Thank you, Dawn.
I hope I still do all that stuff.
I think that press release is a couple of years old.
It's a huge pleasure to be here.
Thank you so much to the University of Arizona Poetry
Center, and the staff for being so fantastic and welcoming.
It's a really lovely organization.
I'm going to read a few oldies.
But I'm mostly going to read new ones.
And I going to start with one about snow
because there is none here, and I was surrounded by it
for a while before I came here.
To pretend that it's sort of winter,
like it is other places.
Not that I'm complaining, I love this weather.
"Why is the color of snow?
Let's ask someone who has no way of knowing,
someone who can give us an answer, another duplicity
to help double the world.
What kind of poetry is all question anyway?
Each question leads to an ice burn, a snow nova,
a single bed spinning in space.
Poet, decide.
I am lonely with questions.
What is snow, what isn't?
Do you see how it is for me?
Melt yourself to make yourself more
clear for the next observer.
I could barely see you anyway.
A blizzard I understand better.
The secrets of many revealed as one,
becoming another on my only head.
It's true that snow takes on gold from sunset and red
from rear lights, but that's occasional.
What is constant is white, or is that only sight, a reflection
of eye whites and light?
Because snow reflects only itself.
Self upon self upon self is a blanket used for smothering.
For sleeping.
For not seeing the naked flawed body
concealing it from the lover, curious, ever curious,
who won't stop looking.
White for privacy.
Millions of privacies to bless us with snow.
Don't we melt it?
Aren't we human dark with sugar hot to melt it?
Anyway, the question.
If a dream is a construction, then what is a construction?
If a bank of snow is an obstruction, then
what is a bank of snow?
A winter vault of valuable crystals convertible for
use only by a Zen sun laughing at us.
Oh, materialists, thinking matter matters.
If we dream of snow, of banks and blankets
to keep our treasures safe forever,
what world is made that made us that we keep making and making
to replace the dreaming at last, to stop the terrible dreaming?"