WEBVTT

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Thank you very much.

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Can you hear me at this--
about this pitch in the back?

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Barbara Anderson said,
as we were walking over,

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do you ever get nervous
giving readings anymore?

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I said, no, I never
get nervous anymore,

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and then I walked in here,

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[LAUGHTER]

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Got nervous.

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The first poems-- the first
group of poems I'm going

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to read begin with one
called "Spring Drawing"

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and what they come out of is
a way in which I would find,

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in my own head, that I
would get stuck in phrases,

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that the world was starting to
occur to me in phrases, in--

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which had the effect of
being these little islands

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of longing, that I was--

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Che Guevara?

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--stuck in.

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That's the very one,
you don't get often.

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So this-- and they're
trying to get often.

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"Spring Drawing."

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"A man says lilacs
against white houses,

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having seen them in
the farm country,

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south of Tacoma in April,
but he can't find his way

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to a sentence, a
brush stroke carrying

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the energy of brush and stroke.

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Or a woman, after the drive
from the airport and desultory

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talk with her
mother and a shower,

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which is ritual
cleansing and a passage

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through water to
mark transition,

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might walk up the mountain
on a summer evening,

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away from, not toward, as
if the garden roses were

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a grammar of loss, and the
deer pellets, the wavering

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moon, the rondure, they used to
say, upping the ante of heaven

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were admirable, completely as
common nouns, shit, moon, sky,

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of a plainer
intention, as if spirit

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attended to plainness only.

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The more complicated
forms exhausting it,

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tossed off grape stems
becoming crystal chandeliers,

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as if the meaning of
meaning were radiance

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and justice responsible
to daydream, not

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only for the strict
beauty of denial,

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but as a felt need to reinvent
the inner form of wishing.

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Only the force of brushstroke
keeps lilacs from pathos.

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He and she may or
may not get together,

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but if they are to get at all,
if the invention of the brush

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does suggest what we might
mean by justice, or lilac,

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or rondure, then the
interval created by if,

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to which mind and breath
attend, nervous as the grazing

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animals the first
brushes painted,

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needs to be habitable space,
lived in beyond wishing."

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