I'd like to apologize to anyone who was inconvenienced
by last week's cancellation.
Howard Moss was ill and we tried to get the word out
to as many people as possible.
But if you came out in that cold rain not knowing,
I'm very sorry.
We're getting ready to put together
the next issue of the creative writing newsletter.
And Friday is the deadline to turn in news.
If you like you can give me items tonight.
I would prefer that you write out
your news because I make mistakes
if you dictate it to me.
Our next reading is one week from tonight,
visiting poet Ellen Bryant Voigt --Auditorium,
the same time, 8 o'clock.
That's the 20th.
Copies of Sonora Review will be available for purchase tonight.
And as a Centennial celebration, the Poetry Center has
had fabricated a set of four poster poems,
poems by the four poets who teach on the faculty: that's
Jon Anderson, Steve Orlen, Richard Shelton, Peter Wild,
they're on display in the Hall.
And they're for sale tonight.
Let me show you, Steve, if you didn't see it on the way in.
Well, the price to the general public
is $5 each or $18 for a set of four.
The price for university students and personnel
is $4 each and $14 for the set of four.
As far as I'm concerned, everyone in the room tonight
is university students and personnel.
So for tonight, it's $4 each or $14 for the set.
I'm not really nice.
It makes the bookkeeping easier.
I hope you'll stay after the reading,
and have some punch and cookies with us.
Steve's been on campus now since 1967, doesn't seem possible
at all.
But he was only eight when he came.
[LAUGHTER]
I was 12.
[LAUGHTER]
Steve Orlen's published four collections of poetry--
Sleeping on Doors, Separate Creatures, Permission to Speak,
and most recently from Reinhardt & Winston, A Place
at the Table.
He's just been awarded his third National Endowment grant,
and I think that's enough for me to announce.
I'm happy to give you Steve Orlen.
[APPLAUSE]
"Dear anyone, I write this from Provence
where there's a bird who sings incessantly
no matter the time of day.
You'll play, he sings.
Sometimes I don't know where I am until I go away.
So off to Avignon I go to buy a secondhand hat
and strutting in the square, anyone
can see what a fool I am.
You'll play.
I saw you in a dream last night, heartless in the falling rain.
How did it feel?
Thinking, were you lost?
Did it matter?
Over Provence the hat flute singing."
Only in your own hometown can you ask all your friends
to wear a hat and they do.
It's wonderful.
Can I keep mine off for now?
It's hot.
Thank you.
I wish I could award prizes.
We've got-- Kim has a wonderful banana hat,
Mary Cuddihy has a lady pope's hat.
Mike Mahar of Oriental Studies provided his international hat
collection.
We've got the four paper hats.
This is wonderful.
I don't know yet.
A poster, should I say.
Well, I keep disrobing, it is warm.
I'm going to read several poems from my last two books
and then the rest of the reading will
be poems since the last book over the last two or three
years.
This one's called the "Mad Man's Wife,"
and it's for my old friend George.
"The unleashed dog walks back and forth.
The cat leaps over the backyard fence.
The owl shifts.
Down this street, the madman threads his way
over curb and cobblestone, and does not fall.
At dawn, everyone smiles.
The butcher has saved the plumpest hand for him.
The barber trims his hair.
The children tease him because he is there
less than a child more than a lump.
Later, he sits across from me at breakfast talking of suicide.
His plate becomes the tin plate prisoners
use to rattle their complaints.
Last night in a bar, he says a woman
disguised as a wife told him lie after lie.
There's no way to answer.
So I put him to sleep.
What does he dream with his eyes open?
I might as well ask what a child dreams before speech gives him
the power to lie.
Out the window, the dog sees the shadow of the cat.
The cat looks after the owl.
The owl keeps the moon in place.
To be mad, I know is to be out of touch
with life, to touch a stranger in a bar and say my wife.
But even the truth would be a betrayal.
He wakes, read me a story, he begs, tell me the names.
I gaze into his white eyes, into the blue gas
swirling in his heart.
Oh, poor us, I begin."
Some of these older poems I've read here several times before,
and I don't know whether to couple them with a story that
belongs to them or not.
But this one I think I ought to.
It's called "Naming the Children."
And it's a short poem basically about my grandfather
who had a series of strokes and was in a nursing home.
This was 15 years ago or so.
And my wife Gail and I were picking him up
to bring him to a family party at my parents' house.
And he was a quiet man of some personal dignity.
And his wife who had run the family
had died some years before and provided him
with some order in his life.
And we were about to go, he couldn't
find his fresh handkerchief and he did not
want to go to the party without a fresh handkerchief.
And my wife gave him her fresh handkerchief
and it moved him very much for some reason.
But we drove the 10 or so miles to my hometown
and he said that he'd been losing his memory lately,
but that every morning he would wake up and recite
the names of his children in the three languages he knew--
in Russian, Hebrew, in English, because those names changed
as they cross the ocean, and he would count to 10
in all three languages.
And he did it for us and got them
all wrong obviously because he was losing his memory,
but it was a very moving ride, excuse the pun.
"Naming the Children."
"He remembers good night and good morning.
He remembers my wife, Gail, which
is the wind who sits beside him stroking his thin right hand.
From back of the car through the neighborhoods,
recites the names of his children
in Russian, Hebrew, and English.
The names squeeze through the damaged arteries
past the house in Odessa over the remarkable ocean to New
York.
Mischa will be Morris, Hodya will be Ida.
10 years later, my mother, Beatrice Florence,
stares into polished stone.
At last, she sees herself, nee Bryna Fagel, beautiful bird,
which is how it is in America, over the graves of our parents,
how we are named."
I'm going to move now to this book.
As most of you know, Gail and I are
new parents of a little boy.
And as most of you know, the new parents things
don't go quite the right way during the day.
So my preparation, you don't need
to prepare much for a reading except for 20
years of writing or so.
But I've got my list here, but I'm not
sure I have my state of mind which takes a little while
to prepare with.
This is called "Big Friend of the Stones,"
and it's spoken by a young boy.
"The donkey doctor came covered with rain
and a gift, a picture of Jesus that changed when you looked.
His head seemed to wag.
My father is a good man with a pine cone for his head.
All summer, he chops firewood when the air is hot, not cold.
I've watched him from the rubbish pit where
I was playing with a snail.
My father says, I will be guardian of all God's motions--
wind, and sun, and rain, the goat
after the grapes, the grapes, the bees
spinning the useful honey.
But I could not save the donkey.
The day the donkey died a strange white peace came over
our land like the doctor's white hand into his vest pocket.
My father said the donkey was a friendly old man,
because he carried his burden over the hills
with the flies in his ears and the dog at his legs.
The donkey doctor yawned and muttered,
and we took the graying carcass out, though it was tired
and could not obey.
Please me, I prayed, big friend of the stone.
We drag him down the hill and buried him
beside the poplar tree.
When they left, I knelt and dug a channel to the great head
and stroked his muzzle.
I spoke a little poem I made up in a dream.
It was cold, a leaf fell on my [AUDIO OUT] I sneezed.
I pushed the dirt back over him and thought,
go to heaven where you belong and get yourself
cured, old favorite of Christ.
Behind me, it was snowing on the stream.
Up the hill I saw my father and the donkey doctor swigging
whiskey from the jug.
The door to our house was open.
The dog slept on the hearth.
I sneezed again and it was winter."
My son has a mild congenital condition
called stridor, which is the floppy vocal cord
and he breathes like I snore.
And it's helpful because you always know he's there
and I don't hear him.
So is Gail still here or she's out there.
OK, all right.
What?
She's in the car.
OK.
Very [INAUDIBLE].
OK.
They say it goes away in a year or so.
This is a poem called "Friends" for my friend Jon Anderson.
"Down by the river along the railroad
tracks on a cool August day, we started
our journey trying to get from one country to the next.
We knew the language because we learned it
outside the old mansion with the dogs
and cats and the little schoolmaster who
finally chased us off.
But we were good big fellas.
People along the road wrapped themselves in wool
and drank a heavy beer.
Do you remember?
We were so sure of ourselves that despair was short lived
and a welcome change of heart.
We went from city to city, every detail lodging in my memory.
And walking like that, I had no desire
to choose one place over another.
Don't ask me how much we influenced each other,
picking up accents, exchanging our nicknames and hats.
And the graveyards under the oaks gave life meaning.
You said that though men die, they're
only proving how human we are.
But then in the capital, remember
how every passerby stared at us, how in the border village
that woman cut open her arm and there was no blood, only
flat lacquered veins.
We were no longer living the life of our times.
Let's go home, you said one morning, stirring the fire.
But I knew better.
We stood by the great ocean having slept all night
on the pebbly shore.
Under the froth, great depths of water slept.
I said, we must start to suffer again so we may learn more.
And you said, no, we must travel to the fat lands across the sea
and do some research there, or did I say that?
Do you remember who said good living and good weather?"
The only problem with reading in your own hometown
is you have to be yourself.
You can't fool anybody.
When you go out on the road to give a reading, you can--
I don't know, talk about moral bankruptcy
and how the language is going to hell, but you know who I am.
So I can't talk about that.
You're just going to have to listen to the poems.
This one's called "Endless Love" and the title
comes from the novel by the same title
from which I borrowed part of a line that
moved me to write the poem.
The novel by the way is a lovely lyric
about an obsessive teenage love.
"We read a story aloud about an endless love.
From it, a little time was missing,
and so I switched off the light.
You in your gray robe for winter helped me off with my shoes.
The window shade was up, the light flat
and dim in the late afternoon.
This, you said is a perfect affair, nothing particularly
true or untrue, just a little missing time,
like the forgotten arousal of an old perfume.
You got up from bed and stared out the window.
You said you were watching two figures talking
beneath the trees.
The room was darkening and you look back at me
and shivered, then looked once more at the tall white trees,
leafless.
The snow falling on a deja vu, remarking
how endless and perfect its falling seemed."
This poem is called "Recompense" and the speaker
as you'll see in the first line is Pablo Picasso.
And I love this poem.
I don't really know quite what it means.
It's just one of those poems that came to me
and I accepted it gratefully.
"Recompense."
"My name is Pablo Picasso and my name rhymes in French,
in Catalan, even in American.
As I travel, stopping often to call aloud the single word,
"lady," I find my ghost is still feared.
I'd like to answer, this was my body, I give it to you.
And this my art, which is only some plumes trailing from my
[AUDIO OUT],, and all you politicos and decadents
can penetrate the visible, which may someday
change to include your face.
From the North, for several years,
I traveled through Navarre and Aragon,
and what used to be León before the soldiers came.
I wanted to find the wound that caused the death of art.
I wanted recompense, but good naturedly,
the way the troubadours of Provence
addressed their ladies fair.
In Málaga where I was born, I found a broken mirror
in a cottage a few feet from the road.
The mirror spoke: you must be a strong man
to travel so far toward a miracle.
I sat drinking with a farmer, a simple man.
And when he fell asleep, I yelled,
my name is Pablo Picasso and all words rhyme.
In Andalusia, there is a bird called cowbird.
It lays its spotted eggs in the nests of other birds,
then disappears.
Look for it in your nest, little bird.
There is a second surprise: the artist carries no sword.
Walking across a field, I heard his slurred whistle.
Cowbird.
Now I am gone, my eyes have full freedom,
and my name, Pablo Picasso, hides in the bunch grass.
Some of the birds are gray, and some black, and some practice
suffering, and some patter their lobed feet
on the water's surface.
What's to be done about my sullen disposition, my money,
and my heirs, my houses, and my death, which is what I fear
will attract your attention?
What finally rhymes in rocks and clouds,
in the fat in the grain of wood, is the life
you feared, and I am dead as you have guessed.
I have become a pest, the great man,
who tosses up shapes, who fractures
your face and arms, your thighs; who knows what I'll do next?
Lady."
[APPLAUSE]
This is the last time I'm going to read
from the most recent book, and it's called "The Acrobat."
It's about a certain time in my life
where things weren't going well around me.
But the poem brings me back to a time when I was a teenager
and spent several months in a hospital with rheumatic fever.
And with that kind of fever and that kind of heat in the summer
before, there wasn't any air conditioning.
I had a kind of hallucination and that figures in the poem.
It's called "The Acrobat."
"I was digging in the yard, pyracantha, lady banksia,
drought-loving thorny Chilean mesquite,
a tree against the next year and the next
as though each green thing out there awaited my decision.
I really thought that.
My wife watching from the porch was
glad for this something to do.
All afternoon on the radio echoing from wall to wall,
we heard the old songs that shaped us
into one young couple dancing in a crowd 10 or so years ago.
Later after supper, my wife curled up on the couch
and cried for all that had lately gone wrong,
a long marriage broken, another.
A friend who felt her work had come to nothing, and then
a baby, a friend's, born into this world only part way.
What we had valued falling away--
friendship, work, love, our own, stalled in its passions.
And the small remembered songs of anybody's life,
all that is daily like brushing the hair,
like doves on telephone wires.
She looked out the window, lights of the city came on
and the house seemed to float.
I wanted to hold her crying, but she looked so frail
I thought that if I touched her face
or spoke the wrong transparent words, she might lose all hope.
When I was a child, I thought first
there came the feelings, then the words that
told us what the feelings meant and what we ought to do.
Then everything got confused.
Someone told me a story first and then the feelings came--
sad ones, happy ones, it didn't matter which.
I thought all the feelings waited out there
for our decisions--
or all the words strung out into their many letters waited.
She kissed me on the cheek and said good night.
I drank some whiskey.
I thought about my habit of hope.
I heard my wife's deep steady breathing and the gas heater's
long hiss.
I knew my wife could not be argued with.
I thought about one teenage summer I lay in a hospital bed
in fever.
The doctors listened to my heart and clucked.
Relatives, friends, people I did not even know
sent me greeting cards.
Our high school football hero, a boy perfect in his public life,
came with his lonely duty to say how lucky I was to be alive.
One night, I twisted in chills and squinted
at the cards strung over my head and asked myself again
how I was lucky.
Then I saw the acrobat, a slim marionette
dressed in a shiny leotard.
He paced the string between two walls.
In the middle, words from the cards
slumped in shy groups like children
at a pickup game waiting to be chosen.
At one end in a small box nailed to the wall,
my heart, whose pumping I'd been warned not to listen to.
Slowly back and forth the acrobat his balance wove.
Lucky.
Lucky I was for such a friend.
His only job in this world was not to fall."
Starting a new book of poetry, it's fear
inspiring and exciting experience.
One does not want to repeat what one
has done before yet what the new territory will hold in store
is a great mystery of blank paper.
And the mystery has been slightly filled
since the last book.
And I think the poems are quite different.
The first one is called "Yankee Doodle Dandy,"
and it's about a trip to Europe I took when I was first out
of college.
"Hamburg at night from the Autobahn
is a string of pearls around a lake in 1963
and the prostitutes lined up like ships
above the Reeperbahn, they were nothing to me.
They were like ships' figureheads stalled
in their homey ports above the street, almost nude, very
pert, and very smooth and white, and slightly out of shape.
I wanted one so badly.
Upstairs I went with the Deutsche marks and told her I
only wanted to look, please.
In his statue on the square, Otto Von Bismarck
overlooked everything.
And she said, sing me ein kleine Liedchen, lieber, sing me
a little song, sweetheart.
I didn't do the other thing.
I felt so lonely with whomever she
was and that gaudy perfumed room far from the lake,
and sorry for myself.
I gave her all I owned, singing, Yankee Doodle
went to town riding on a pony, stuck a feather in his cap
and called it macaroni.
Really, I just wanted to sail her home."
[LAUGHTER]
The next poem is called "Time is a Place and There is a Map."
There was a Black woman I watched once in winter
at a heroin connection, straddling
a kitchen chair, bland, and featureless,
and haplessly draining.
The dope dealer pinched her breasts, he slapped her,
and I didn't know why his slapping seemed
so tender and I don't know whether she died or not.
She didn't have time to slip the needle from her vein or time
to feel the rush that comes for the money.
She just slumped out of her chair and out of herself,
I thought.
Snowfall, snow light, I didn't learn a thing that night.
I was too scared of dying, so I took off.
What was I looking for anyway, but sweet amnesia, smelling
of ether.
We live at the edge of a giant globe spinning through space.
And whatever we do, we do forever.
I didn't know her very long.
There is no place lost enough to hide a human being."
This poem is called "Familiar," and it's
the poem that appears on this lovely poster.
And it's an elegy in memory of my father-in-law, Egon Marcus,
who was born in 1910 and died in 1982.
And the very beginning of the poem
is about a short but long feeling of dying in a hospital.
And towards the end of the poem, some odd things
happen which actually did happen,
everything broke in the house after he died.
And I'm not a mystical person at all,
but it was an odd concurrence of events.
There's the German phrase, ach, was ist ein
Mann, oh, what is a man?
And my father-in-law was a Jew from Germany
who had escaped Nazi Germany in the 30s.
And when he was ill, his friends were
calling from all over the country
and from New York where he lived and several of them
said more than once to me, I was the official phone answerer,
to give them the latest medical report--
people would say, oh, what is a man or ach, was ist ein Mann.
And it seemed to put an oddly poetic expression
for these particular people to use.
And not until later did I discover what many you
may already know that is part of a service it
must come from a Psalm or from the Bible, I don't know.
Does anybody know where that comes from?
Oh, what is a man.
Anyways, after the death at the funeral service,
the rabbi used those very words.
"Oh, what is a man, that thou art mindful of him."
Say it again, "Oh--
[INAUDIBLE] God.
I'm not sure if [INAUDIBLE].
Yeah.
OK, thanks.
Anyway, "Familiar."
This is the shape of a man in sleep,
breathing, not breathing, a moth between shadow and light,
between wife and daughter, and the rain
they watch out the window for hours, water, air,
then nothing, bright miscellaneous debris.
Asks an uncle, ach, was ist ein Mann?
The question flutters from cousin to cousin.
The black umbrellas open.
Someone tosses a handful of dirt and what has been given returns
to Earth.
Asks, what is a widow and smiles over
the melon, the fish, the bread, the coffee,
the candle that burns yellow all night for a week.
While in other rooms, things shatter--
a vase, then a mirror, accustomed to a different touch
as though the soul breathed out now runs amok like a child
through a new house finding each thing unfamiliar, unbelonging;
familiar yet wrong."
This is called "Even the Smallest Death."
We found the orange cat this morning
sprawled outside the window as though reaching
to surprise his own reflection.
The yard around us asks the simplest questions,
better to question or wind and weather,
going and coming, needing no reason.
The sun rises and the flies gather as they will
and the rest is sentiment.
You beside me in the yard in sunlight grieving.
Oh, everywhere you look, you shape your own ghosts
in the air lest you forget, willful to memorize.
I call it sentiment.
Flies will gather soon as the sun sets over that far corner
of the garden.
Sluggish and obedient, the dead can't change, as now we must,
or eye the empty spaces."
This poem is called "Acts of Will,"
and this is the first poem that interested me
that I had written after this book had been published.
And it's a very long poem, but to give you
an idea about the foolish waste that artists work is this poem.
I finished the poem at about 120 lines and read it to my wife
and to my friend, Julie.
And they asked me if I thought maybe
I ought to start writing detective novels.
[LAUGHTER]
And I trust my friend's responses
and I guess it sounded a little like a Raymond Chandler novel.
So I went back to my desk and realizing
that it had many of the tics or habits of writing
that I had been working with for several years.
I thought cutting those tics might, those habits
of location, and description, and story might
make for an interesting poem.
So I cut imagery, story, et cetera, most of it
from the poem just to see if there would be left.
And this is what was left.
"Acts of Will."
"On certain nights, the bad mood takes you by surprise
and all the faces you meet shrink to the bleakest farthest
stars.
Oh, take a bus as far as it goes to the city's edge,
that no man's land where it idles, breathing like a house
alone in an empty field.
You don't, of course, and the night shoves you along
in unhooked trains of association,
old regrets, blunders, humiliations, love, the dead.
And nothing stops you until the end defeats the mind's
self-repairing chemistry.
What draws us into such a narrow place,
a nameless, courseless, heartless chasm?
Doubts we thought we'd overcome?
Our body's occasional need for despair?
Or is it the numb bliss, oblivion, we desire?
Wouldn't it be better to talk to ourselves
in a dark of our own choosing, go home, phone a pal
or read a book, dance to the radio's late ballast of music.
How long you stand there, fascinated.
You touch your cheek, you need a shave.
What casual truths such moments absorb.
Those small decisions arrived at in the dark stall
a moment longer, then whistle sing, grin, my friend.
Welcome to the loneliest communion,
an act of will from which you won't return quite whole."
This is a poem that it was written not to--
it's called "At the Indoor Shopping Mall."
And it's not a particularly complicated poem.
Well, I think it's probably more like a song than a poem.
But I worked on this poem for probably a year or a year
and a half because I didn't know what it was supposed to mean.
And it took me, and I bring it out of the drawer
periodically, run it through the typewriter,
run it through my head until I finally
found what simple theme was lurking in the song.
"At the Indoor Shopping Mall."
"Either the snow's persistence or inertia sat me down
after I'd run my errands beside a blue tiled fountain.
And wherever I looked, young couples
wheeled their sleeping infant.
And in and out of shops went wives
with trailing identical husbands in brightly colored trousers.
Isn't it lovely?
Said an elderly woman beside me on the bench
beside the circular fountain.
Her dress was a field of flowers.
Over the flowers, the spray from the water
was blue as the waters of a bottomless lagoon.
And I there beside them emptied of need and happy at last.
Until I saw way down below what seemed the movement of a fish,
lantern-jawed and glowering, eyeless as a rock.
And further down, like a vast and stupid secret,
the plain bottom we can know but never see.
Isn't it getting late?
She said.
She rose from the bench, a field of endlessly
intricate wild flowering weeds.
Then came the soft and airy whoosh of revolving doors,
and shoppers coming through with armfuls of packages.
And it was December again in the north,
in the windowless light of perpetual waters."
Everybody's got a cough.
Lois left me six cups of water.
I think I should pass them around.
This reminds me of Gail and I where we were in Europe.
But I don't know, a long, long time, 10 or 15 years ago we
were in Greece and we'd go to the movies
and you couldn't hear what they were saying
on screen because everybody was smoking and coughing
at the same time in the theater.
It was incredible.
This poem is called "Bagatelles."
And a bagatelle is by dictionary definition a trifle,
but it's also the name, the title of a series of piano
pieces by Beethoven.
It's a poem about the nature of memory I guess.
"My father who forgets that yesterday he
saw of the color of sky not slate,
who argues with the endless irritation of the elderly,
remembers which leg he broke at soccer,
not the year but the sharp bluing
bone escaping through his skin.
He phones to tell me the past comes
to visit when he sits listening in his room alone
and the simple accumulation of years
like a jigsaw puzzle pieced together in an afternoon
tells him all he needs to know.
I told this to a woman.
We were dancing at our 20th high school reunion,
her thigh a presence against my own.
I could barely remember who she was.
I didn't remember telling her pretty soon
boys will be chasing after you, though she did,
and how solemn I'd looked, and how
she planned her future then.
Years later, standing before a mirror brushing her hair,
the memory shuddered through her like music
through an empty room.
On the night of my 40th birthday far from home,
I stayed up late and lonely.
Snow fell on a city in the valley, lights in the windows
went off, roofs blended evenly with snow,
evergreens with snow until the whole white valley dissolved.
I could vaguely remember women I'd loved,
flake by flake snowing down.
The courtesies, undressing slowly,
pleasure given, pleasure taken.
The nerves barely inquiring of each other--
not memory but ellipses, not the consciousness of afternoons
but gray light falling, Beethoven from the next room.
The bagatelles he wrote, not to be remembered by
but to be played.
Practice afternoons.
On top of the piano, some bric-a-brac
given me by friends, a brass whale paperclip and ivory
elephant no bigger than a child's lore.
And the globe with two polar bears seesawing in the snow.
When I turn it over, I see us years
from now talking on the phone.
One says, remember this?
And the other, rising white on white, remember that?"
This is a little song called "Down at the Harvest Bar."
The harvest bar is a bar restaurant
in Cambridge, Massachusetts in Harvard Square.
"Down at the harvest bar tonight I
met a woman I met in college; one day, one kiss
in the back seat of a car.
I doubt she remembers it.
That was 20 years ago and we sit boring each other now
as we did then.
Just one more kiss I think for another gin to prove I
am more myself than I was then with
less each night to remember."
I hope she never reads that.
[LAUGHTER]
Sometimes when you're working on a poem,
it's so close up to you.
I'm repeating myself, I guess.
But I'm not quite sure what it means
and so I have to depend on my friends
to say that it does connect so that everything
does hold together in the poem.
And I still can't see this poem, but Jon Anderson
tells me that everything does connect although obliquely.
[LAUGHTER]
And I should have worn my baseball hat tonight,
but my wife said one hat was enough.
This is a childhood poem.
It's called "A Certain Death of Mrs. Lyons."
"I watched two men in white attempting what seemed a cinch,
pick up a lady and carry her down to the sidewalk
from the porch.
When one stretcher bearer stumbled,
I could hear the neighbors from their porches, Mrs. Becker,
Mrs. Finn, and her mother, Mrs. Sullivan crying, whoops.
I could feel the doll-like skull smacked the sidewalk
like a baseball leaping off a bat.
Even if you concentrate on one thing at a time,
say, a baseball hurtling toward you growing larger wider
in the sun, even if you refuse to flinch,
some things turn out wrong.
So that's what the fuss is all about, I thought,
looking up long after Arnold Belcher took
his famous razzle dazzle every which way wind up, and threw
the ball again, my favorite pitch."
The next one is called "Life Drawing."
And a few years when my wife was teaching a life drawing
class at the museum art school, I would go to pick her up.
And if I came early, I'd wait in the back of the room.
But it's a little awkward sitting in the back of the room
doing nothing.
Well, a nude person sits there in the front of the room.
It seems rude to do it.
So I started drawing rather than leave, one's got to leave.
[LAUGHTER]
And if no good drawing ever came out of it,
at least that poem did come out.
"Life Drawing."
"At night in the museum art school,
men and women whose daily work doesn't require hands or eyes
to surrender to such intimacy, and the instructor
passing over us.
And everything around the room in shadow
gathers to intensify light on the model's body--
a stranger's, a woman.
The charcoal starts erratically almost of its own accord,
though we're hardly aware of time anymore.
Hands moving to match body part to body whole.
Nipple to breast.
The long waist to the shadowy haunch
like a blue whale rising falling back into the feeding dark.
Her eyes are closed.
What could she be thinking of?
Her boundaries shift between each taken breath, more sure
of their universe than we.
The old masters drew her as an angel descended,
walking across the farmyard lost,
not in thought but motion.
Sundays, the men who hang out at the park
love to describe women.
The young men sweep the air with huge emotions like liars
after hours of no bath at the county reservoir,
with a wink to the boy who caught the fish
but doesn't know yet a woman's figure matters
enough to tell lies.
The old man's hands seem to stutter.
They might be shaping the lost map of Thrace, stone house,
stone wall, a horse nibbling grass,
clouds from the long neigh; hands that labored in stone,
or wood, or dirt for years--
with a wink to the boy who caught the fish
but doesn't know yet a woman's figure
matters enough to tell lies.
The old man's hands seem to stutter.
They might be shaping the lost map of Thrace,
stone house, stone wall, a horse nibbling grass clouds
from the long neigh; hands that labored in stone, or wood,
or dirt for years when they're about to fly off the wrists
vanish into their pockets.
All the postures of flesh blur in the merciless overhead
light.
The model stretches.
She puts on her glasses and pads naked and noisily around us
like a silvery carp stranded on a beach or water
as it overflows its banks seeking a new shape.
She wants to see just how we have depicted her, then
bends to pick up her clothes.
And with her back to us, puts them on slowly--
bra, panties, and a shirt, blue jeans, rubber thongs.
What lay there in a stillness older than statues
of gods made from clay and spit is a teenager
in a Rolling Stones T-shirt.
If she could have watched the lumps of charcoal
carefully produce, she might have
thought, child playing dead at sunset
after supper on the front lawn under the privet.
Horizon, hill.
Hill after hill someone cares enough about to sit and draw.
We all love to look.
And as we can't always touch, we walk home
to more familiar shapes.
The curves follow the light from the open door.
And even as I sit on the bed, and stare, and wake her,
even as my breathing starts to echo hers,
there is something I can't have--
the drowsy neck, the hollow back of the knees,
the ear that goes around, the feet like a slum at dawn.
There is also the body as a version of habit skin deep;
body going deeper, pleasuring itself even as it pleasures us.
Body, the hotel of the spirit, elusive and presiding
below nothing and to no one."
This is a poem called "Acts Without Consequence."
And it's about two different times.
One is about working as an apprentice machinist
just when I got out of high school
and the other is more recently when I saw something very odd,
and moving, and lovely, which appears at the end of the poem.
It's called "Acts Without Consequence."
"All one summer I thought about God.
This in the factories and this at an age when I just as
soon have felt like any ordinary apprentice, machinist, a
recently graduated high school kid no different
from anyone else.
Then I began to wonder what they'd
be thinking about, all of--
din of huge machines, routers, and lathes
that cast the high windows with metal dust.
And now and then, the random lap of waves
came off a nearby canal creating a timeless sanctuary baffle.
I'd let my mind work the same thought until the thought broke
when the whistle blew.
One time, one of the men must have
sensed the burden of my thoughtfulness
because he asked a question so generalized it felt intimate.
I don't remember what, where do the dead live, about love.
But I must have been amazed as I am now
by any unexpected heartfelt endlessly answerable question.
Maybe I felt that slurring in the brain that happens a split
second into an accident.
Anyway, I didn't so much decide to quit
as I drifted into other jobs, then college and so on.
I thought about it just a while ago, probably
I was high back then.
God kept me company.
Or God was pure attention, seductive like a mantra.
It hardly matters now.
It so happens the poplars are in leaf.
Bordering each yard, the white perennial African daisies
and poppies whose languid yellow petals seem
to palpitate like flesh.
I was out walking.
I glanced up.
On a balcony above the avenue, stood a very old woman
dressed in a robe and slippers.
I saw that in the raised circle of her arms
she held a photo in a frame.
Then she was moving.
She was dancing, a waltz, a box and four,
as though she'd heard the call while ironing
and it just fell on her like old clothes or spring
snow: cheek to cheek early on a Sunday morning,
who'd have imagined ever doing such a thing?
And just as suddenly as she began,
she stopped and bent her body out
a little, neighboring yards, rows of houses,
trees, flowers in their beds.
Sometimes this world's almost the safest place to be."
"Paradise."
This poem begins with an eccentric version
of the Genesis story of Adam and Eve and the snake.
I've replaced the snake with a swallow for some reason.
"When the bird saw how innocent they were,
it flew toward the garden in a swallow's perfect curves.
So luminous, she placed it in her companion.
They kissed.
They passed the light between them.
They spoke and the bird flew out.
This is the story I tell myself when
I'm most unsure, when I stare out a window at dusk
and can't decide--
at times love and at times hate like a phone ringing all night;
sometimes the truth, sometimes the lie.
The heart reasons or the mind.
Above my room, the swallow fascinates even when
I feel most sure.
Oh, come back, they must have cried.
Mouths held open in a perfect human singing: oh.
The certainties dissolving on their tongues.
How large the sky looks now.
The swallow's locomotion and obstacle.
Air holds him, makes him graceful.
Sometimes baffled, a shifting helpless light
above the garden."
I'd like to read three more poems.
This one is called "Alternate Lives."
The opening allusion is to some of the writings of Leonardo da
Vinci who wrote a wonderful list, a bestiary, symbology
of beasts.
"Da Vinci, she said reading from her book,
has the swallow serve for inconstancy, always
in motion, unable to endure the slightest discomfort.
Have you ever, she asked, cheated on me once?
How many times?
Leave them.
Leave them be.
Hours in some neutral room where the light is weak groping
another's body for an answer.
Wouldn't it be worth to stay awake all night imagining how
it would feel to live alone?
To sit like a bachelor or spinster
in a straight back chair in a bathrobe sipping whiskey,
smoking one cigarette after another all by yourself,
to watch the lilac light arrive, first swallow
arching over the river and no one to tell or have to tell?
Put your book away, he said, come here."
This poem is called "A House."
"Their mouths blur like leaves caught in a crosswind,
lips barely softly touching there.
And behind the lips, the hard white teeth.
And further in, pink membranes pulsing to seize a breath.
How deep is a mouth?
How far in before in the other?
Some nights they fall asleep like that
then wake, walk out to check the weather, breakfast together,
and off to the world for a day.
All morning and all afternoon inside the house, shadows
change places with light.
Noon, then twilight, dusk, until the shadows
become one darkness.
How thoughtless it looks to a passerby.
Room by room, the lamps go on as though to repair the harm
the hours have done.
But what can you say in dark or light that hasn't been said?
Good morning, good night, a kiss again.
Then in the body's deepest place as in a room revisited
after years away some space you thought
of as your own, same radio, same bed and sink, same view.
You meet another passing through, a pilgrim, not quite
familiar, not quite a stranger.
What way?
This is where things change sometimes.
This is how some people love."
And this is the last poem.
It's in two sections.
And to continue the theme of acts of--
this one is called "Acts of Grace."
The beginning of the poem is a real experience.
It took place when I was on a bus traveling
at night through Yugoslavia in the mountain.
"Entering any unknown lovely mysterious place, woods,
or water, and for whatever reason
carries you along a slurred amnesiac passage.
It's dark.
The bus slows around a curve.
It's always dark when I remember this.
I've been traveling alone a while from one European country
to another.
Every city looked the same, cathedrals, farmers' markets.
From any hill, the harbors gleamed
with a broad and tireless contentment.
So when the bus stopped, I entered the woods
at the side of the road and did not care to wonder where I was
or what drew me down a path between the trees so late,
unable to distinguish one darkness from another.
Have you ever looked in a mirror in the dark
and seeing yourself grown older other?
I did as a child, and could not help but touch
that terrifying face which was a skull.
There was a lake, and in the distance,
a cottage with a single light.
A thought so lonesome I felt myself dissolve.
Whatever I saw, it went abstract.
Out of such emptiness, I would invent a future--
husband, friend, poet, prodigal son.
What a lovely foolish luxury of thought.
Two.
Have you ever looked in a window at night
out walking when you can't sleep?
The shade is up, table and chair, a lamp,
and open book, a half-filled whiskey glass,
though no one's there.
I wrote one poem, willful and exact.
I love a slim woman in a house in a quiet neighborhood.
This yard and small trees I've planted to resemble other yards
are shapes I've almost memorized.
Wherever I look, the same bright patient stars pause overhead.
On nights like this, I can recite names
of streets and local flowers.
I know the seasons by the turning light, knowledge
to fit in a coffee cup, mornings when
I watch one lovely yellow flower opening to light.
Their history begins.
I cannot see but know the rising breadth of houses as is
valuable even as it vanishes.
Once, at the funeral of a quiet man,
I elegized the quick familiar motion of his waving hand.
If there's a light, I stop, I look in.
Here is what the book says: whatever you learn,
you will forget, so you might have its glimpse again.
When have I ever felt lonelier, happier?
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
[INTERPOSING VOICES]