Get into a little music here.
I guess it's been-- three years ago,
September, I first started trying
to learn how to play saxophone.
So I guess that's going to have some kind of influence.
A tenor sax.
Anyway, I know that language-- there is power in language,
you know, and really concentrating
on what things mean and how they mean,
not the usual media run of magazines and so on,
where it's very cheap.
But I know that words can do things.
They do have power.
So I wrote this poem.
And I know that powers--
that poems can be very useful.
So I wrote this poem called "Healing Animal"
to heal a sore throat.
I've heard it works.
You know, we'll see.
And so I was putting things in it that might help.
And I also have always wanted to-- you
put this story in a poem that Josiah Moore told me about.
He was telling me about his uncle.
They call it Chief Russell Moore is what they called him.
And he played the trombone.
And he used to play in all these big bands
and these great bands.
And I guess he told about sometime during the '30s
and '40s, these bands would go from New York to California
on trains.
And one time, they stopped out at, I guess, Santa Rosa
or out on the Papago Reservation and played for the people.
And I've always liked that image of this band's
out there in the desert playing for the Papago people.
So that's another reason I wanted to--
I wrote this poem is I wanted to put that in here.
And then thinking about music, and saxophone, and so on,
the throat is very much involved.
So this is called "Healing Animal."
On this day, when you have needed to sleep forever.
To forgive the pained animal needing your throat, sleep,
your back curled against my belly.
I will make you something to drink
from a cup of frothy stars.
From the somewhere, there is the perfect sound called up
from the best-told stories of benevolent gods, who
have nothing better to do.
And I ask you what bitter words are ruining
your soft-skinned village.
Because I want to make a poem that
will cup the inside of your throat
like the fire in the palm of a healing animal, like the way
Coltrane knew love in the fluid shape
of a saxophone that could change into the wings of a blue angel.
He tasted the bittersweet roots of this crazy world
and spit it out into the center of our musical globe.
Josiah's uncle brought his music to the Papago center
of the world.
And music climbed out of his trombone,
into the collective heartbeat of his tribe.
They had never heard anything like it.
But it was the way they had remembered,
the way Chief Russell Moore must have known when
he sang for the very first time through the brass-boned
monster.
All through the last few nights, I
have watched you fight for yourself with the eyes
I was warned against opening.
You think you are asleep when you turn off the lights.
And we blend into the same hot-skinned sky.
The land called Miracle is the daughter you never died for.
And she stands at the edge of the bed
with her slim hand against your cheek.
Your music is a crystal wall with a thousand
mouths, kin to trains and sounds that haven't yet been invented.
And you walk back and forth through it to know
that it won't betray you.
And in the last seconds before the breaking light,
when you are nearly broken with a secret antelope
of compassion, when the lost guardian angel has flown west
to the Pacific to see someone else
through their nightly death, a home fire
is slowly kindled in the village of your body.
And the smoke of dawn turns all your worded enemies
into ashes that will never rise.
Mythic cattle graze in your throat, washing it with milk.
And you will sing forever.
[APPLAUSE]
OK.