My first poem every time I move is one of-- you'll see,
I'm going to read a San Diego poem-- supreme alienation.
The whole-- the next book, the whole first section,
I've been holding off finishing it for a while.
Moving around really displaces me,
and when Brighton said they wanted to do something
the other day, they're a wonderful organization,
by the way.
Look closely at their things.
They do these-- they have a one book that's $4,000.
It's a one of a kind illustration
of Zbigniew Herbert's work that is exquisite.
But what they do is they bring together
an artist and a writer, and they don't necessarily
bring them together.
An artist and a writer could go to them.
And if they want to do it, they just
say, tell us what you want.
Tell us how you want to-- a book doesn't
have to look like a book.
A book could be a room.
A book could be a one of a kind Herbert illuminated manuscript.
Whatever it might be.
So anyway, they said they wanted to do something.
So I said, OK, I'll print out the stuff I have,
but it's not a book, it's not a book, it's not a book.
And then when I got it together and I was looking,
and I was like oh my God.
It is a book.
And I always thought that it had a number of different things
that were contradictions, but what
happened was there are these two sections
and everything else fell away.
And that was great, because I didn't like those poems that
well anyway.
So the first section is cold and in the mountains in the north.
And the second section is immediately north and south
of the equator.
It's tropical.
I wanted to have the sense of walking through an oil painting
and it's not dry yet.
So this is one of those, and I'm going
to read two poems from that southern section.
This is a prose poem called "Azaleas."
"Sisters climbed the bedroom window,
lay themselves on the night table like pink fish,
like negligees and soap slivers, diaphanous, pale veined.
Wrapped through doors leopard spotted nectar paths pour down
a wash of purple stars.
I remember women in New Orleans, some
driven through the humid hours like orchids in a cooler,
and others all azalea, wild pink shrubs that
trumpeted in hot places, flagrant and profuse.
Night came on so strong there the smear
of color, the neon grass, the mournful owls,
and funereal perfume.
Every bloom corpulent on flood and rain.
My friend and I walked the quarter eating butter pastry
and oysters.
Six feet tall, she glowed against the courtyards
like Venus, that marble goddess who tasted the world's saliva
as if it were champagne.
Sax men poured tunes like hot cane
just to make my friend laugh.
When Venus danced, flowers opened,
freaks spun round her like multicolored ribbons
as if she groomed her handsome children,
my friend embraced men with faces shaped like figs.
She kept a pond for beasts behind a black iron fence,
behind the quarter on Lessop Street,
and a gravestone in the grass.
Near dawn I slept on her guest bed, sweating against red satin
while a silver fan clapped overhead.
Sun cut through leaded windows and spun the air
to hot glass, black coffee with thick cream,
huge strawberries in a mahogany dining room.
We hid from the heat and talked of dying.
The flickering boats are father's road
to the spirit world, the little shells of morphine.
As the air began to wave and drip,
we walked the streets again both dressed in white gauze
with crisp straw hats, then wispy, drooping, damp,
we headed for her levee shack, three wilting
rooms of bird nests.
Water, the dissolving river lapped the back porch.
The pilings.
Tell me about a lover, she'd say, causing a lip of wine
to sing under her index finger.
We never touched but in the tuberous wave of our voices
we drifted for days.
As I drove north one dark past St Charles and into the bayou,
a rainstorm changed the livid horizon to brown, then bruise.
How sweet azaleas at the beginning,
breathing in the swamps, breathing in the streets.
Their fuchsia bodies covering our feet.
How brief our beauty and sugared heat.
Our dresses lifted and fell those hours
between the wicker and dying rafters like opulent clouds
of steam."