While I'm reading to you, I thought
I would read three very short vignettes from Working Time.
These three are from an essay called "One Day Old."
This is nonfiction, I guess that means it's real,
or anyway, it's the past.
Is that real?
Did that happen?
Anyway, they're very quick.
Here they are.
"Number 1.
I'm in the bathroom with cherry soda,
smoking a Marlboro instead of attending geometry class.
Everyone's attention is completely on sex.
In the stall, we discuss our attitude
toward L's recent initiation, elaborating with circumspection
on the calamity of male domination
because L had been had, been taken beside an azalea
bush in 15 minutes and left to take a bus home alone,
broad daylight.
This is minutely compared to C's transgression
in the park beneath the aging elms,
a week ago, last Friday night's party.
It had taken two hours to get someone
to sell her beer underage.
In two more hours, C would be initiated, experienced,
and only vaguely remember how her zipper had
torn in his mouth.
And then there was S who had lost consciousness
after drinking soda drenched in Old Grand Dad,
stolen from someone's father's liquor cabinet,
and been abused.
The fullback drove her home, walked her
to her parents' door, left her leaning on the rail,
pressed the doorbell, and fled.
Two weary teenagers whispering loudly and laughing.
Now these fits of giggle, exploded phrases,
barked in the cafeteria, or surreptitiously slid off
the lips during some history lesson.
The music of these memories now is
turned into a love of cadenced words
and an appreciation of their power.
No matter what they were then, these
mingle with visual and aural events--
the wind, for example, flirting through the trees
of upstate New York in summer, the length of rye fields
and wild strawberry patches.
2.
The air is really cool when I step onto the sorority lawn.
The singing, chanting, really, is
off key, is merry and terrible.
I hadn't thought to go this far amidst the singing
and ineffable conformities, the light-headedness
of foolish young women, myself now among them.
Girls, really, for all their makeup and shapeliness.
I'm woken out of a deep dream, a dream
that I'm a warrior in the Black Moshannon
hills of Pennsylvania.
And then I'm shaken out onto the sweet verbena
to praise some uninitiated soul's engagement
to be married.
I'm not happy.
But it's the mild ambiguous unhappiness of fear,
really, that which is holding me back
from myself as a matter of course
and which drags through me, like a comb
through knotted, long, wet hair, drags me down the reverberating
metal stairs into the April night.
I'm taken out of the circle by a wind faintly full
of orange blossoms and of pine cones.
Others among us also drift back and out of the crowd.
It interests me what specifically
has become of them.
K with her peculiar penchant for the study of porcelain.
C with her fanatic rapture for Jim Morrison.
The sweet marijuana drifts down from her room
to those below who now yawn, and peck, and spoil
the night for one another, calling into it too loudly
about tomorrow, which determinedly asserts
its first hours, its darkest.
We go back to bed.
Those with an 8 o'clock class slipping
briefly and deeply asleep.
This circle of women is a caricature
of the consciousness-raising groups
we would engender years later.
First, it's a circle we're forced out
of loneliness and repressed sexualities to join.
Each in her turn was wooed, for it is indeed
a safe house of homoeroticism by invitations to free dinners
and by the desire to be in, but as to what exactly
we were joining, no one understood,
for no one knew herself enough to know from what that self was
categorically, by nature of her gender alone,
going to be excluded.
No one yet associated her private loneliness
and curiosity with a greater public, political,
and historical situation.
3.
It's damp.
I can smell the earth in the air.
Few slants of daylight reach into the row of windows.
Last night, Richard stole an easel from the art department
for me.
And I now shift my oils from a slip of wax paper
to a real palette.
And I begin the bathers, a group of nudes at Trinidad Beach.
The second floor creaks.
The whole house is redwood, the whole rented acreage,
and four miles up and down this coast, redwood.
And then the trees cease and aren't anywhere else on Earth.
This myopia is the metaphor of my 20's where the presence
seems infinitely plentiful, colorful, primordial,
the unconscious world from which we all emerge.
When eventually I feel beyond a moment in which I happen
to be absentmindedly happy painting nudes,
I reach into responsibility.
But for now, that young woman in Humboldt County,
California waking to paint, painting long hours,
and sleeping to dream is finding something
out about shape that later will be useful in figuring out
how language takes form."
[APPLAUSE]