Why did I bring you?
I'm very happy to be here.
And Frances and Gail, thank you for inviting me.
And it's always amazing and thrilling
to be back at the University of Arizona, my alma mater,
and still, I think, my home.
I'm going to read a few poems from this new manuscript.
That poem was from my new manuscript, The Real Enough
World.
And I'm going to read a few poems from that.
And then I'm going to wind up with the title
story of the new fiction book, The Garden In Which I Walk.
I'm going to first have a little water.
"Ear Surgeon."
I have to say, I started writing sequence poems a few years ago.
It just sort of struck me as a thrilling thing
to do, just have a theme and kind of go with it.
The way this started is, I wrote a bunch of poems
on the professions, which sounds odd, even to me, to say, oh,
I wrote poems on the professions.
But anyway, I did.
And I'm going to only read one of these
and then I'm going to read a couple of series
and then I'm going to wind up with the other thing.
I'll read you one of the professions,
and you'll see how quirky they are.
This is called "Ear Surgeon."
"The ear surgeon needs an ear if he is to ply his trade.
He needs the hammer, anvil, stirrup.
He needs the drum and possibly drumsticks
for snacks, but very little, minuscule, and a tiny scalpel
and an infection.
If he is beautiful, he must empty himself of beauty,
whoosh.
And whoosh for all heartache, and likewise
for philosophical thinking, which he is prone to,
being an ear surgeon.
And he must be able in a blink to shrink himself to squeeze
through caverns plugged with boredom and heartache
for which he also needs a pick and goggles and a tape
recorder.
He will be in there for a long, long, long time.
He will record moans so sweet to his own ear
he will have erections, and a deafening thrum
thrumming, and another noise like a creak gurgling up,
and another like an egg frying, and a few more
that are only lost metaphors, half of what he heard.
He is the ear surgeon of the 21st century.
He will untune himself and whisper deep
into his own waxes.
The ear surgeon, my only hope."
I feel that way sometimes.