Well, it's been six years since I read in this room.
I had just moved to Tucson.
I'd been here about six or seven days,
and I had no one to greet and no one to thank.
And now I do, so let me just take a moment.
First of all, thank you, Alison, wherever you went.
Thank you for inviting me here and running the Poetry
Center in a great way, making it an open place,
a wonderful place to be and work.
If you haven't visited it yet, get down there.
I also want to thank my colleagues
for making my work here pleasant, pleasurable,
and sometimes even profound.
And most of all, I'd like to thank my students, past
and present.
Some of whom are in the room tonight, both undergraduate
and graduate students who have reminded me that we're all
always students of poetry.
Thanks for your patience, and your warmth,
and your attention.
A great compliment.
So thank you.
I want to take that opportunity to do that publicly.
So the first poem is called "Miami Heart."
"In a long text, on live TV, in an amphitheater, in the soil,
after the postmoderns, after it's still proven
you can get a kiss out of a pretty girl,
after the meta-ritual lectures, and Heinz switches
to plastic squeeze bottles.
As one flies into St. Louis listening
to Lorca's Luna, luna, luna, beyond Anacin time,
after, God help us, the dishwasher is emptied again,
and Miss America, Miss Mississippi,
reveals she has entered 100 pageants since age six.
Packers' ball, first down after a fumble,
the corn detassled, the assembly of enthusiasms
awakened, and we meet in a car by the river,
not not kissing, considering making love,
visiting Jerusalem, the awful daily knowledge that we will
have to die in the hospital on the sixth floor,
or in an amphitheater at half time,
or at one's parents' condo, over pasta,
or in a strange relative's arms, along the coast.
The heart bumping, bumping the old pebble up the old spine.
A squirrel scared up a sycamore by an infant.
Along that stench of humility, along this highway
of come, charge card in hand, I will give my time freely.
And the more I dissemble, the more I resemble.
The better, the faster I sleep, the more I
remember to go elsewhere.
A movie.
Excuse me, now I must whisper not to disturb the patrons.
Now I must drive, park, tramp to the edge of the world.
Roughness, ferocity, cannibalism,
bite, chew, transmogrify.
Inside the lungs, the little revolutionaries.
Between the thighs, the reflex.
It's too this, it's too that, it's not enough.
Similarly, and more particularly,
it's raw twice over.
It's the imagination draining its husks, left-handed
because comparison is motive, which is why
one writes with one's desire."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
That was set in Miami.
You may not recognize Miami in there.
Hope as we go along, you will recognize
some of my landscapes.
My poems travel a lot.