OK, looking at the clock over there.
Without my glasses, I can't see.
[INAUDIBLE] still good.
So someone asked me what "The Maybe-Bird" is,
and what the title--
why I called it "The Maybe-Bird,"
and I honestly don't know.
My first two books, I had figures, women who were guides.
The first one was Magdalena, a particular woman
who really existed, I think.
I used to see her on the side of the highways
by the gas stations wearing a blue dress when
I used to drive from Santa Fe to Tulsa, which I did frequently
for several--
a number of years when I was taking care of my grandpa
before he passed away.
The second book there was an elderly lady, Hoktvlwv,
who I met on the beach in California,
and she became the guide for that book.
This one, "The Maybe-Bird," but the maybe-bird has not
shown herself to me.
So I actually can't describe her.
So this poem mentions the maybe-bird.
Oh, here we go.
Sorry.
I lay my aloneness in the beast's shrine.
By blood, I encountered my formlessness.
A sheer trough near the center of a lake where I moor my boat
and float in absence collecting names I
had forgotten or left at the gates when I descended.
Of the upper world, I only remember a cellar
lit by wisps and lamps.
Portals to the sun, its gilded reliquaries
navigable not by bird light or moon.
Her face concealed behind the stars' dull hatchets.
Where snapped trees breathe with ghost food, moss,
I have laid my aloneness in the beast's shrine,
left my footprints on the muddy shoals.
The reflection of myself in water
dispersed by a nervous brushwork of grass.
Oh, maybe-bird, what will you name me now,
disappearing as I am from the body?