So I forgot to tell you there are two stolen lines, or quoted
lines, in that poem.
You may have recognized some of them.
We all feel, of course, this is Elizabeth Bishop
from "The Moose," when people are stuck
drawn by that creature-- struck down by the creature outside
on the highway.
And the other is, is there?
It is so.
The final line is from Hayden Carruth.
So how are we doing on time here?
OK?
Two poems?
So we have one little bit longer, one little.
One short.
Quite short.
OK, so this is another poem in a way about the transmission
of the faraway to something closer to home
because it's concerned with an act of public violence.
What happens now can be transmitted,
recorded so easily on cell phone, passed on.
It's a great boon to us in terms of the documentation of abuse.
This poem is dedicated to a young man,
Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was killed
in Cleveland by the police.
He was playing with a plastic gun in a city park.
I didn't know that boy, of course.
I didn't know how to talk about it.
I didn't know if I had the right to talk about it.
And I began to think about what happens
when a life is interrupted, how everything,
every tributary that is poured into making
that particular person is interrupted.
And then how whatever that child might have done,
whatever might have been contributed to the future,
is also interrupted.
It's as if at the moment of his death time
implodes in a way, future and past pushing against one
another and emptying out.
This is called "In Two Seconds."
And again, the title pours into the first line.
In two seconds, the boy's face climbed back down
the 12-year tunnel of its becoming, a charcoal
sunflower swallowing itself.
Who has eyes to hear?
Who has eyes to see, or ears to hear?
If you could see what happens fastest,
unmaking the human irreplaceable,
a star falling into complete gravitational darkness
from all points of itself, all this: the held, loved body
into which entered milk and music, honeying
the cells of him: who sang to him,
stroked the nap of his scalp, kissed the flesh knot
after the cord completed its work
of fueling into him the long history of those
whose suffering was made more bearable by the as-yet-unknown
of him, playing alone in some unthinkable
future city, a Cleveland, whatever that might be.
Two seconds.
To elapse: the arc of joy in the conception bed,
the labor of hands repeated until the hands no longer
required attention, so that as the woman folded
her hopes for him sank into the fabric of his shirts
and underpants.
Down they go, swirling down into the maw of a greater dark.
Treasure books, comic-- treasure box, comic books, pocket knife,
bell from a lost cat's collar--
why even begin to enumerate them when
behind every tributary poured into him comes rushing backward
all he hasn't been yet?
Everything that boy could have thought or made, sung
or theorized, built on the quavering but continuous
structure that had preceded him sank
into an absence in the shape of a boy playing
with a plastic gun in a city park in Ohio,
in the middle of the afternoon.
When I say two seconds, I don't mean
the time it took him to die.
I mean the lapse between the instant the cruiser braked
to a halt on the grass, between that moment
and the one in which the officer fired his weapon.
The two seconds taken to assess the situation.
And though I believe it is a part of the work of poetry
to try on at least the moment and skin of another,
for this hour I respectfully decline.
I refuse it.
May that officer be visited every night of his life
by an enormity collapsing in front of him
into an incomprehensible bloom, and the voice
that howls out of it.
If this is no poem--
but that voice, erased boy, beloved of time,
who did nothing to no one and became nothing because of it--
I know that voice is one of the things we call poetry.
It isn't to his killer he's speaking.
[APPLAUSE]
So.