WEBVTT

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If you want to bail
out, now's the time

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because I'm going
to read some stuff,

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I don't even know
anything about.

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[LAUGHTER]

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I've been working on this for
almost a year and a half or so

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of these sorts of thing
and they're journals.

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Didactic journalism.

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Instructional,
evangelical journals.

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[LAUGHTER]

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There-- I will read
three shorter ones,

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so are there 50 lines each.

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But they surround two--

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or will, I hope,
when I'm finished--

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longer ones of about
11 or 12 pages each

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where what I'm talking
about technically

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in these smaller ones will--

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attain?

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in the longer ones.

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And they are attempts
at trying to use

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a long conversational
and majestic line.

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It's something I'm not
really sure can be done,

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but I want to try to do it.

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The middle one called
"March Journal"

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tries to take the old
process of marginalia

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where Coleridge, Crane,
Donald Justice more recently

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explicate what's going on
in the poem on the side.

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I put it into the text and it
doesn't explicate the text,

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but explicates the
technical matters going on.

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Yeah, five seconds to get out.

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Three, four, five, OK.

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First one is called
"Yard Journal."

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Actually, all three of these
are basically about my yard

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back in Virginia.

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Great yard is your--

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Yard Journal.

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Mist in the trees, and soiled
water and grass cuttings

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splotch the driveway, afternoon
starting to bulk up in the West

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a couple of hours down the road.

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Strange how the light hubs
out and wheels concentrically

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back and forth after a rain, as
though the seen world quavered

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inside a water bead
swung from a glass--

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grass blade.

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The past is never
the past: it lies

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like a long tongue we walk
down into the moist mouth

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of the future where new teeth
nod like new stars around us,

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and winds that itch us,
and plague our ears,

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sound curiously
like the old songs.

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Each of these is an entry
supposedly into a journal.

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Deep dusk and lightning
bugs alphabetize

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on the east wall, the
carapace of the sky

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blue ribbed and buzzing
somehow outside it all.

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Trees dissolving
against the night's job,

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houses melting in air.

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Somewhere out there an
image is biding its time,

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burning like Abraham in the
cold, swept expanses of heaven,

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waiting to take me in
and complete my equation.

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What matters is abstract,
and is what love is,

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candescent inside the memory,
continuous and unexpungable,

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as love is.

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Blue jay's bound
like a kangaroo's

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in the lawn's high grass,
then up in a brush stroke

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and over the hedge in one arc.

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Light weights down the azalea
plants, yesterday's cloud banks

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enfrescoed still just
under the sky's cornice,

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cardinal quick transfusion into
the green arm of the afternoon.

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Wax- like flowers of sunlight
drift through the dwarf orchard

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and float under the
pygmied peaches and pears

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all over America.

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And here, too, the blossoms
continuing down from nowhere,

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out of the blue.

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The mockingbird's shadow
is burned in the red clay

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below him.

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Exclusion's the secret.

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What's missing is what appears
most visible to the eye:

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the more luminous
anything is, the more it

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subtracts what's
around it, peeling away

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the burned skin of the world
making the unseen seen.

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Body by new body they
all rise into the light

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tactile and still damp, that
rhododendron and dogwood tree,

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that spruce, an
architecture of absence,

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a landscape whose words are
imprints, dissolving images

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after the eyelids close.

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I take them away to
keep them there--

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that hedgehorn, for
instance, that stalk.

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A bumblebee the size
of my thumb rises

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like Geryon from the hard
Dantescan gloom under my window

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sash to lift the rain
gutter's tin bolgia,

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then backs out like a
hummingbird spiraling languidly

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out of sight.

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Shoulders I've wanted to sit
on, a ride I've wanted to take,

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deposited into the
under light of cities

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thronged in the grass.

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Fitful illuminations,
iron colored plain

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that lies littered with
music and low fires, stone

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edge of the pit at
the end of every road,

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first faces starting to swim up.

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Bico, my man, are you here?

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