[APPLAUSE]
Thank you all very much.
Now, can all of you behind me hear?
No.
Oh, OK.
Can all of you behind me now hear?
Yes.
So if I'm facing into the mic you can hear me,
if I'm looking at you can't hear me, right?
[LAUGHTER] This is one of life's awful choices,
because I hate not to look at the people that I'm reading to.
But every now and then I'm just going to swing around and look
at you, so.
And you on this side too.
I also want to lend a voice to urge all of you
to look closely at the flyers that you've
been handed out here to help save the Poetry Center.
I have very personal sentimental-- no,
maybe not sentimental-- just personal and very deep
associations with staying at the Poetry Center,
working on collecting my poems into the first selected poems
that I published and doing a lot of reading and thinking there,
a long time ago, and I think it was around 1973.
And so many poets, so many writers,
have had that opportunity, and the library
as a resource next door has been an incredible asset to just
the little house which somehow has
been so conducive to writing and thinking and reading.
So, I, from this very personal point of view,
want to urge you to see what you can do to save it
and to make it possible for Lois and her staff
to carry on the magnificent work they've
been doing all these years.
[APPLAUSE]
I'm going to read a couple of poems--
one short poem, one longer poem--
from Your Native Land, Your Life, my last book.
And then everything else I'm going to read
is from a book that's coming out in May called, Time's Power.
"Homage to Winter."
About almost five years ago I moved
across the country from the Northeast to California.
And that was a hard personal choice.
It has turned out to be a wonderful decision,
but I think a lot of the tugs and pulls
and conflicts in that choice are reflected in this poem, "Homage
to Winter."
You, a woman, too old for passive contemplation,
caught staring out a window at bird of paradise spikes jeweled
with rain across an alley.
It's winter in this land of roses, roses.
Sometimes the fog lies thicker around you than your past.
Sometimes the Pacific radiance scours the air to lapis.
In this new world you feel backward
along the hem of your whole life, questioning every breath.
Nights, you can watch the moon shed skin after skin,
over and over, always a shape of imbalance except at birth
and in the full.
You, still trying to learn how to live,
what must be done, though in death you will be complete
whatever you do.
But death is not the answer.
On these flat green leaves, light skates
like a golden blade.
High in the dull green pine sit two mushroom-colored doves.
Afterglow overflows across the bungalow roof between the signs
for the three-way stop.
Over everything that is the cotton pants
stirring on the line.
The empty coke can by the fence onto the still, unflowering,
mysterious acacia, and a sudden chill takes the air.
Backward you dream to a porch you stood on a year ago.
Snow flying quick as thought, sticking
to your shoulder, gone.
Blue shadows ridged and fading on a snow swept road.
The shortest day of the year.
Backward you dream to glare ice and ice wet pussy willows.
To riverside drive, the wind cut loose from Hudson's Bay,
driving tatters into your face.
And back you come at last to that room
without a view where webs of frost
blinded the panes at noon where already you
had begun to make the visible world your conscience,
asking things, what can you tell me?
What am I doing?
What must I do?