The last thing that I'll read is the most recent thing
that I've done.
Some of you have already heard it.
The poems are concerned with the myth of Eden,
and the sequence is called "Lamentations."
The Logos.
They were both still, the woman mournful, the man
branching into her body.
But God was watching.
They felt his gold eye projecting flowers
on the landscape.
Who knew what he wanted?
He was God, and a monster.
So they waited.
And the world filled with His radiance,
as though he wanted to be understood.
Far away, in the void that He had shaped,
he turned to his angels.
Nocturne.
A forest rose from the earth.
O pitiful, so needing God's furious love--
together they were beasts.
They lay in the fixed dusk of His negligence; from the hills,
wolves came, mechanically drawn to their human warmth,
their panic.
Then the angels saw how he divided them--
the man, the woman, and the woman's body.
Above the church and reeds, the leaves
let go a slow moan of silver.
The Covenant.
Out of fear, they built a dwelling place.
But a child grew between them as they slept, as they
tried to feed themselves.
They set it on a pile of leaves, the small discarded
body wrapped in the clean skin of an animal.
Against the black sky they saw the massive argument of light.
Sometimes it woke.
As it reached its hands they understood
they were the mother and father, there
was no authority above them.
The Clearing.
Gradually, over many years, the fur
disappeared from their bodies until they
stood in the bright light strange to one another.
Nothing was as before.
Their hands trembled, seeking the familiar.
Nor could they keep their eyes from the white flesh
on which wounds would show clearly like words on a page.
And from the meaningless browns and greens at last God
arose, His great shadow darkening
the sleeping bodies of His children,
and leapt into heaven.
How beautiful it must have been, the earth, that first time
seen from the air.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]