I'm turning now to the second book,
The Violence of The Morning.
I'll read, first of all, because it
is in the lighter mode a portion of the poem
called They Liked It, Because The Wind Blew
and Blew The Birds About.
Partly, because it refers to a desert scene.
And it just seems appropriate.
The title, They Liked It, Because The Wind Blew and Blew
The Birds About, is from Gertrude Stein.
She's a great source of titles, if you haven't discovered
that yet, and it's actually in two sections,
A and B. I'm going to read B, but I'm
going to include by way of preface
the last few lines of section A.
We had climbed the stairs with longer legs than the English
on the stage set against an Indian paintbrush sky.
This American loneliness tastes right bitter.
Don't it?
I'm going to have to kill the sumbitch stole my horse.
Ferdinand boat plank to me, whistling
with the breath of all the sea birds who extends
is pearl loosened company, like a beetle finding
its way into a brilliant day in the prairies.
I swear I was pushed into this country
by a few staggering sentences.
These Burger Kings will never gather the hymns
of the mountains about them.
Nor an idle Helen, sick because the phantom, one, alone
sings and moans in Troy, take ship
on Lake Powell's pink under sky of matters every evening
desire.
Nor will these lion colored clouds over Salt Lake
ever taste a Mormon.
A fly sized plane is all the Om in Omaha,
and Tom Eliot had it all to give away, mountains rearing,
like salmon in his fishing basket.
To walk down the center line of a dead on Nevada
highway, shaking one's head from side to side,
Jupiter glows over the ice altar.
A hobo spits on his palm.
Love, fear, anger, the gods cruise the silver dollar
and jolly jacks.
Come down the road with me, friend,
like a convoy of the crushed conversations of beer cans.