WEBVTT

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I'm going to switch
gears a little bit.

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I want to read a couple of
new poems, if you don't mind.

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Two of them,
actually, have Tucson

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to thank for their
genesis, you might say.

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But we'll start with
the first one, which

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has nothing to do with Tucson.

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[LAUGHTER]

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It has more to do
with the Midwest.

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I know nothing about poker,
but this invokes poker terms.

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And it riffs on an old William
Carlos Williams poem as well.

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And I guess, that's all
I have to say about it.

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It's called "Omaha Divorce,"
and it's from my new collection.

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"Smoke rises from the Queen
of Clubs' headdress of sun.

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The King of Hearts has
killed himself, again.

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The nurse cuts, I deal.

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All over the Midwest,
spring conspires

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against the electric companies.

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Their skeletal spires
humming presciently

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under the pang of snow,
baby, don't we pang too?

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Don't we hum as we palm kindness
like cards for ourselves,

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investing our interests in
the black bank of the self?

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Sure we do.

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But neither of us can say how
long the black bank will stand,

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its vaults packed full of
indecisive knaves and women

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with flowers.

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All I know is the earth will
tick with its traffic of worms,

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as we turn card after card,
waiting for the river.

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The truth is love is not the
ever shifting face of the sands

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or a noun, but a nun dressed
in inexhaustible fire who

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wanders through the rooms of the
night without want for water.

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Love is like the
conspiracy of asphodels,

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who push through slush to
hiss at the newfound world,

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singing of this place that
we, like stubborn flowers,

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have pushed ourselves into.

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Home, they insist, home."

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