Thank you very much.
Can you hear me at this-- about this pitch in the back?
Barbara Anderson said, as we were walking over,
do you ever get nervous giving readings anymore?
I said, no, I never get nervous anymore,
and then I walked in here,
[LAUGHTER]
Got nervous.
The first poems-- the first group of poems I'm going
to read begin with one called "Spring Drawing"
and what they come out of is a way in which I would find,
in my own head, that I would get stuck in phrases,
that the world was starting to occur to me in phrases, in--
which had the effect of being these little islands
of longing, that I was--
Che Guevara?
--stuck in.
That's the very one, you don't get often.
So this-- and they're trying to get often.
"Spring Drawing."
"A man says lilacs against white houses,
having seen them in the farm country,
south of Tacoma in April, but he can't find his way
to a sentence, a brush stroke carrying
the energy of brush and stroke.
Or a woman, after the drive from the airport and desultory
talk with her mother and a shower,
which is ritual cleansing and a passage
through water to mark transition,
might walk up the mountain on a summer evening,
away from, not toward, as if the garden roses were
a grammar of loss, and the deer pellets, the wavering
moon, the rondure, they used to say, upping the ante of heaven
were admirable, completely as common nouns, shit, moon, sky,
of a plainer intention, as if spirit
attended to plainness only.
The more complicated forms exhausting it,
tossed off grape stems becoming crystal chandeliers,
as if the meaning of meaning were radiance
and justice responsible to daydream, not
only for the strict beauty of denial,
but as a felt need to reinvent the inner form of wishing.
Only the force of brushstroke keeps lilacs from pathos.
He and she may or may not get together,
but if they are to get at all, if the invention of the brush
does suggest what we might mean by justice, or lilac,
or rondure, then the interval created by if,
to which mind and breath attend, nervous as the grazing
animals the first brushes painted,
needs to be habitable space, lived in beyond wishing."