I was putting together this reading today,
and I was trying to show Lynda, my wife, what
I was going to read.
And she said, that's a really dark reading, isn't it?
And I realized that it would probably
have to be a dark reading if the author of the poems
is someone whose fondest childhood memories are helping
stock a fallout shelter.
[LAUGHTER]
When my father died a couple of years ago,
one of the things that I ended up doing
is going through his things.
And I found that during World War
II, when he was in the army, he had fastidiously read--
and he hardly read any books at all,
but had fastidiously read and annotated
the Bible, particularly the Book of Revelation.
And I'd never read the Book of Revelation before,
and I started looking at it then,
and it's really a wild document.
And so there's an epigraph from the Book
of Revelation in this poem.
And it's got a lot of stuff in it
which maybe needs a little bit of explanation.
There's a flying saucer cult in this poem.
There's a woman who's received the stigmata in the poem.
Chernobyl is in this poem.
There's also a guy that someone I know
met at a writer's colony, which in this poem becomes me.
And this guy had this huge federal grant,
he was a painter, to devise a semiotic, a symbol which
would indicate even two or three thousand years from now,
that a drum was carrying radioactive material.
And also, there's a terrific book that years ago--
I think it was Steve Orlen told me about,
called The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.
Have any of you ever heard of this book?
A guy named Milton Rokeach, a psychologist in Michigan,
years and years ago, decided that he'd
be able to cure three schizophrenics who all believed
they were Christ by making them live together
for a year in a single room.
And actually they got worse, and they fought all the time,
so Rokeach made them conduct all of their interactions
according to Robert's Rules of Order.
So all that stuff is in there, but it's not that long a poem,
there's six short sections.
It's called "The First Six Seals,"
and it's got an epigraph from Revelation.
"I saw a scroll, it had writing on both sides,
and was sealed with seven seals."
Revelation 5:1.
"Seal one, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.
All three Christs in a locked room for a year, sharing meals.
A daily business meeting conducted, of course,
to Robert's Rules of Order.
Each session commences with a different song, Blue Moon,
Yankee Doodle, never hymns, for they
spark untherapeutic theological debate, which
leave each Christ exhausted.
Tonight they talk back to a TV set bolted to the wall.
Joseph screams, Leon's a heretic.
We'll burn for watching Sea Hunt, Milton Berle.
Leon Almighty, Clyde Christus Est,
Joseph Hallowed-Be-Thy-Name.
Pre-thorazine and manic, their Godhead is degenerative.
The experiment will fail.
For what could shame them into human form?
Joseph bewails another lost Yahtzee game.
Leon, scowling, changes channels.
Seal two, The Prophecy.
It's a monologue.
Then Mrs. Clark received the final message,
spoken to us from her trance.
Prepare for the saucer to land at midnight by the patio.
December in Wisconsin, it had snowed all day.
She urged us to stay calm, to remove all metal objects
from our pockets and clothes, for in the spacecraft's heat,
they'd scorch our skin.
We threw down earrings, belts, and coins,
sliced the zippers from our pants and skirts.
We gathered in a circle in the yard
and waited for the mothership's approach
on this, the final day of the world.
Someone spoke of this snow as the world's last.
Mrs. Clark led us all in Amazing Grace.
Then the silence settled in, the snow swirling up,
we huddled that way till dawn.
Seal three, Semiotics, Posterity.
These 50 gallon drums, he's telling me, Their water's
radioactive, two millennium.
It's breakfast at the artist's colony.
His paint flecked sleeve is reaching for the ham.
His grants, not NEA, but AEC, devise a semiotic,
a symbol still readable in AD 4,000, some idiogram
for deadly.
They'll stencil it in red on every barrel they store,
I'm working for posterity.
His studio's a cactus forest, six-foot exclamation points,
thunderbolts, and skulls like teetering stacks of heavy metal
album covers.
Hardest to paint are simple things, Cézanne said that,
or someone like him.
Just call me the goddamn toxic Cézanne.
Seal four, The Ecclesiastical Commission
to Investigate the Receipt of the Stigmata
by Mary Van Hoof, Marquette University Hospital, 1952.
Holy Week in a psych ward cell, her hands and feet
are bandaged, and she claims to feel the scrape of thorns
all night against her forehead.
The stenographer charts each ecstasy,
and all sharp objects have been taken from her room.
Blood tests daily.
Stigmatic blood in theory should be iron-poor,
its salt content low.
Father Gray performs his daily interrogatory.
How often does the Virgin come to you?
Is she, for example, right here in this room?
What prophecies has she uttered in recent weeks?
Is it true your father makes you sleep tied to a chair?
Your mother, is she often hurt by him?
Is it true he broke her collarbone?
What sort of hair shirt did he make you wear?
Seal five, Cathedral Building, a Photo of Chernobyl.
Inside the reactor core, a zigzag pulse of light drilling
through the walls, six story crack.
The lead-robed worker turns to us,
the camera flash reflected in his goggles,
white-hot asterisks, exploding spiral galaxies.
He'll die of thyroid cancer in a year or two,
but the work will last at least a century.
Slow retrieval of deadly debris, the crews stabbing trash
in Dantescan and gloom, like artisans in an antimatter
Salisbury or Chartres.
They'll wreathe their labor in a concrete dome
that's seven miles across, mausoleum of shattered atoms.
The lead-robed worker turns to us, descends a stair.
The camera hisses as the film rewinds.
Last section, seal six, After the Funeral.
Inside the Bible on his bedside table, an address decades gone.
ALBEE, SD, And PROPERTY RC Wojahn,
PFC. The 12 steps of AA, expect a miracle
embossed in Gothic lettering.
The O2 tanks and tubes, a Kleenex box, his watches,
bookmark at Revelation, verses scored with X's.
Now the trumpet blast, now the lamb breaks the seventh seal,
and now the Wormwood Star, like unto a torch,
comes thundering from the sky beside his marginalia.
Prophecy, with triple exclamation points.
Father, where art thou as I call?
Upon what journey did thee embark that such signs
could point thy way?"