Well, I don't know if this next poem needs any explanation
particularly.
You know, I think in the classroom
they refer to poems that are self-reflexive,
poems that are talking about themselves while they're
going on.
You know what I mean?
This isn't one of them.
[LAUGHTER]
No, I mean, this is the poem that's
self-reflexive toward the place I do my writing.
You know?
So it's a little bit inbred, in that sense.
It's about just sort of hanging around a place, your place.
It's called, "Thoughts While Reading The Sand Reckoner."
Um, nothing.
"What nourishes the polar star?
That's a story I refuse to tell.
Bellhops lacking a pineapple, or the secret ingredients
of bubble bath, itself a derailed story.
And still, stuntmen by the school are washed ashore.
What would be appropriate here is deep-fried calamares
or the sound of a crossbow humming.
I've been reading for hours.
I'm counting every little grain of sand.
Saturday night in Amherst, Archimedes is my man.
I drift toward nightfall, renaming
all the recent immigrants from Antarctica.
We shall have a good voyage if god is willing.
Disconsolate bunglers, incalculable cloves,
the ship sang, ginger scurvy.
Then I took one of them--"
This poem is-- [LAUGHS] I actually like it,
but I don't expect you to.
[LAUGHTER]
"Then I took one of them around to see chlorophyll working
in the meadow, and later brought him a porkpie hat."
This is insane.
[LAUGHTER]
"Night was coming on.
Hell, night had come and gone and I
was still reading, reading my way through the library.
Night had come and gone, leaving not a trace except me.
And I, by necessity, had moved on
and was by now reading Magellan's Voyage, a Narrative
Account of the First Circumnavigation,
by Antonio Pigafetta.
Poor mad Ferdinand died spectacularly at the hands
of Filipino warriors.
1700 years before, a fellow named
Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth
to be 24,650 miles.
Not a bad guess, only 225 off.
Well, I was reading about all these stargazers
and felt this aching desire for a newer
world when Adventures of a Red Sea Smuggler
tumbled off the shelf.
I love Henry de Monfreid for writing,
'I went to see the pyramids.
What a disappointment they were to me.'"
[LAUGHTER]
His reason, the majesty of the desert could not be obscured.
Hmm, I like that line.
[LAUGHTER]
"Sunday morning in Amherst, I have spotted a water buffalo.
Emily Dickinson has decided to purchase several mohair
jackets.
But it is Sunday and, I regret to report,
she has not been a very good neighbor lately.
"Tears are my angels now," she said to me, around 4:00 AM.
'But are they interested in Cedar Rapids?'
I asked.
'I'm not qualified to say,' was her sorry reply.
And so I went, the sound of a crossbow humming, my own jungle
fever, my weary and blossoming soul
was passed from hand to hand to hand.
I was resting in the center of some huge pageant when a human
standing next to me said, 'There must be more,' and set out
to find it, against all odds, against the known sum.
And years later, either came back
or didn't, was the biggest fool ever,
or shines there on the horizon, like a newly minted coin
of hope.
And those who stayed and mocked, and those
who merely read about it later, the grains of untrammeled sand
fall through their brains long after the sojourner
has begun to snore."