WEBVTT

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The sound of a poem makes a
great deal of difference to me.

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And poetry I think always occurs
between the polarities of song

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and speech in our era,
and our right now poetry

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is very close to speech,
I think perilously

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close to speech, flattened out.

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There were other times such
as in the Elizabethan time

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when it was much,
much closer to song.

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This poem is about as close
to song I think as I can get,

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and still have some sense of
the speaking voice in it that

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will make it poetry for me.

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It has one word in it,
hydras, which was--

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the hydra was a mythological
beast, a water serpent,

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that if one of that
had many heads.

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And if one of its heads was cut
off, it would grow back again.

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"Fire and Sleep."

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I think of myself as dust of
bones, mornings when I awake

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to find the fine white ash
lining the bottom of my box

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stove.

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Each night I slide
in logs thicker

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than the circle of my
thigh, and watch them

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all blaze for a while, because
I am about to sleep and know

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that what I see
in fire and sleep

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possesses me for no reason
I can ever understand.

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The fire in a dark room
is the center of a dream.

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Flames pulse as constant
blue transparencies

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inside yellow hydras that
want me to become them as they

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change and change again.

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While on the underside
begin orange coals

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that should seem so cool
and delicious on the tongue.

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And all of it
nothing by morning.

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