This next poem is about a carnivorous plant called
the yellow pitcher plant.
Well, this is a--
for somebody who doesn't know that much about botany,
I guess, a carnivorous plant is an invitation
to mixed metaphor.
I use two words maybe that I should explain here.
One of them is oubliette.
Oubliette was a particularly nasty kind
of dungeon in the Middle Ages.
It means a forgetory.
And it was apparently bottle-shaped.
And you dropped the prisoner in the top,
and then forgot him or her.
And it didn't matter after a while whether it's him or her,
I guess.
And the person just starved to death in this dungeon
without an exit.
The other word is seely, which is an old word from which we
get the words silly, which means innocent, helpless, simple,
deserving of pity.
I describe the fly, the victim in this poem, as being seely.
The yellow pitcher plant is pitcher-shaped.
It's trumpet-shaped.
Into the top of the trumpet, it invites its victims.
Yellow Pitcher Plant.
Flowering stomach, scroll of leaf,
covered with small, honeyed words
by which the seely fly is lured to sloping
pastures at the trumpet's lip.
Until, grazing downhill, the fly finds
the underbrush of hairs casually pushed through
has closed behind.
A thicket of lances, shark teeth, trap.
Oh, alas, it stumbles on, falling from chamber to chamber
within the green turret, making each loud
with the buzz of its grief.
And finally slipping into the oubliette itself,
pool that digests protein.
To become mere chitinous exoskeleton, leftovers,
a sated petal, an enzyme's cruelty.
[APPLAUSE]