WEBVTT

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This is called-- and I'll just
read about three more poems.

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This is called "Birthday Star
Atlas," and it's a poem about--

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well, it's a [INAUDIBLE]
receiving for Brazil

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a very fancy star atlas
with good photographs,

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and it's also a poem
about Emily Dickinson.

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I was reading Emily Dickinson,
I suppose, at the time,

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and I made a kind of connection
between the two, as you'll see.

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I mean, I pretty much explain
everything in the poem,

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the associations.

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Wildest dream, Miss Emily.

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Then the coldly
dawning suspicion--

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always at the loss--

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come day large black
birds overtaking

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men who sleep in ditches,
a whiff of winter

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in the air, sovereign
blue, blue that

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stands for intellectual
clarity over a street deserted

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except for a far-off dog.

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A police car, a light
at the vanishing point

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for the children to solve
on the blackboard today.

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Blind children at the
school you and I know

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about, their gray nightgowns
creased by the north wind,

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their fingernails bitten
from time immemorial.

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We are in a long line
outside a dead letter office.

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We are dust mice under
a conjugal bed covered

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with exotic fishes and monkeys.

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We are in a slow drifting
cold barge huddled

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around a television set,
which has a wire coat

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hanger for an antenna.

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A quick view by satellite
of the polar regions

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maternally tucked in
for the long night, then

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some sort of interference.

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Parallel lines
like the ivory bone

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needles of your grandmother,
knitting our fates together.

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All things ambiguous and
lovely in their ambiguity,

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like the nebula in
my new star atlas.

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Pale ovals where the ancestral
portraits had been taken down,

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the gods with their
goatees and their faint

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smiles in company of
their bombshell spouses,

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naked and statuesque as
if entering a death camp.

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They smile too, stroke
the Triton wrapped

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around the mantel
clock, when they're not

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showing the whites of their
eyes in theatrical ecstasy.

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Nostalgia for the theological
vaudeville, a false springtime

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cleverly painted
on the cardboard

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for the couple in the
last straw to sigh

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over while holding hands,
which unknown to them

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flutter like bird
shaped scissors.

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Emily, the birthday atlas.

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I kept turning its
pages, awed and delighted

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by the size of the
unimaginable, the great nowhere,

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the everlasting nothing,
pure and serene doggedness

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for the hell of it,
and love, our nightly

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stroll the color of
silence and time.

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