of guilt in the tree, in the valley,
of triumph with lessening for an excuse of nails for two sticks
of how fallen into of kisses on her lap, to the future
in my shoes, out of spinning for the same, with my stuff
of a morning to this.
What is keeps custody of what we will never be,
clustered radically in knots, withheld as lateness
or shine its webbed course stayed.
Nothing speaks, so there is no poetry there, just
riot and tidal wisps blown into shade and other sham effusions,
except when otherwise alone.
Although we are now rhetorically cold, flimsy as gloves
left on a doorstep.
Do not even then agree.
For the clarity that we are aiming at
is indeed complete clarity, which
means that the problems should disappear completely.
The real discovery is one that gives
peace that no longer brings itself into question.
We demonstrate a method by examples,
and the series of examples can be broken off.
All is contained in the bubbles floating code, not
this sheltering skin with its abrasions.
The lovely conduct of things, architectural, denuded,
seen from above is elsewhere conditioned
but opened to surmise.
Here, in the throat's watery plume,
a voice is besieged by the moon's portrait, mistress
of the huge marquee, where the dots are not connected.
And of the curbs tree, the rivers, city,
its theme drawn into a bowl as colors allegiance.
Three doves perch against a plaster sky.
Lichen steal from tapestries and maps, a pewter flood.
What is the world if not brilliance tarnished
to memorable debris?
Toothless, repugnant, our lady of hags
drags from coast to coast, her burlap bag leaking.
Oh, moon, we call.
Oh, bright thing.
Who are we to arrest serendipity,
when your radiance dribbles into the sea?
The captain's skill did not save the crew.
Flaws foiled passage.
So what was expected did not arrive on the stainless steel
tray.
Something axiomatic or idiomatic flew out of the cuckoo's mouth
and away into the century we can almost see.
Huge calipers moved against wind,
doses of prior delight, suds and tubs,
gleeful memoirs of an awful age.
Stoic vouchers, burdens of proof,
meanwhile, a vanguard carried estrangement
into the path of our alliance.
And pandemonium's tryst skyrocketed into the voyeur's
polished lens.
Tools of trade.
A fashion for linen sheathed our hands, legs,
heads into fake burdens.
Bleach made our eyes smart with revision.
Confidence thus augmented, even the wind seemed irresponsible,
no vacancy at the empty inn, and the fire spread.
Dissertations multiplied into the quixotic chat
of the living dead.
Figurines conversed on rooftop gardens like balconies of gods.
Tear here.
Cut along this edge.
Above a broken cauldron, something
wept, staining the windows with filigrees of ash.
Caprice in the name of following with nothing as nothing
beckons, although our service is still best,
sending the mediated village gruel.
If you, in tawdry remembrance lamp lit,
were to come in at last, would you still carry a tune?
How long before the mood comes to rest as in an earlier now
preserved as curious mirth?
What is it?
Paper umbrellas collect distant rain.
This close to failure, a runt God
might flip out of the drain to rescue us, tiny, gold hip
flask, atomic cufflinks.
And that president's grin never to be endured again
in any language.
What's in store for us today?
What catalog?
What bequest?
Curtains spill out onto the sky to hide a cast of strangers.
No machine, no team, no fat white shoes
with good arch support, just the cold noise
of the eternally unhomed.
She gazes from every glossy page, a slender emptiness.
How many stairs has she climbed to nowhere?
Morning, then, is a mask.
And these songs, they, toys to prevent vertigo.
Tell me a really scary story.
Catch this wild mimosa bowl plucked from Blake's wheel.
Have you practiced your absence today?
Or some twist of fate the scavengers provide
to tool the future as patterns of wind
braid the last person to be execu--
or some twist of fate, the scavengers
provide to tool the future as patterns of wind braid.
The last person to be executed in Florida
was a Black slave with a noose.
Take heed.
Safety in numbers is a hoax.
One man's guide is another's mistranslation stumbling
barefoot down the cliff into the cartoon's inky crawl.
Of its own success, upon the asylum,
of course, into something for repressively of patients
to 500 or 600 of that sort on the edge, on all sides,
from the semantic against moral treatment with it
by a growing population of an organic, of the 20th century,
in understanding by contrast of decay, on their part,
in institutional of an infectious illness of sanity
into some fun.
Devotional excess laminates the seal.
Facsimiles burlesque obscures the song.
How unseemly our ambassadors could not relax,
could not pull loose.
I carry my skyline with a harsh tip, an old fashioned fountain
held by spirits, even after the funeral.
So the monastery sink is in the center
with a logic behind birds.
The birds are necessary if the dawn is to be useful.
And the enemy suddenly from city to city
comes forward toward the lover with a frame, an animal,
and finds a way by touch through the drawing room
into the field, pressing down the fire escape by flashlight,
traipse from island to island with nothing to sell,
head back to the cabin's shade.
Do it.
Leave here.
Take your empirical tirade with you.
Its grandeur is winter and zig zag
prowl, missing person's voice.
Even in gossip's vacant, lot there's
a trace of us in every buyout.
Of a person in profile, of space toward you,
of floors to live between from a box with gold of a bird,
of a man, of its oracle into different of a content
between objects of an ideal.
My hands in the shape of a house.
Where's the kitchen?
Where forbearance, lost antecedents,
faces in another century, when photography is not allowed.
Sell the groom his trousers.
Then I recall that his buttons were but partial moons,
and the water wheels in the cellar became extinct.
Or so we are told.
Not in the room with the fake hair is baleful expertise.
Not where the sister is in the parapets' transition that
others cannot hear, not the imperious yank into hoodlums
fame, where delusion accrues.
Not the hum's drag across limelight,
where company is sometimes kept as title mirrors brake light.
Could we say this green is humorless and shines
only to please an acrobat's poised flip?
Is the postcard delirious with its orphan stamp?
You go your way.
I'll go mine.
The evening uncollected, a penny on the street.
What is unfinished is not by choice gathering
inconvenient slang to ride the large dark over the dark city.
I can see this thing opening onto another thing,
but I cannot pronounce it.
Neither the one with the freeze of antlers,
nor the one with the clocks.
Taking off gloves is a theatrical event
like tossing a pail of water at an immense flame
or following a script in which a boy impales himself on a mast
as the crowd watches.
The crowd always watches.
On the walls, in the starkest, in the wrong,
with our physical fire on fire, to the Hebrews of plans of sins
without the in this century and a revelation.
On the other hand, in this century,
to a perception, at least for a moment for us, in which
of the relation from the great between services
of experience in every of there, to their diction,
to each between services on a forward from which,
by myself, into my innermost, by my souls with love,
in a region with my eye, above my mind, before the light,
with love, into an awareness with love from you in time,
out of which features for forces of something
by mismanagement from his face of information
on the soundtrack."
Whoa.
I forgot that was so long.
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
I'm going to read one more from this book,
and then I'm going to go and read a few new poems to you.
This one's for you.
Are you holding up?
Most of you?
This is called "Harm's Way, Arm's Reach."
And it does have a little tiny piece of--
it might be interesting to notice.
I went away, and I came back.
And I looked out the windows, and somebody
had chopped all the--
a lot of the limbs off the one tree
that's in the back of my loft in Manhattan.
And I felt like somebody had murdered this tree.
The tree survived, actually.
But anyway, that's the beginning of this poem.
Some people up there in the total dark.
"Harm's Way, Arm's Reach."
"Things are not cured by resilience.
Thrash, thrash, wept the amputated limb, unable to lean,
starved of its hair.
A group of men wanted to avenge, to truncate the city,
to make everyone scream.
On the bateau in wild heat, children
laughed for the history lesson with the great facades
in the year of friendly fire.
The friend looked away, subverting fate,
because of the wound, saying, I disapprove of the personality
of the street which cannot be arranged.
Henceforth, two out of three curtains must be closed.
In fiction's unhinged seat, in the hesitant new,
resting under a shadow embodied in febrile need.
And from afar, far in that land, song of the first bird,
pressure in the throat, gospel devoted to mercy, a zone
or hinge out of the discursive enclosure.
Long freeze of furious goddesses,
wrath of the drunken boy, in the home of depraved girls,
in the department of recent arrivals.
My name is an unsolved equation.
I come toward you.
I ask you to meet me at twilight in the unfinished part
of the story in the small grotto in the room with giraffes
and a man with a string, when it is raining, when
all the maps are spread on the desk, where the towels,
where the nest fell.
I write to you from the place of habit, but today, I am young.
I am merely a slant perpetually drawn into spelling.
My name is a tall man who walks along the street of books
in the year of the mouth who has not forgotten how to kiss.
The friend says, but in order to fix it,
you must have a sense of prior perfection.
She says, light, beauty, fire.
I say, toward, and rage of the weed,
and etymology, and starvation.
I say, the change or revolution that
does not produce the conclusion or final event
catastrophe as definition, the wall that was.
Where we come from abides as choice.
It is the way of a vowel.
Have you remembered to take all your belongings with you?
Today, all distance is summer.
If you open the curtains, you will
see the evil wires, the broken lock, the rifles, the plot,
dark crevices of diminished weight,
the lesson of the open hand, your mother's maiden name.
You will hear a cluster of pilgrims undaunted by speed,
flagrant as any transparency, the indelible scheme
of the wish, a parade for no reason,
an apricot thud where the limb was."
I'm really out of time, but I'll read just a couple.
Is that OK?
A couple of new poems.
[LAUGHTER]
Driving them out.
It's hard.
I'm sorry.
I shouldn't have read that long poem,
despite the fact that you asked for it.
[LAUGHTER]
All right, short poems you need, short little tiny poems.
What?
No, not necessarily.
Not necessarily?
Oh, you're my best friend.
[LAUGHTER]
I was told 50 minutes.
It's almost 50 minutes exactly now.
I don't have any time.
You don't have to count the time in-between poems.
Really?
[LAUGHTER]
There's hope?
[LAUGHTER]
Just slowly, there's another one.
There'd just be three of us here.
I'll be reading--
[LAUGHTER]
And then you'll remember this.
Right?
She came, and then she read.
And she said she looked at her watch,
and then she read some more.
And then she read some more, and she just never stopped.
[LAUGHTER]
All right.
So much for the joke.
[LAUGHTER]
See, I really want to read these poems.
I'm furious that I didn't give myself enough time.
So I just have to find what I most want you to hear.
Do you want something that just sounds
very different from anything that I've read?
Yeah.
Yes.
Right, thanks.
[LAUGHTER]
Very, very, very consoling.
You're-- leave now.
That was a trick question.
Yeah.
Well, all right.
You're right.
I'm getting there.
Just wait.
You want something a little less splintered.
Right?
Ann, stop this.
This is ridiculous.
All right.
I'm going to read one that--
OK.
I'm going to really indulge, but I'm reading three poems.
OK?
You can count them.
That's one.
I'm not usually this like--
I only had one drink too.
[LAUGHTER]
It's-- you know what it is?
It's the coldness of the room.
I'm trying to do something to get heat in here.
Would you like my jacket?
No.
I don't mean that kind of cold.
I mean, you know--
all right.
This is-- Brenda Hillman, a poet friend asked me for a poem
with a garden in it.
And so this is what she got.
It's called "Elegy in August."
"Guess again at the brown birds' queue.
It is dry.
This is dry again.
And so also, still dry.
So dry, it could be a French repetition, not weather at all.
Filament follies, skirmishes, decor
of the flat chested actress with thin lips.
Enhancement of the singular does not count,
or else this is an event among thieves and the women
who belong to the thieves.
So dry, so many, so common, the twilight brown bird,
the accretion of musical numbers counting so.
But garden, only hymns and slight
poems to praise her to her grave.
But garden, we were there.
We listened.
Michael had been invited to a convocation.
He is adored in other countries.
Michael, only hymns and slight poems, only counted stones.
But garden, and yet in the heady nomenclature of the newly dead,
there are forgotten words.
Hollyhock, cornflower, foxglove.
I dare you.
I dare you to unplant the daisies under glass.
Only white flowers grow.
But Michael, mes jardins, angel, is a season coming next?
Or easily stranded with the worried bird, the brown bird,
twilight, the white flame.
Is reason coming?
Is this your curtain?
To be so lovingly displayed as Michael's worth lilies,
Queen Anne's lace with the night eyed ghost planted these.
Is it your garden?
Stone arch, bed, broken root.
Is it your garden, Michael?
Your twilight?
The roses were stolen from China with tea."
OK, second poem.
It's very splintered.
It's called "To and So."
I've read it once.
So I'll give it another try.
"To And So."
"Unalterable complex, unfurled shed came this way unslithered.
Purchase factored in as noise following personal revelations
of the suit.
Swiftly, swiftly, then glazed over visual
to amplitude of signs, crank imperatives, tides
of exact ephemera held or foretold
to the graduated sweetness of a perfect impasse,
swindle, can't, ribs cut out, two episodes.
Oh, oh, oh.
The reporter lonely in Istanbul, carpets, tea,
blue glass, bridge, to perfect these household gods,
eyes against envy, beads against expectation,
more stones, more letters.
And so the symmetry of good windows
set to remember in distant times how facts looked blank
under thrall of a prerequisite doubt.
Nothing de-fragged there, only terse contractions enjoyed up
close, riddle, quim, apparition, clear eyed, yes, but something,
it seduces even the greatest soldier to minor treason,
infatuated tables slanted up, legs raised, emotion of tears,
quotidian exhaled, a farewell of sorts under logic,
under guess, where the bug, without much left, the all made
small, diligent maker, shipwrecked encyclopedia,
coyote racing across the graveyard
toward a flock of wild turkeys.
OK.
So here is rain's insistent, oblique, elderly contest.
She who would have seemed before this task what had resembled
but now abstract, global, and abbreviated costs.
There will be no generals in our army of thieves,
and the big library will discover little poems.
There is always violence and clean elaborations of such.
What?
You want to ask, what?
Unjust equation, night is night closes on a simple thing,
recurrent in the kneeling air, collapse of particulars.
Say, leaf.
Say, drip.
What is required is attached at the outer rim.
We, in our love, also indicted, because the frame extends only
so far, then around a corner, then descent, gradual glide
into viscous air.
Again.
Up again.
Is this another never?
Another cell?
Another impossible procedure?
Another x?
Another unsayable--