I think I'll read just two more poems.
Here's another one from Palladium.
In this poem, I was trying a formal experiment.
That's part of what's happening.
And what it was was to see if I could use different levels
of diction in the poem.
I wanted to start out using some scientific--
of course, this wasn't so conscious.
I say it now like I planned all this in advance,
but, really, it just developed as I saw the material
and what I was working with.
And then I realized this might be an interesting thing to try.
I wanted to try to bring in some scientific diction
and religious biblical diction, and also some other registers
of diction, more poetic, lyrical.
It begins in kind of a cynical tone and proceeds
and becomes more sincere and more feeling
as the poem goes on.
And I wanted to see if that could
work without disintegrating entirely.
Everyone knows the world is ending.
Everyone always thought so.
Yet here's the world.
Where fundamentalists flick slideshows in darkened gyms,
flash end time messages of bliss, tribulation,
through the trembling bleachers: Christ
will come by satellite TV, bearing millennial weather
before plagues of false prophets and real locusts
botch the cosmic climate, which ecologists predict
is already withering from the greenhouse effect
as fossil fuels seal in the sun's heat and acid rains
give lakes the cyanotic blues.
When talk turns this way, my mother speaks in memories,
each thought a focused mote in the apocalypse's iridescent
fizz.
She's trying to restore a world to glory,
but the facts shift with each telling of her probable gospel.
Well, some stories have been trinkets in my mind
since childhood.
Yet what clings is not how she couldn't
go near the sink for months without tears
when her mother died, or how she feared she wouldn't get
her own beribboned kindergarten chair,
but the grief and the skull, like radium and lead.
And the visible dumb love, like water and crystal,
at one with what holds it.
The triumph of worlds beyond words.
Memory entices because ending is its antonym.
We're here to learn the Earth by heart.
And everything is crying, mind me, mind me.
Yet the brain selects and shimmers to the touch of hand
on skin, while numbing the constant stroke of clothes.
Thoughts frame and flash before the dark snaps back.
The dress with lace tears she adored,
and the girl with one just like it.
The night she woke to see my father walk down the drive,
and the second she remembered he had died.
So long as we keep chanting the words, those worlds will live.
But just so long, so long, so long.
Each instant waves through our nature and is nothing.
But in the love, the grief, under and above the mother
tongue, a permanence hums, the steady mysterious,
the coherent starlight.