I'm going to switch gears a little bit.
I want to read a couple of new poems, if you don't mind.
Two of them, actually, have Tucson
to thank for their genesis, you might say.
But we'll start with the first one, which
has nothing to do with Tucson.
[LAUGHTER]
It has more to do with the Midwest.
I know nothing about poker, but this invokes poker terms.
And it riffs on an old William Carlos Williams poem as well.
And I guess, that's all I have to say about it.
It's called "Omaha Divorce," and it's from my new collection.
"Smoke rises from the Queen of Clubs' headdress of sun.
The King of Hearts has killed himself, again.
The nurse cuts, I deal.
All over the Midwest, spring conspires
against the electric companies.
Their skeletal spires humming presciently
under the pang of snow, baby, don't we pang too?
Don't we hum as we palm kindness like cards for ourselves,
investing our interests in the black bank of the self?
Sure we do.
But neither of us can say how long the black bank will stand,
its vaults packed full of indecisive knaves and women
with flowers.
All I know is the earth will tick with its traffic of worms,
as we turn card after card, waiting for the river.
The truth is love is not the ever shifting face of the sands
or a noun, but a nun dressed in inexhaustible fire who
wanders through the rooms of the night without want for water.
Love is like the conspiracy of asphodels,
who push through slush to hiss at the newfound world,
singing of this place that we, like stubborn flowers,
have pushed ourselves into.
Home, they insist, home."