I'll finish with the title poem of my book, "Interior
With Sudden Joy," which is the title of a painting by Dorothea
Tanning, who is 94 and still around doing
great things like writing books of poetry and making me laugh.
"Interior With Sudden Joy."
"To come into my room is to strike strange.
My plum velvet pillow and my hussy spot, the only furniture.
Red stripes around my ankles, tight as sisters.
We are maybe 14, priceless with goose flesh.
Our melon bellies, our mouths of tar, us four.
My mud-legged sister, my bunched-up self, the dog,
and the whirligig just a prick on the eye.
We are all sewn in together, but the door is open.
The book is open too.
You must write in red like Jesus and his friends.
Be my other sister, we'll share a mouth.
We'll split the dress down the middle, our home, our cesarean.
When the bishop comes, he comes diagonal, from the outside,
and is a lie.
He comes to bless us all with cramps.
Mole on the chin that he is.
To bring us the red something, a glow, a pumping.
Knot softly a rub with loincloth and linseed.
More of a beating with heart up the sleeve.
He says the air in here is tight and sore
but punctured sudden by a string quartet.
We are.
In these light-years, we've rung a star.
I am small for my age.
Child of vixen wood, lover of the color olive and its stain.
I live to leave, but I never either.
One leg is so long we can all walk it.
Outside is 1,000 bitten skins and civilization,
its own murder of crows.
I am ever stunned, seduced whistle thin,
and hot with home.
Breathless with mercury, columbine.
Come, let us miss another wintertime."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]