Some of you would be willing to come on down to the front
a little closer.
Close in a little so we're not quite so spread out.
Thank you.
The Poetry Center sponsors an annual contest for students.
The judge this year will be XJ Kennedy,
and I brought some of the contest rules and regulations
and entry blanks.
There's a stack up here behind me,
and there's a stack out on the refreshment table
if you're interested in finding out about the contest.
I also brought a stack of our newsletters.
And in our newsletter, we try to announce
literary events that are sponsored
by other agencies in town.
The next reading that sponsored by another group
is this Saturday night's reading,
sponsored by Among Other Things at the Central Arts Collective
downtown on Congress.
And it would be a poetry reading with Michael Cuddihy and Karen
Brennan.
And that's at 8 o'clock Saturday night.
Our next two readings are faculty readings next Wednesday
in this auditorium.
Poetry reading by Richard Shelton.
And two weeks from tonight a fiction reading by a new member
of the faculty, Terry McMillan.
There are nine poetry and fiction readings this month.
So whenever you need a fix just check the calendar.
And we have added one more reading
to the schedule which we will be publicizing a little bit later.
The non-fiction writer Vivian Gornick
is coming to the campus, and she'll
read in the architecture auditorium on Monday the 24th.
Architecture auditorium is the corner of Speedway and Olive.
Richard Jackson comes to us from Chattanooga, Tennessee, where
he teaches at the university.
He's published two books of poetry:
Part of the Story and Worlds Apart.
He's published two books of criticism.
Acts of-- I can't read.
Acts of Mind which is conversations
with contemporary poets.
And this Dismantling of Time.
He's the editor and founder of Poetry Miscellany.
It's a great pleasure to have him with us.
Richard Jackson.
[APPLAUSE]
OK.
When you do one of these things I
guess the first thing you want to do
is introduce yourself to the audience with your first poem.
And I think what I'll do is have somebody else do that.
I want to read a poem that's been
on my mind for the last couple of weeks by Thomas Hardy.
I think I'll begin with that.
I think obliquely, at least, has to do with what
I've been concerned with.
The poem's called I Looked Up From My Writing.
"I looked up from my writing and gave a start to see, as if rapt
in my inditing, the moon's full gaze on me.
Her meditative misty head was spectral in its air,
and I involuntarily said, "What are you doing there?"
Well, I've been scanning pond and hole
and waterway hereabout, for the body of one
with a sunken soul who has put his life light out.
Did you hear his frenzied tattle?
It was sorrow for his son who is slain in brutish battle
though he is injured none.
And now I'm curious to look into the blinkered mind of one who
wants to write a book in a world of such a kind.
Her temper overwrought me, and I edged to shun her view.
For I felt assured she thought me
one who should drown him too."
What I want to begin with is the latest poem that I've done.
It's called My Cruelest Muse.
It was written actually as I gave an assignment
in a class, as I often do, to write a letter poem,
and we put our names in a hat, and pick out the poem,
pick out this person's name and you
have to write a letter poem to the person.
So this is a letter to one of my students.
And also to a friend of mine.
My Cruelest Muse.
"If nothing else I still have this black Scripto pencil,
this notebook, and this hag of a muse who
hides out in the attic stirring an old hornet's nest.
Who lets me live everyone's life but my own.
She was born years ago when my classmates were mocking Ellen,
nearly blind, pockmarked, her spine twisted, but she never
gave me the strength to fight for truth.
She was there with her crowd of laments,
tearing their shirts, holding their arms out to the sky.
She was there when anyone slipped
under a car, forgot to wake up, caught a bullet in some jungle.
She was there carrying flowers, telling me the way to cry.
Jesus, I love that pain.
I love feeling bad for the murderer everyone turned on
at the movies.
I felt bad for the executioner, who
I imagined firing reluctantly.
No one else knew his loneliness.
I have been calling this love.
Imagine you were Caravaggio, cursing the same muse we do.
In the shadows in the Church of St. Francis in Rome,
I saw his Calling of St. Matthew.
Saw Christ entering the dark tavern,
extending a hand to the foppish saint who
is surrounded by rogues who are plotting to cheat some soul.
Christ could be anyone.
A highwayman demanding money, and Matthew
points to his own breast as if to question or accuse himself.
He must be Caravaggio wondering why his own work is ridiculed.
Imagine the artist taking his models, not from some ideal,
but from the victims he robbed or cheated.
I love to imagine him lurking in the shadows
he painted by night, in order to extend daylight
across one face or another that must have looked up
at him in disgust or horror.
I love to see him walk in the blazing streets, first
of Naples, then of Malta, where he is exiled
for killing a noble in a duel.
I love the way he walks through the rain that is floating,
not falling around him.
The same rain he enters on the road back to Rome, pardoned.
The rain that is filling the marshes
to hide the malaria that finishes them
outside the walls.
This was love, this was living for the art, cursing the muse.
If nothing else, this was blaming the nearest shadow
for our own cruelty, sitting around the tavern
table unable to act, wiping the blood off the soldiers' boots,
oiling his guns, locking the cell doors
with each empty phrase.
But this was also hoping that even in the cruelest things
we say, there's something we forget.
A kind of miracle.
A whisper against the treacherous night.
The way Matthew's companion slumped over his beer
in the corner, is ready to lift his head, ready maybe
to write the poem he always avoided,
ready to take the blame."
[APPLAUSE]
People never know what to do between poems and a poetry
reading.
Fiction writers have it's so easy.
You just keep going.
You don't have to stop and get done, walk off.
I had wanted to write a poem--
a series of poems.
It was sort of self-deprecating.
And I was telling someone this afternoon, that took me up
to the canyon, that I had wanted to write a poem called My Worst
Poem.
Let's see how many of my friends would argue over it and say
no, that's not your worst poem.
I know worse ones than that.
But then I thought, I've been writing the same poem
again and again.
This one's called The Other Day and it
has a quote from a French critic named Georges Bataille.
It says, "On the other hand, to no longer wish
oneself to be everything is to put everything into question."
"I just want to say a few words about the other day, a day.
All right.
Let me start again.
I just want to say a few words about the other day,
an ordinary day I happen to recall because my daughter has
just given me a yellow flower, a buttercup, for no reason.
Though it was important
that other day, that ordinary one
when the stones stayed just stones, and were not
symbols for anything else.
When the stars made no effort to fill the spaces
we see between them.
Though maybe you remember it differently.
A morning when I woke to find my hand
had flowered on the breast of my wife.
A day so ordinary, I happened to notice the old woman
across the street, hips so large it is useless to try
to describe them,
struggle off her sofa to pull down the shade that
has separated us ever since.
Her room is lonely as Keats' room on the Piazza di Spagna,
where there was hardly any space for words.
Where I snapped a forbidden photo
that later showed nothing of his shadow,
making its way to a window above Bernini's fountain.
A shadow that hesitated as if to open one of Fanny Brawne's
letters before deciding to take them to the grave unread.
Who knew how little his own death
must mean to the boys playing in the Piazza below.
A shadow that I later understood as my own.
Indecipherable.
But I just wanted to tell you about that other day,
the ordinary one, when the drunk turned over
under the local papers beneath a bush in the park.
When another in a t-shirt, tattooed, picked up the paper
to check the lottery number then put it down, secure
it was just another ordinary day.
That happy day in which nothing left my shadow.
That sorrowful day in which nothing ended,
well I took my mother to the clinic at noon
to burn away the spot in her lungs,
not nearly as large as the one Keats fought.
Walked along the river alone.
Brought broccoli for my favorite soup, and good wine.
Hummed a pitiful song unconsciously on that day
when a few million cells in each living thing
died and were replaced perfectly.
When I wrote a few words, crossed them out, wrote others.
That day I can tell you now when someone
left a bunch of yellow flowers, buttercups,
on the grave of a nameless child burned 40 years ago in a circus
fire.
Leaving also the child's name, Sarah.
Which is why I remember that other day because it seems
if her story could be known, thousands
of other ordinary days that belonged to her
might also be known.
And I could tell my daughter why I have this sudden desire
to weep all day.
Why weep for the names of the dead continuing,
like Samir Sayah, 16, shot in the stomach by soldiers.
Amyad Nafea, 18, shot in the chest
by soldiers, the moment perhaps my cat scratched
the door, while the cicadas begin their afternoon
thrumming.
On that ordinary day where I found
myself powerless and guilty once again.
A day so ordinary the descendants
of the very lights that bothered Christ began
their work in the hair of the boy trying
to outrun the soldiers.
An ordinary day, yes, when it was not
so impossible to go looking for the dead.
Though I must say that of all the deaths that inhabit me,
the one the other day was the least noticed lately.
So small that I imagined myself alive all day,
holding a yellow flower just one just to remember.
A day I can almost forget except for its likeness to today.
A day I must call ordinary because if it is not
so ordinary then, Christ, we are pitiful for our poor laments.
The death so small we must imagine ourselves alive
all day."
[APPLAUSE]
I'm going to switch back to this for a little bit.
Most of the poems that I've tried
to do in the past year or two, I've
tried to pull together as many possible things
as I can in the poem and see how far afield
I can go and still make sense when I come back to the end.
And this poem does that.
It began with a strange little situation
where in a little town north of Boston called Lynn.
I went in one night listening to my friend's police radio,
and we went out where an old drunk had died.
And what was amazing, what caught
us was the police talk on the radio
because he had painted and chalked incredible paintings
and chalk drawings in his little alleyway that was sort of his.
And so I went down and looked at those
and became part of the crowd.
And this poem came out of it.
At the same time a friend of mine had committed suicide.
And so all these things started to come together.
But I really owe the poem to Bob Houston who
gave me a line in here or actually a couple of lines.
It's called The Promise Of Light.
"In the background, steam rises from the snow patches
and from the backs of horses nearly out of sight, yet making
their way towards a hidden stream.
For a moment.
The crowd that has gathered around the man who
drank himself to death does not know
whether to look at this and the other pictures
he painted at the end of this alley in perfect detail
or at the man.
I believe the artist painted the scenes
from Gustav Mahler's Pastoral.
And it must be that by now the horses would
have found the stream, so much do
they seem to trust the artist's stroke which allows them all
to turn away, perhaps some shyness.
Once, north of Atlanta, I came upon two trailers
in a wreck that had spilled their horses
quiet and unnatural on the wet pavement.
Littered intervals by the blue lights of police cruisers.
No doubt these horses waiting to disappear into the wall
are those horses, alive in a world we can't name.
And this man who kept a photograph of a woman he never
knew, cut from a magazine, as his friends explained,
speaking his whole life to her.
Invented whatever past, whatever future he
could trust to face the dark.
And surely he remembered, for the first time in years,
climbing the ladder down to the bottom of a pier,
the stars already fading, with a girl he hardly knew.
The wooden pilings coated with barnacles and black seaweed.
The tide low, the oil slicks gathering
on the harbor around driftwood, paper cups, tin cans,
dead fish.
Gathering towards the darkness which was the other shore
they swam for.
Trusting luck, trusting the certainty of tides.
He must have remembered how long it takes to trust anything.
I remember reading how Mahler as a boy watched until dawn, not
believing in the burlap bag stuffed with the hair of mice
and human hair.
Charms his uncle hung around the orchard
because the nuisance deer couldn't stand the smell.
Now, in silence, the crowd begins to break up.
The artist who had seemed only to be sitting
asleep on a cinder block he took from an empty lot
next door is gone.
And I almost believe the fog on the walls
might lift revealing the scene I read once where Mahler watched,
from a distance, a girl so awkwardly beautiful
he couldn't trust what he saw.
The man with her lifted her blouse
and placed it across a branch.
Its arms spread like antlers, a spread
like the arms of another lover or her father.
Or even Mahler, becoming too slowly
the man who would finally understand that whoever you
love is all of a sudden there.
Promising nothing but the next day.
The way fireflies would gather as they all began to leave,
promising nothing but their own brief light.
In those days the imprints from tie
beams and the shadow of a rail-bed in Bohemia
would be enough to take him anywhere.
Once, by tracks like those, I found and broke open
a brown cocoon.
Inside were hundreds of yellow spiders
entangled in each other's lives.
The way our own lives and the lives of so many we never knew,
even this poor artist's, become entangled by whatever stories
we remember.
And I remember the story of Gustav Mahler
writing his Pastoral symphony in a world as silent as this wall.
Instructing his wife to untie the bells from cows,
cut the rope to the village tower,
teach singers how to mime.
And how she would try to silence the birds,
keep the horses from running.
And how later, he would lock himself
in a room waiting for his daughter to die.
And how he would return to the Danube
to face his own lingering death.
And I remember Mike Connally, the sketch artist,
who played left field with an old stubby glove.
And whom we called Sky because of the long fly balls he'd hit.
And how he turned away in the end from any sky
to face the quiet of the Tennessee River for three weeks
before they found him.
I think he knew what the poet Delmore Schwartz meant
by the deafness of solitude.
The world we are never able to hear.
Schwartz who wrote on a restroom wall in Syracuse,
New York give me $5 in the change.
And I'll go where the morning and the evening can't hurt me.
And who lay, finally, for three days in a New York City morgue.
"We live so seldom in the real world,"
he said because we are so often surprised by the deaths
of friends and cannot understand, even from that,
the meaning of our own deaths.
It may be that by now I no longer wish
to tell one event from another.
Believing the stars which are moving away yet reappear.
Like the stories of this artist, of Mahler, of Schwartz,
and of Mike Connally.
On the far wall is a picture of wolves
who must have stalked a caribou to death for weeks, trusting,
even as the artist must have, in the terrible meaning
of that event.
Trusting, as we must, in the way the mind and heart.
Find each other out despite our own fears.
Despite whatever details we invent to divert ourselves.
These stories are images we make of the morning emerging
from the fog where, when we look carefully,
one or the other of us is also emerging, trusting whatever
silence lingers.
Knowing the world begins from where we are."
[APPLAUSE]
A friend of mine who teaches with me in Chattanooga
bought a train set for his birthday last year.
I was so jealous.
Even as a kid, I only had those kind that had the three tracks
and they were big and awkward as compared
to the sleek little things on two tracks
that everybody else got.
So this poem is called Hobbies.
"You have to understand this man keeps trains.
This man creates whole landscapes made from
papier-mâché, built on the huge plywood table that covers all
of his basement except for the circle in the middle where he
controls the whole show.
There are hills with tiny Ponderosa Pines, that's
right, down to the last detail.
A hawk in one branch.
A tree house behind a cabin.
A wire house.
A crew exploring the timberline.
And ridges.
Sometimes a bear, a grizzly, can be seen just
emerging from his winter cave.
You have to understand, this is more than a game.
You have to understand that when a train passes a crossing,
the gate goes down, the light comes on,
and a tiny man that looks just like our man,
comes out from a switch house, waving a lantern.
He's asking you in.
He's a great philosopher in building his own utopia.
No one has to die.
No one gets sick.
No wars.
The town lights up whenever he wants to throw a simple switch.
The cars all obey traffic rules.
Even the funny little man leaning out
of the window of his sedan who seems to be asking directions.
And, of course, everyone knows where he is.
The houses are all new, and the yards are perfectly kept.
Inside one of those houses is a miniature Immanuel Kant.
Don't argue with me.
I mean the same kind who lived his whole life in Konigsberg
and never traveled more than a day by coach from his house.
Those ideas snaked out suspiciously
like these tracks that seemed to go on forever.
There's only one problem, the man
who keeps trains is worried about what happens
when they enter a tunnel.
He's worried that he can't verify
what he can only imagine.
You have to understand, there are several tunnels.
But the main problem is the long one curve
like a quarter moon under the mountain that covers one fourth
of the basement.
And that's why he's installing the mirrors.
That's why he's made an awful discovery.
The mirrors only reflect each other endlessly.
Or maybe inside the tunnel there is no end.
That's right, it just goes on and on.
If you happen to be on the train and they
don't even bother to punch your ticket.
This is a little paradoxes this philosophy can't solve.
Inside the tunnel, you don't change.
So you'd better go in happy.
Even the great Immanuel Kant is a little worried.
Now, we'll have to see if the trains come out the other side.
How long do you think we should keep observing?
Where do you think we're headed?
Is this is our stop?"
[APPLAUSE]
David Wojahn, who's a graduate of this program,
and his wife Linda introduced me to the wonderful world
of tabloids last year.
But anyways a few remarks about this next poem.
It just so happens that I have something
to say about the origins of this next poem.
"Not long ago it spent some time as a formula
waiting to be translated into English
by a group of scientists discussing
how feeble the relationship between the mathematics
and the experience of reality has become.
How in some geometries the shortest distance
between two points is a curve, how you can be in two
places at the same time.
That is why these words are like bombed out bridges between what
they say and what they mean.
It seems in this case, the allied B-17 Flying Fortress
bombers were very accurate.
Along each bank of the river, two armies
from another age, yet to be determined
are threatening each other.
One group is led by someone who looks suspiciously
like Hannibal, the other seems to be led by Sitting Bull.
It seems that the sword of Alexander the Great
is being confused with the riding croup of George Patton.
There are a few more things you should know.
What I'm trying to do in this poem
is disguise a recent discovery.
That is why as the poem pauses to meditate,
you will find only the ghost of Pascal
lecturing the unusually docile Thomas
Aquinas about the unfathomable dangers of the absolute.
Also, the poem has not forgotten the relative truth
of everyday life.
Quoting from the tabloid Weekly World News,
legless boys somersault two miles to save dad.
Describing in great detail the rocky terrain,
the bloody but heroic torso of the boy,
the chance and saving encounter with a motorist.
While from the same source: Trick Cigar Blows Man's
Head Off.
Though I don't have time to pursue
the interesting hypothesis concerning terrorists
and the anti-tobacco lobby, there's even a place
as the story begins to develop for the following,
Pit bull eats mobile home.
Which I use as a springboard later on
to discuss the laws of probability
as a function of the general theory of relativity,
though the uses are really self-explanatory.
You should be told also about the section
where the scientists are calculating
the glide paths of bombs.
Where they will also engage in a rather philosophical discussion
about how the joke of a few stray atoms
in one part of the world will be the sad story
of later generations in some other part.
And that is why the poem, having seen enough sadness
in his companions, does not want to mention
the real story behind itself.
How I found my uncle Bernard's letter
to my father, the chemist who enlisted before his time.
A letter from two months after my sister's birth.
Two months before my uncle flew the B-17 flying fortress
into a Belgium woods, letting the rest of the crew bail out.
A letter arriving, as it were, 40 years too late.
Married too soon before he left, he says, but he'll make it up.
You can gauge how important this is
by how much the rest of the poem has to lie, to joke, to hang
around under a streetlight, smoking, Pretending
to be the ghost of René Magritte, reading the tabloids,
faking the science.
Using words like pi meson, neutrino, graviton,
to hide behind because in the end,
each of these words or ideas is only a fiction.
A sign for something I shouldn't ever reveal.
That Bernard signs the letter Butch, his nickname.
And addresses my father as Zeke.
The names I remember on the old skis I used for years.
One name burned into each head.
Skis they must have owned together.
Names my father never revealed to anyone, not even his wife.
But used mysteriously every once in a while I couldn't tell.
Whenever the talk turned to the war, to science, to the science
he and Bernard would spend their poor lives on.
As a curse, as a blessing, or as a kind of a joke."
[APPLAUSE]
This is a pretty simple poem.
It's just called Web.
"I think he wanted to kill me.
The brown spider that had spun all night across the doorway.
But he retreated along the tangle of silk
I made with my thrashing, clenching himself
into a ball that look no different than the pods he
suspended in storage between the dog berry bushes in the house.
I never saw him.
Never heard your warning
Once, as a child, I saw my father
emerge from the crawlspace beneath the porch, covered
with webs, dead bees, pods, tiny black spiders that
made my mother scream so that my father understood what
it would mean for him to die.
I never really saw that, either.
Only imagined from what they told me.
That scene that took place before my own birth.
As any child will do, trying to connect itself with the lives
beyond its own life and moment.
That is why our everyday details become so valuable.
A silver watch, a GI compass, old maps.
The wood burning of a farm.
A simple touch repeated beyond the stories
we have found them in.
Sometimes I can see you as a girl learning to ride
the horse that is too large.
Letting it guide you both from barrel to barrel.
And suddenly, I cannot imagine not letting your hair tangle
gently across the backs of my fingers.
Not drawing you closer, and then, after a little while,
feeling you rise above me, lifting the sheets
with your back, my palms moving from the sides of your breast
to your hips.
Cannot imagine not holding you closer than our past.
Not loving you this way forever.
Or to think you would not be there at all.
One or both of us caught in the invisible webbing of a moment
we never saw."
[APPLAUSE]
One of the things that I think has
made a difference in the last couple of years
is trying to include as much as I can in poems.
And then also making the drama of writing the poem
become part of the subject of the poem.
And that's what happens with this poem.
It's called Raspberries.
And it has an epigraph from--
well, epigraphs can be so pretentious, can't they?
This is from Parmenides.
Nobody reads Parmenides.
But anyways it has something to do
with the notion that thinking and being are the same.
What you imagine and what you can name is what's real.
And the poem starts off in one direction then gets
interrupted.
And actually it was a stupid little poem
that I wrote about an owl.
And I thought it was good at the time, but after a few weeks,
I thought better of it.
So did my friends.
And so I didn't want to quite throw it away.
And so it gets used again in here.
It's called Raspberries.
"The old man knows the Earth is not a dream.
He is not going to read my poem about the tiny brown
and yellow saw-whet owl, silent as it often
is by day behind the flute sounds of my daughter's
practice.
Nor will he listen to any self-indulgence
about whether it cares if I'm here.
Instead, he's stockpiling old painkillers
to prescribe the time of his own death.
This morning the old man showed me his palm, stained like a map
by raspberries he was selling.
And I remembered how I used to believe
that the souls of suicides wanted a geography, not even
Parmenides could name.
He wasn't going to say what he believed.
He wasn't going to tell his wife when the pain became too great.
Behind him, the cracks in the window frames of his shack
were stuffed with wads of paper to keep the hornets and wasps
from going after the berries.
And I could see still my own father,
how he'd protect the preserves in our cellar.
Peach, strawberry, grape, raspberry, blueberry,
holding the whole summer by stockpiling the sunlight,
he'd say, for the winter's dark cold, the winter's silence.
But this old man, he wasn't going to hold on to the past.
He only wanted to talk about how the Earth had fallen apart
along that coast.
The glaciers rotted from the insides,
trailing the long gravel beds down the sides of hills.
How the walls of those cliffs tell us the life
we have is only a few centimeters in rock.
He wasn't going to read my poem.
But I've left him in here sitting with a few wooden boxes
at his roadside stand.
And why not?
I don't know any longer what will be important.
Tonight my daughter rushed in here from practicing,
with news of her--
that her friend's heart had suddenly failed.
I wanted the stain of a father's love
to hold her longer than I knew it would.
And what could I tell her?
A few years ago, when legend and not geography held us,
I would tell her the Indian stories for death.
How the father of shining waters was the sun,
how her young lover saved her father's home,
dispelling the birds of darkness by his own death.
I'd forgotten until now how we have
to invent a life for the dead.
I had doubted when I began, that Parmenides
was right to say that what we thought
became the world we lived.
But when you look carefully, marking set
by men or time and rocks, objects and legends or poems,
tell you whatever story you want them to.
This morning I believed it was only
a question of not using such a tired symbol of loneliness
and despair as that owl.
Now, as my daughter reads the notes
they passed in school, their children's jokes,
the message to remember Jennifer whenever she played,
she is trying to find the words to hold her close.
Do you know what I'm saying?
I'm trying to find for her which secret words preserve
our pasts.
Which secret brings the owl back again to these lines
where it doesn't seem to belong.
I'd seen it before.
Years ago, the woman across the unpaved street that
would be covered late that summer.
The same woman who was beating the old Persian rug she'd
strung across the cast iron bars, the clothesline,
looked up and saw the small owl that must have entangled itself
in the rope lines.
She looked up and knew the cancer deep in her liver.
Knew, I believe, it would take her in a week.
In those days, when we ate bread soaked in milk,
when we bottled root beer and sarsaparilla bottles
and waited for the street to be paved or tarred.
While the neighborhood grew and the owls disappeared,
I held my mother, afraid that she too might die.
It was a summer we walked along the railroad tracks
picking raspberries for miles of happiness.
Hearing my father scratch a song on the harmonica.
Trying to make us forget all the faces that returned now faster
than I want them to.
So this is it.
This is why I'm going to include all
this in that old poem for another summer,
as Parmenides would.
Why I'm going to let the owl then or now
speak for whatever future rises from the trees,
itself rising as Parmenides does in the fragments
of his own lost poem.
To escape the geography of grief, the dark that gathers
anyways.
Feeling what we had hoped for it.
Why I'm going to tell the old man
how any breath, however pained, is what Jennifer would choose.
Why I'm going to listen to the sound of my daughter's
flute rising like the old legends,
setting like a stain on the air.
As the owl lifts the wing, as we all
move off becoming a few lines in the rock.
Holding whatever stories, keep us safe
and to the silent worlds we hold so dear."
[APPLAUSE]
I think I want to read two more poems, and one of them
is a little longish.
The poem is called Wishbone.
The first one.
And it has an epigraph.
It's from Stevens really, from one of his notebook entries.
And it says, "Perhaps poetry, instead
of being the rather meaningless transmutation of reality,
is a combat with it.
And perhaps, the thing to do when
one keeps saying that life is a dull life
is to pick a fight with reality."
"This could be the poem you picked from the ruins,
the day the air was so thick in the must of the past.
One word as simple as love could have changed the story.
This is a poem so reluctant to reveal how it arrived there
to face the outside world.
It tries to talk only to itself.
In fact, this sentence is telling you
that its hero is really Cervantes,
the poor son of a noble doctor who visited court each time
a swordsman needed mending.
Cervantes, the soldier of fortune,
wounded at Lepanto, taken prisoner by pirates.
Who knew his own hero Don Quixote,
not by the comic surface, but by his desire
to avoid the tragic pain just underneath.
He would like to reflect on the way Don Quixote,
later in his own fiction, must play the role
his early story has made.
Well, this could be the poem I handed you
when we visited the ruined church tower, its library
shelves covered with bird droppings.
A scene you said that was written for Cervantes.
This was the tiny wishbone of a sparrow you found in the ruins.
I kept it for luck and for love.
Later, I intend to tell you where I lost it.
To tell you the far places I've been, the stories I've heard.
But now there's something I can no longer avoid.
For a while, this poem began with Rodrigo Rojas, who
was caught in the streets of Santiago,
Chile, beaten to the ground with rifle stocks
along with his companion, doused with gasoline
and burned, then covered with a blanket, dumped in a ditch
so that death would come more slowly.
This is not the story the poem wanted to face.
It does not want to see Rodrigo, a bystander,
does not want to focus on his eyes and that first puzzle
of dying.
Does not want to feel the fire in his throat,
unable to talk for the few bad days in the local hospital.
It would rather skip a few lines at the cafe, when
no one has yet heard the news.
It would rather argue that when you were not
reading them none of these lines remembers him anyways.
The girls in the bar are laughing.
'Include me in one of your poems,' one says,
'but do not mention my name.'
'If I were you,' another laughs, 'who would be saying this?
If I were you.'
The poem is having trouble thinking only of itself.
At the funeral of Rodrigo Rojas it
took four militiamen of President Augusto Pinochet
to hold the water cannon that would dissolve the procession.
It would take hours for the frightened people
to flee the safety of the church like swifts pouring out
from the bell tower at evening.
From the tower of our own church,
we could see far mountains through the greasy windows,
and a yellow bird, a warbler I believe,
blurred on the maple branch, wondering at our silence.
The poem fumbles here awkwardly to tell you
how one night, the next week, I swore
it was the same bird song that lit
the far darkness of Belgrad.
So that I woke dreaming of you and went down to the street
and found an old man from the hospital in a bathrobe also
unable to sleep.
And for a long time we watched the water trucks spray
the street drowning out of the saddle that lonely bird.
'We are here,' he said, 'because we know that memory must stop
inviting guests from the past.'
You have to forget, as his truck does,
all the scraps of the day, the gum wrappers, popsicle sticks,
straws.
We will look at anything, a street worker, a building
project, a traffic policeman, anything mindless
to stop from remembering.
Even so, there is a scene or two that escapes.
It returns like a prisoner.
It remembers one night the rain endless,
the artillery flashes beyond the ridges.
The difficulty in raising your boots out of the mud.
It remembers the old comrade, the blankets
rolled like seashells where no sea sounded.
The next day the Germans entered Kragujevac,
the old battleground against the Turks,
to shoot the 7,000 men and boys.
After a while, the old man was all pipe smoke, and silence,
and leaned into the past of Kragujevac which was also
the past of his own son.
Leaned into the wall as his own son must have.
But the truth is he must have imagined the 1,000 ways
death could come.
What the boy must have thought.
This poem would like to report Kragujevac
as the only place that happened.
Though he remembers another town, nameless, where
still out of respect in Yugoslavia,
no men are allowed to enter.
Instead it will tell you we watched
the truck disappear across the scraps of two languages.
The men lit by the red light in the cab,
and by the light of their own cigarettes.
If Quixote were there, the old man could have been Cervantes
and the truck would have stood for dragons
of everything he feared, everything
he couldn't understand.
I showed him the wishbone then, and I
remembered the stories you could imagine for how it came there.
For what lovers had stolen off to that tower,
hiding behind the books.
There was a young girl, just married,
who hid there, fearing love, collapsing into the wide hoops
of her gown.
I believed you.
And I believe that the bird, whatever it was,
breaking that Belgrad night has never stopped.
That the poem takes the persistent song as an elegy.
Wonders what birds sang about the crowds in Santiago,
the day of the burning.
Remembers the birds of the tower.
The signal birds Quixote woke to.
The birds of every elegy continuing.
The poem though, does not want to be an elegy.
It is, however, to become impatient
with its theory of place.
How a church tower in Tennessee, a few months ago,
can become also a tower in Belgrad almost any time.
It wants instead to deal only with single things.
The yellow bird on the branch balancing
the wind, unable to decide to fling out its soul and to whom.
Waiting five years in a prison for ransom,
Cervantes too would listen to the birds that sang of freedom.
On the walls of the cell, he would etch a few poems.
I don't have to tell you the poems of Rodrigo
Rojas are written everywhere.
They are poems we find in ruins.
Even in Belgrad.
I stood in the rain at the great fort's tower.
I stood with the Roman legions.
Watched the barbarians gather on the plains across the Danube.
I stood with the partisans, watched the German Stukas
dive unannounced from the sky.
I stood in the rain that came from Chernobyl,
and I fingered the wishbone for luck.
The next day I would head for Zagreb, where years ago,
in the first light of St Mark's Square,
watching a few women hugging the sills of houses along the walk
to the bakery.
The trees scorched.
Hearing the rail cars begin.
The traitor Pavelić offered to his German friends
another basket full of human eyes.
No one wanted to look.
No one wanted to glance up from the tasks of finding
eggs or cleaning the streets.
Pavelić only smiled.
The gray coat and trousers.
The gray muddy boots said nothing was unusual.
Nothing unusual, the poem says, where
centuries earlier in that same square,
a hero of the peasant revolt was awarded a red hot iron crown,
dismembered and burned.
So now the poem does not know who to trust.
I could trust the old man in Belgrad.
And perhaps he really was Cervantes
who admitted in the end the failure of all dreams.
And who is now going back to his room
to take a little mandarina and crackers with the dawn.
Somewhere in Belgrad, the gypsy children
are washing windows at intersections.
One hand stuffed with rags, the other holding
out for a few dinars.
The old women, kerchiefs tied around their heads,
are dreaming for the huge sides of lamb and the butcher
windows.
And it's not raining.
The young men walk the promenade, stopping for beer.
This is where the poem too wants to linger, lifting a glass.
It wants to tell you Don Quixote's episode in the end.
Instead it recalls the cafe in Santiago.
A little girl is carrying an apron
full of flowers which she sells for nearly as much
as they cost.
Her straight black hair hangs unevenly
and needs to be combed.
It is expected that she has no shoes.
That her parents have been taken.
But the poem is too polite to ask.
Behind her a troop carrier clatters past.
The poem's getting nervous.
It wants to find a home for you in one of its sentences.
It wants to tell a story with a few touching mementos.
I begin tonight by trying to tell you
I still have the wishbone.
To tell you about this river, however moonless the night.
The surface touched by skaters, or what
they call in your Texas Jesus bugs,
walking the simple miracles on water.
For what I've taken to be skaters
might be the reflection of a plane's light on the surface
or cars or the few expected stars.
The poem doesn't care, finally, what we call them.
Does not want the unexpected, though it
makes me remember because of the skaters, another season when
my friend followed the sled tracks of his daughter
to a ponds edge, early thaw, and drowned going after her.
I think it has to do with the way the heart tries
to understand its own losses by the losses of others.
It has to invent those lives to live.
I remember my own daughter chasing pigeons, opening
her arms as if to gather them all in as they rose around her,
dozens of them.
Even now, she too embraces most what flies away.
For a few hours now, we have stood where the Annisquam
River becomes the sea.
And she is watching a harbor seal bring its secrets
to the surface every few yards.
I must tell you that I've cast the wishbone, as the Portuguese
fisherman here do, on this tidal river for luck.
Hoping to keep a while a few friends from the sky.
For the old man in Belgrad, for the memory of Rodrigo Rojas,
I must tell you that this poem has
put no boats upon that water.
No lobster boats with this light signaling,
redeeming what the sea will take [AUDIO OUT]
it's scaling from the sides, the oars too loud in anticipation.
Not because they do not belong there but because remembering
all these, remembering how you knew the lives that
haunted the tower, surely you too
would have suffered the losses this poem has
failed to replace.
And surely you too have already imagined those boats."
[APPLAUSE]
And the last poem I want to read is a pretty short one.
I think in the back of your mind,
you probably have a theme or something when
you put the poems together.
And as I'm walking over here, it dawned on me that a lot of them
have to do with poems about poems.
And it's probably the sum total of my poems about poems.
This last one just called The Real World.
And I think this is probably the last poem
in this manuscript that's sort of edging its way along.
"I'm sorry for the way all this turned out.
But the scene I begin with, the one where my eight-year-old
body is sprawled out next to my aunt's old Philco radio
cabinet, its beveled brown wood curved at the top,
with the electric smell of tubes warming up,
beginning to fill my spirit, has dissolved
when I remember it must have been the McCarthy
hearing she was listening to.
I don't know what to do with what's left,
is his fragmentary sentence, a blind horse knocking around
in a stable.
But I don't know where.
It must have something to do with the toy cowboys
and horses I was clutching.
It probably doesn't mean anything,
but there's another scene where my face is pressed
against the back window of our Plymouth
later that summer, when we drove through enormous fields
of cotton.
Saw the ragged shacks, the pitiful young
faces Walker Evans had photographed.
A place I vowed never to return to,
though writing you there from now.
I can't help it.
The sun is going down.
I can't find enough moonlight to replace it.
I can't find any song of crickets to console me.
Every now and then a coyote, a wild dog
calls from somewhere beyond the tree line,
but I don't hear an answer from the other side of the field.
What I can't make sense of is why the later barbershop scene.
A smell of oils, of electric shares, of cut hair.
The pottery dusted on the back of my neck.
It makes me shiver even now.
Outside I had placed a beautiful winged car, probably
that Plymouth.
But already, somebody has packed it with explosives
and abandoned it outside a hotel in another city
where I've never been.
It doesn't mean anything when the bomb goes off
because I couldn't stop it.
And I'm sorry for the way I let these images get away from me.
I'd like to apologize to my aunt, myself,
for the rich landowners, for whoever stole the car.
But it wouldn't mean anything.
I'd like to apologize for you, but leave you this instead,
the truth all you get.
[APPLAUSE]