It's called "Two Stories."
Again, as I say, I used to live in Laguna.
And this is set in California overlooking
the ocean, the Pacific.
And those are the lights that are
spoken of in the first part of the poem.
And I was brought up in a place called Kingsport, Tennessee.
And I lived on about five miles out of town on a mountain
where you could see the town lights down below.
And that comes in.
And it ends up with a slight little ejaculation
to my fifth-grade teacher whom I liked very much.
[LAUGHTER]
I couldn't ejaculate and do it right.
So I'll do it now, do it now.
Anyhow.
"Two Stories."
Jesus, what's the matter with me?
It's Jon Anderson who's making me do this.
It's--
[LAUGHTER]
Anyhow.
"Two Stories."
"Tonight on the deck, the lights semaphore up at me
through the atmosphere, town lights.
Familiar lights pulsing and slacking off the way
they used to back on the ridge outside of Kingsport
35 years ago.
The moonlight sitting inside my head
like knives, the cold like a drug
I knew I'd settle down with.
I used to imagine them shore lights,
as these are, then, as something inside me
listened with all its weight for the sea surge and the sea
change.
There's a soft spot in everything our fingers touch.
The one place where everything breaks
when we press it just right.
The past is like that with its arduous edges
and blind sides, the worlds of our fingerprints embedded
along its walls like fossils the sea has left behind.
This is a story I swear is true.
I used to sleepwalk but only on camping trips
or whenever I slept outside.
One August, when I was 11 on Mount LeConte in Tennessee,
campfire over and ghost story over, everyone still asleep,
apparently I arose from my sleeping bag,
opened the tent flap, and started out
on the trail that led to the drop
off where the mountainside went straight
down for almost 1,000 feet.
Half moon and cloud cover, so some light as I
went on up the path through the rhododendron, the small pebbles
and split roots like nothing under my feet.
The cliffside was half a mile from the campsite.
As I got closer, moving blindly, unerringly,
deeper in sleep than the shrubs, I stepped out,
it appears, onto the smooth lip of the rock cape of the cliff.
When my left hand--
and then my right hand stopped me
as they were stopped by the breathing
side of a bear which woke me.
And there we were.
The child and the black bear and the cliff drop.
And this is the way it went.
I stepped back.
And I turned around.
And I walked down through the rhododendron
and never looked back, truly awake in the throbbing world.
And I ducked through the low flap of the tent so quietly.
And I went to sleep and never told anyone until years
later when I thought I knew what it meant which now I've forgot.
And this one is questionable, though sworn to me
by an old friend who killed a six-foot diamondback about 7
o'clock in the morning
(he'd found it coiled in a sunny place)
and threw it into a croker sack with its head chopped off
and threw the sack in the back of a jeep,
then left for his day's work on the farm.
That evening, he started to show the snake to someone
and put his hand in the sack to pull it out.
As he reached in, the snake's stump struck him.
His wrist was bruised for a week.
It's not age, nor time with his gold
eyelid and blink, nor disillusion
and all its mimicry that lifts us and sorts us out.
It's discontinuity and all its spangled coming between that
sends us apart and keeps us there in a dread.
It's what's in the rearview mirror, smaller
and out of sight.
What do you do when the words don't come to you anymore?
And all the embolisms fade in the dirt?
And the ocean sings in its hammock,
rocking itself back and forth?
And you live at the end of the road
where the sky starts its dark decline?
The barking goes on and on from the far hill
constantly sticking its noise in my good ear.
Goodbye, Miss Sweeney.
Goodbye.
I'm starting to think about the psychotransference
of all things.
It's small bones in the next life.
It's small bones, and heel and toe forever and ever."