OK.
So I'm gonna read some new poems, which I'm excited about.
And there's one I haven't read to anyone outside of my house
before.
[LAUGHS] So it's older, but it's also, it feels like the newest.
So I-- when was this, 2008--
I went to the Met, and I saw the German soprano Diana Damrau
in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.
And I don't know if y'all like opera.
I wasn't a person who thought I liked opera.
But then there was this singer, and I liked her.
And I was like, oh, I want to see her at the Met.
And then there was this mad scene.
There's a mad scene in Lucia di Lammermoor.
And I was so angry by the end of it because it was so good.
And it was only 13 years later had I calmed down enough
to write about it.
I was just--
I was so upset.
I was like, how dare she?
So: "I grew angry, I suffered, I resolved.
I thought I knew what came next, the bride and the bloody dress,
the knife held forward, a herald, a salvo.
The groom opened offstage.
The great house hushed.
The chorus's deep murmur and block,
the blood neither hers nor her beloved's--
the mad scene.
The bride unravels backward in time,
finds the fountain in the great house of her mind.
In the glass harmonica's tinnitus, the bride sits.
She is her own ghost, past, her future ghost
rising from the fountain.
Her voice, the shape of liquid, viscous and bright,
a ringing in the ear, her voice, round and low,
pounds into the floorboards of the great house,
bounces high to close my throat.
The white glove bright with red, her throat a flood,
my throat dammed, stinging in my eyes.
The chorus lifts the bride.
The bride's eyes turn to the lights.
Her mouth opens to the ceiling.
The flute in her mouth calls to the flute in the pit.
The flute in the pit calls to the cavern in my chest.
She is abandoned, will pray for her beloved
from heaven, this bride so soon a ghost.
The chorus shifts its hands under her body.
The stinging in my eyes takes the shape of a liquid.
They carry her up the stairs.
Her voice, wet gold, falls as if from a tremendous height,
my tears as if from a furious one.
I tell you, I understood nothing before the great house
of her voice, and everything after.