Our next reading will be one week from tonight
in the Terrace Lounge at the Student Union,
and that will be to honor Persona magazine.
And the readers will be the contributors to Persona 1981.
I regret to announce that one of our October readings
has been canceled.
Bill Knott has canceled his reading,
so we'll be letting you know soon if another reading will
be scheduled in that time.
I'd like to invite you to come to the Poetry Center following
tonight's reading for some punch and cookies.
Where?
The Poetry Center.
[LAUGHS]
If it's raining we'll go inside, and if it's not raining
we'll go outside.
OK?
And if it's raining and you don't want to come over there,
come by tomorrow, and I'll give you some cookies tomorrow.
[LAUGHTER]
If I don't eat them all for breakfast.
It's a great pleasure to introduce Pamela Stewart again.
Most of you know her as Jody.
Her books include The St. Vlas Elegies and Cascades, both
published by L'Epervier Press.
She's published in such magazines
as Poetry, Antaeus, The New Yorker, Ironwood.
Her work's represented in many anthologies,
including the Pushcart Prize V and Borestone Mountain Poetry
Awards Best Poems of 1976.
She has just joined our faculty teaching poetry classes here
at the university, and we're very happy for her
to read for us tonight.
Pamela Stewart.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Can you hear me?
Yes?
No?
I can't hear me.
I don't know how these things work.
Do I have to lean into it?
Better?
Yeah.
Ooh.
That means I have to go like this the whole night.
OK.
This will probably not be too long
a reading, because I'm going to read poems
that I've written in the last 18 months, which
is not that many poems.
And they seem to get--
or for a period, they seem to get shorter and shorter.
The first set of poems is from a series
called The One and the Other.
And since my favorite activities are smoking cigarettes
and plotting my obsessions, you will see
that these poems speak to that.
The cigarettes I'm saving for my first novel.
And so basically, these poems are
about acknowledging an obsession and trying
to work one's way out of it into something like the real world.
But I don't fool myself and pretend that I did that
in any way at all.
The epigraph for the series is from the Spanish novelist Cela,
and it reads, "To not remember the story leaves
you incomplete," and I believe that's true.
The first poem is called "Vespertine,"
which is a very nice word I found in the dictionary,
and it simply means of or pertaining
to the time of vespers at dusk.
"Now light falls out of the garden,
unchaining its trees and blossoms still.
A wedge sky deepens purely.
I know that God moves in to break our hearts so we
may choose reshaping them.
These are the words you told me, the no words unfolding
from the face of wall.
I touch my mouth, my tongue.
I touch the air a bird went through.
The dog barking down the street is certain of his purpose.
There's a crack in the walk, a spider's husk.
And far across the world, rooms with iron bars
are calling down the night."
"Weather."
"The room is torn into a light you haven't dreamed of.
Clouds fall between two mountains
where blue deer graze.
You know this is true.
You know how his face has gone into rain.
The cat leaps to the sill and curtains don't open.
Still, the light.
The deer have slipped into a thicket.
He is miles from there.
How dark it's become.
The blue-nosed deer step near a pond which fills with rain,
and certain things are finally forbidden.
Low notes rooted in the corners, long, white hands
folding paper.
The room is full of love that may not remain.
The doors for these walls that hold you,
the door is for later and cannot keep away the eye of God,
burning across the plains."
Sometimes I'm not sure how these poems connect.
"Eurydice."
"I molt in the face.
The lake skin toughens this summer.
Yellow chintz hangs in the window.
Water pulls along my eyes.
Yet you stand nearby where I am not in love
and fire fills the lake.
Paper boats sail off the island's lip.
I lived there once as air above the flames.
There are times a man's torso in the concave clench of love
makes an animal's face.
At those moments, I want to send you
a postcard saying, slow dance, dusk, thunder over trees,
saying, I am not air.
I am just not.
Lift your head and reach for me across the world.
Shouts from the island, tall pines, and a clearing
where blueberries ripen from their blood color of someone
stabbed yesterday.
The boats have caught fire, are dying in water.
An edge of yellow in my mouth.
I bite down hard.
That face, surging in window glass.
Is it mine?
Someone's opening the door.
I won't look."
The next one is called "Sand."
I was really into one-word titles,
because I had written all these wonderful titles that went on
for two or three lines before you read the poem,
and I was really tired of that.
And it was very hard to find one-word titles,
so I tried to find the most elemental thing that
applied to the poem.
At this time, I was reading "Wind, Sand and Stars,"
which made it a lot easier.
[LAUGHTER]
And the image of the dogs in this poem--
I don't know why I keep telling people
this-- it was very striking.
On New Year's Day, I was driving down I-10 a couple of years
ago, and I saw a big black hound dog with his ribs
showing right in the middle of the road eating roadkill,
and the blood was coming out of his mouth.
It was like 1980, and it seemed like the black dogs
of the plague in medieval times.
And he seemed really an omen.
And all these cars were going by him really fast,
and he just stood there, absolutely obsessed with having
to eat, he was so hungry.
It doesn't have a lot to do with the poem, but--
[LAUGHTER]
--it didn't at the time.
"Sand."
"I reach for you in sleep, touch a nervous wrist.
You pull away your hand.
I see the dogs of war eating sand.
I see the blood blacken at their feet.
A child puts his face deep into his mother's skirt,
his mouth gritty with thirst.
The prelude continues one hour while its piano stands forever.
He is my subject.
It is not what you think, a face perceived and never
really seen.
I move my body towards him, white of washed root.
The blue veil at my mouth keeps out the sand,
and wind is the same over and over.
Today, I cut my leg, black twig drawing.
Once a man took my blood through his teeth.
His lips shone.
With salt-red eyes, I see how the clouds are jaws spilling
sand around the street lamps.
His voice across the world is a gap in the wind.
The subject is not what you think.
It howls, and his face falls into my lap, a black key
pressed and never released."
The next couple of poems are sort of marriage poems.
I like to think that they're not my marriage,
but they may have been.
"Gravity."
"My mouth flicks into red points of air as you hit me.
A hand flies up through mantles of space I cannot fill or keep.
This is the bodiless night.
This is where innocence frays along speckled air.
I touch one thread, its pain drifting from house
to house, ashes, ashes.
Sleep while you can.
Black spots in the corner of my eye float between us,
between the dust-pocked glare of broken glass,
and you hard into the wall go spinning along the edge of me.
One of us falls.
The children don't wake.
Their small arms and legs hold on.
I won't stay, though your heart, disembodied,
is sewn to my hair."
"Insomnia."
"Someone sleeps with his back to you, or he doesn't.
He sweats as he dreams.
On his lip, a small blue spot gathering
clouds beyond a mountain pass.
Miles from here, you see another man
staring into himself at the face of a woman.
She turns at the gate.
He looks so hard, she becomes transparent.
He looks through her, right into the Earth.
He wakes.
You both wake.
On the mountain the deer stand betrayed.
One of them is you.
The sky loose and snow.
A flash of hooves circles your room.
Black spots on the horizon.
In each hand, you hold a story.
Between them, your heart wedges into the Earth, not
flower, mouth, or star, but an eye half shut, waiting."
Incidentally, black spots on the horizon
I found in the thesaurus, and it was an old 19th century
term for being depressed.
A lot of hearts in these poems.
There's nothing I can do about it.
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
Two-word title, "Tabula Rasa," blank slate.
Tonight, the moon flings against our walls.
What it does to us makes a heart split,
forgetting the prettiness of its origin.
Inside my fingers, the blood shakes into unpainted poppies
that scatter their tissue reds.
Each holds your face.
You pull the sheet over your chest.
My hands tremble to dig through toward that cluster of ribs
and wrench them open.
I want to listen to what's there.
I'm inside two people.
The other is not you.
I want to understand the moment he died.
You are different from me and might know, but you are asleep.
The other is standing by a river.
He turns to say goodbye.
The knife leaves his throat, and what I prayed against
drags me toward where you were sleeping
in the white skin of yourself.
We are nameless.
I hold everything back, asking, where is the time for sorrow?
We must eat."
In this series, there of course has
to be a father poem, as in my second set of poems.
And again, I find myself returning
to the landscape of my childhood, which
is New England, in the countryside of Western
Massachusetts.
And trillium are a kind of wildflower
that first appears in the spring.
They're kind of a real dark, almost blue-red, at least
the ones I'm thinking of.
"Of My Father."
"A child flings herself into those pine woods
where blue jays snap the air in half.
Blood trillium reduced the shade of Earth unpatching from snow.
I am back in that instant I misplaced years ago,
leading to a summer pond called evening, home.
There's the corpse with countless faces
rising from water.
He calls me toward his gifts scattered among far trees,
terms of endearment, thin lips, and the lilting gold chain
that locks down my throat.
I have always worn it.
Two or three women pulse in the radius of my wrist.
Cassandra, Marie, and delicate Anne.
None of them are me.
I wake from this, a self torn from others
who, if she had her way, would be rinsing her arms
and legs in the moon's deft, predictable light.
But it's nearly dawn.
A first bird unlatches.
The man beside me sleeps with his long legs walking away.
His eyes open briefly.
I lean above him and see how he holds back
the enveloping breath, seeing also
how deeply he could give it.
I kiss his shoulder, and what I say no one
hears as the gold scar on my neck breaks and the forest
falls toward me.
Blood lover of night face down in water,
the wildflowers want gathering.
The name is in my mouth, and I'm not able."
This is the attempted return to reality.
"What Is."
"I was sick of myself, a bell of desire always shaking.
Music pulled my skin inside out, upsetting
the house where I lived.
I met a man with white hands who pulled illusions
from under blue fingernails.
They were wafers on my tongue.
The leaves outside our imaginary window
gathered an adagio of light from the cruising moon.
The dark edges of our arms and legs
tightened until it was easy to say yes, always, we are,
we are.
The paper and tastes were so nearly
true I think he would hit me now if he could.
He might even believe in blood on the wall.
But the days are what they wish to be.
There is you, and language is harder.
I move one leg at a time to a few clear tones.
In the morning, coffee and the exhalation of night
work, steam above the dusty smell of sex.
I don't pretend to know if God loves me,
but outside, a sky is opening with light
as two people stumble from sleep, arriving at a table
where only newsprint is certain of its lies."
And this is the last poem of the series.
"October," which is my favorite month except in Arizona.
[LAUGHTER]
"October."
"My mouth starts speaking in another direction of how apples
are falling into red smoke and the sun no longer
publishes each leaf or name.
I want to know what's forbidden, to enter
that space an apple takes from the heart of tree.
Dark radiance, your hands have unpeeled this story
to the edge of the world.
It falls against a man who turns to look back on a field
where blue deer descend, stitching the heartland up
for winter.
From the hills, leaves shiver back, a sound no one can name,
speechless as what's caught behind my teeth.
The branches now fill up with sky,
holding that horizon where a man slowly
opens his hands to the shape of apples and the deer lie down,
where leaf and fruit must sleep forever."
I wrote all those poems drunk on vodka.
[LAUGHTER]
It's true.
I realized it when I went over them before this reading,
except for the very first one where I
was outdoors and very healthy.
But I drank all this vodka and listened
to Pat Metheny's American Garage, which
is great for writing, because you're
so involved in the vortex of the music, of improvisational jazz.
Every time you choose a word, you
have to force it out of yourself from the bottom up,
so it makes for a more declarative poetry
than I used to write.
The next set of poems are newer, and they're still
being revised all the time.
And I suppose they're a section of a book.
I don't know.
I'm not sure if books should be sectioned anymore or what.
And the epigraph for this is from Thomas Mann.
"In all of us is the wish to return to the has-been
and to repeat it, that if it were once unblessed,
it may now be blessed."
I love epigraphs.
They give a lot of information.
And so do dedications.
That can save you a lot of time.
[LAUGHTER]
Seems logical to me.
I don't know about this poem, but I'm
going to read it anyway.
It's called "A Little Place."
And again, it has an epigraph.
Maybe I shouldn't put it here.
And it's a sort of crippled epigraph
from a Charles Wright poem that said,
"This world is a little place.
Hold hands.
Hold hands."
It's a father poem.
Of course.
"A Little Place."
"From the yellow eaves of our house,
two pigeons shoot into the sun.
What matters is the way my eyes follow
and how desert sparrows stitch up the blankness between grass
and trees.
I move closer to touch that invisible seam
where your face pulls back from light into a little place.
Stupid, stupid ecstasy that tires my mouth,
I move closer without you.
The mourning dove sob loosens at the core of my throat.
I've been faithful, never brushing
the slope of your skull.
Father, in August the birds won't even
remember how they fell violently up into leaves.
Shadows shook the grit of their songs in the sun.
And Father, like you, the birds will
forget how they started everything over and flew."
The next poem is bizarre, I think.
I don't know.
Before a poker game, some people were talking at dinner,
and I heard about sin eaters.
And I don't know if you know about them.
I had never heard of them.
It's a Celtic tradition where a member of a town or a community
who is kind of a--
not exactly a favorite member of the community
will eat all the food on the table.
Before somebody is buried, next to the corpse,
the food's all laid out.
And by so doing, absorbs the sins of the deceased.
And then leaves the house in the morning,
and the people in the community throw him money,
and that's how he makes his living.
And it's an inherited job.
And so this guy's son--
he's got to have a son.
Otherwise, he's in real big trouble.
When he dies, the son takes the sins
of the father, consequently taking
the sins of the whole community and his own father,
and keeps on working, eating this stuff, all these cakes
and things.
And it seems a really fascinating notion.
Apparently, there was a Night Gallery show about a sin eater,
and I don't know what happened.
And so I'm trying to write in the voice of the son eating
the stuff around his father's coffin.
And it was a strange experience, because before I
wrote this poem, I started doing drawings with my left hand.
And I'm right-handed, so I was using another part of my brain.
And it was really interesting.
I had about three different voices that seemed to have--
one was male and one was female, and one was sort of in between.
And amongst all that, I sort of tried to arrange this poem.
"The Sin Eater."
"Outside, the wind has not stopped.
It tunnels, and the birds fall in.
The cabled shadow and sway are making a chill on my skin.
On the table are trays, a chalice, and the long box
where he lies with his waxed, unstitched mouth.
Small leaves are clicking at the window,
and tonight I'm as far away from my name as on the day
it was given.
It is not the cake, not the pastries nor slabs of ham.
It is not the white fat rinsed in milk,
but how all breath pushes against me,
a crumb of salt from love's encrusted feet.
The name of this man I do not know is hurting my mouth.
It's the name of my father with his ladle of darkness
between my ribs.
White stones flow from his eyes and the wind
repeats his fingers tapping at the sill.
They have left me here, mortal and in love, holding the slope
of his woman to my lips.
She unleashes against me.
I lick the blood from beneath her nails
and kneel to cradle the stones that have gathered to feed me."
Next poem is-- wants to write about the most
cliche and beautiful sunset you ever saw without mentioning
the word sun.
Not very easy.
And it makes reference to a Chinese painting,
which probably most of you know called "Six Persimmons," which
is done in bluish and gray colors.
Called "Postcard."
"Dusk.
The sea is between colors and our medallion star
is ready to leave for China.
This is the brush stroke hour we have already befriended.
I'm here for the first time taking a rush of water
into my mouth.
My ribs fold with a white salt weight.
Centuries ago, Mu Ch'i slipped his eye from fog to indigo.
A grain of sand dislodged from a monastery wall.
His six bitter orbs of fruit are still blindingly pure.
And every day, his seventh unpainted persimmon
ripens across the sky.
The bell blossom moon follows behind.
Here in California, the day shakes once and falls.
The ocean pulls closer.
With luck, you say, a sudden streak
will flash toward the stars as the flaming persimmon
dips into salt. In this way, the eye will complete the day.
It will root in the heart.
My hands return from water.
The water returns from China.
I would unstain my heart to carry it with me."
I was just reading Louise Bogan's autobiography,
and so I wrote a poem for her, because I really like her.
I think she had a lot of integrity and a lot of guts,
and I think we should all read her and love her.
[LAUGHTER]
It's called "Back Through Song" for Louise Bogan.
"I spend all day in the sound of soaking rain.
I lean at her desk as she thinks how all the streets once
had wooden houses.
At dusk, through open summer windows,
children repeat their scales.
Long, awkward songs plunge from the pianos.
The maple leaves take on a certain light
like a wide yellow drape.
Each day still holds unbearable promise,
and each night the secret reason for it.
Not eyes, she thinks.
Rain fills these city streets.
It's not good to be so shut away from stars.
In just hours, the clouds break through to pink and gray.
The pavement holds that scent of freshly ironed cloth.
She walks across one street toward those metal
gates which divide the world.
There, children play inside the park.
They hoot and cry until a mother calls.
A ball thuds against a tree, once, twice, soft as bright."
This is just a little poem.
And I wrote it for women characters in novels.
It's called "From the Attic" for Lily Bart and Mrs. Rochester.
Why not?
I think it's nice to write for characters as well as people.
"From the Attic."
At home, each bird I saw sang in tune with my ears and teeth.
Red flowers flew into my hair.
Now it snows when it wants to.
The month of the 10th moon is back
with its cold carpet of light.
Snow crowds the chimneys and the pond is cracking in its shroud.
Through my window, the bloodless moon
drops her white face onto mine.
Ice flowers open on the pane.
And what is true streaks across my eyelids into my mouth.
It is a spider weaving her bright corner,
the lock clicking into place."
This is another little poem.
This is a double imitation.
I never did an imitation before.
I mean, I didn't think I did.
I guess I did a lot of them.
This is after a poem--
after content and two poems by Li Po, and in style
it's after a Charles Wright poem called "Portrait of the Artist
with Li Po."
So I figured, you know, it's an exercise.
"She Thinks of Him After Li Po."
"A white bell narcissus nods beneath pines.
Her mouth makes a word that follows you.
The stream beyond slows bright to dark.
From the temple, a pulse and a breath chime their distance.
You the moon have touched that flower's face.
Small weapon.
Your light still does not cut through water.
One hour, and you've slackened toward another day.
Her sorrow leans into the pines.
The trees rise as the stream breaks open
its inescapable river of stars.
They are gods, both here and up there.
Water tears the flower from her stem.
Wind bears a current of grief into the air.
When you turn, you will see its bright, ringing mouth."
When I was little, it was really my grandmother
who took care of me.
And so I wrote a poem for her.
At one point, I thought that I would not see her again.
But it wasn't true.
She's really tough.
She's just hanging on and traveling and stuff.
And for lack of anything else, I call it "Benediction
For My Grandmother."
"Everywhere around is the city and its noise,
except for that space the wind makes in dry, tall grasses.
I'm told the dead live on the other side of a single leaf,
close to my mouth.
The breath I send travels each vein
to the deep other world where the wind lies down
by the roadside.
Last night, I dreamed I was a child against your knees.
I was braced there between blood and bone, that moment
before waking when everything is true and not true.
Still, the small use of walking here tonight
makes beautiful, the knowing that the moon is dark inside
with the dark of tunneled bone.
A haze among these leaves I gather in my hands
toward you, toward the wind that wants touching."
There's just a few more poems.
I have nothing to tell you about this one particularly,
except that Sebago is a lake in Maine,
and there are things that are facts
and there are things that are psychologically true.
"The Wind of Late Summer."
"At first, what flew hard from my grandfather's mouth
into my mother's ribs was a feeling.
No more, no less.
Call it anger, call it love, call it thunder
cracking against the pines.
She never spoke of that moon, looking up
from the lake, or the loons with their terrible noise.
The doorknob turned.
His hands became two red knots slipping at her breasts.
Don't tell me I can't speak of this.
My mother hummed in her sleep as the mist from Sebago
sucked all the light from the windows.
Grandfather stomped through the house
like it was still outdoors.
My mother wakes now, over and over.
What truth there is lives in the air that
thickens the clock's grief.
Those sheets, once pale beneath her storm-bound hair,
have rotted and gone.
Curled into myself, I think how he sent his breath
hurtling down her throat as the wind rose on its hind legs.
Leaving my dress on the floor, I rise
to open the window on ancestral hands ticking at the sill."
Next poem is called "Spring."
Real simple title.
I woke up one morning trying to write a sonnet about cows,
and I should have known better, because it was early March
in Phoenix, and I always write an orange blossom poem.
Because in New England there are no such things,
and they're still miraculous to me.
They have this-- they just smell great.
I don't know.
"Spring."
"The scent is back, a bridal weave across the city.
All night, the kiss won't leave our mouths and memory steps
with dark measure between us and the flowers.
If we rise to this, the white-budded stars will shake,
the sky fall back to air.
I know what I've worn in my bones since birth,
hands at my throat, hands at my knees,
that swift red stain between my teeth.
The future of memory flares.
We age.
The flowers return.
The trees I pass each day fill up with birds.
I pick a single orange blossom, which I crush to my wrist.
I could rub its skin to music, break a man's bones
to get to the heart.
I have only one slow breath, riveted to breath.
The stars stammer back their light.
Oil of flowers.
Bright enemy.
Heart."
And this is the last poem, which I kind of like,
because it started in such an ordinary--
such an ordinary event like going
to the store for cigarettes.
And the lovers that are mentioned here
are Paolo and Francesca, of course.
It's called "The Eye of Heaven."
Actually, I like the title best.
"The Eye of Heaven."
"Walking home, brown sack hugged to my hip,
the wind lunges brightly around me.
Across the street, figs ripen within the fingery green
of their tree.
Suddenly, I hear the clacking arpeggio of a fallen muffler.
The car pulls up behind me.
I turn as a Navajo boy jumps out, sees me, and grins.
I grin back, eyes filling with the shape of him,
the spine's knobs of light, his hair a black globe of sun.
And for just a moment, an impersonal lust raids the sky.
My eyes take all parts of him until I wear
his brown other skin as mine.
Back in the kitchen and no one is home.
There is no one to talk to or touch.
The sky leaps against its light.
Trees still with the weight of an incoming storm.
The birds stop and low belly clouds fill with dust.
Rinsing lettuce and beans, I think
of how Dante said lust is a lesser sin.
How can I tell?
Those lovers continually weeping circle a torn black sky.
Mouth on mouth they fell into a war of winds, opening the eye
of heaven.
Then you come home, put your hand on my hair.
The windows darken as across the street,
figs swell and shine in the rain.
We lie ankle to thigh, but limitless world admits me.
There are words not for my mouth.
Caught, whirling in the eyelid of dusk, I cry, don't close.
Don't close until I must."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]