If you want to bail out, now's the time
because I'm going to read some stuff,
I don't even know anything about.
[LAUGHTER]
I've been working on this for almost a year and a half or so
of these sorts of thing and they're journals.
Didactic journalism.
Instructional, evangelical journals.
[LAUGHTER]
There-- I will read three shorter ones,
so are there 50 lines each.
But they surround two--
or will, I hope, when I'm finished--
longer ones of about 11 or 12 pages each
where what I'm talking about technically
in these smaller ones will--
attain?
in the longer ones.
And they are attempts at trying to use
a long conversational and majestic line.
It's something I'm not really sure can be done,
but I want to try to do it.
The middle one called "March Journal"
tries to take the old process of marginalia
where Coleridge, Crane, Donald Justice more recently
explicate what's going on in the poem on the side.
I put it into the text and it doesn't explicate the text,
but explicates the technical matters going on.
Yeah, five seconds to get out.
Three, four, five, OK.
First one is called "Yard Journal."
Actually, all three of these are basically about my yard
back in Virginia.
Great yard is your--
Yard Journal.
Mist in the trees, and soiled water and grass cuttings
splotch the driveway, afternoon starting to bulk up in the West
a couple of hours down the road.
Strange how the light hubs out and wheels concentrically
back and forth after a rain, as though the seen world quavered
inside a water bead swung from a glass--
grass blade.
The past is never the past: it lies
like a long tongue we walk down into the moist mouth
of the future where new teeth nod like new stars around us,
and winds that itch us, and plague our ears,
sound curiously like the old songs.
Each of these is an entry supposedly into a journal.
Deep dusk and lightning bugs alphabetize
on the east wall, the carapace of the sky
blue ribbed and buzzing somehow outside it all.
Trees dissolving against the night's job,
houses melting in air.
Somewhere out there an image is biding its time,
burning like Abraham in the cold, swept expanses of heaven,
waiting to take me in and complete my equation.
What matters is abstract, and is what love is,
candescent inside the memory, continuous and unexpungable,
as love is.
Blue jay's bound like a kangaroo's
in the lawn's high grass, then up in a brush stroke
and over the hedge in one arc.
Light weights down the azalea plants, yesterday's cloud banks
enfrescoed still just under the sky's cornice,
cardinal quick transfusion into the green arm of the afternoon.
Wax- like flowers of sunlight drift through the dwarf orchard
and float under the pygmied peaches and pears
all over America.
And here, too, the blossoms continuing down from nowhere,
out of the blue.
The mockingbird's shadow is burned in the red clay
below him.
Exclusion's the secret.
What's missing is what appears most visible to the eye:
the more luminous anything is, the more it
subtracts what's around it, peeling away
the burned skin of the world making the unseen seen.
Body by new body they all rise into the light
tactile and still damp, that rhododendron and dogwood tree,
that spruce, an architecture of absence,
a landscape whose words are imprints, dissolving images
after the eyelids close.
I take them away to keep them there--
that hedgehorn, for instance, that stalk.
A bumblebee the size of my thumb rises
like Geryon from the hard Dantescan gloom under my window
sash to lift the rain gutter's tin bolgia,
then backs out like a hummingbird spiraling languidly
out of sight.
Shoulders I've wanted to sit on, a ride I've wanted to take,
deposited into the under light of cities
thronged in the grass.
Fitful illuminations, iron colored plain
that lies littered with music and low fires, stone
edge of the pit at the end of every road,
first faces starting to swim up.
Bico, my man, are you here?