Then I picked up the wrong book, and I went from adolescence
back to childhood.
And it's a book called The Bloodlines,
where I wrote some more poems about my growing up.
Mostly my battle with the Episcopal Church.
[INAUDIBLE] was one as always.
I think it'll probably win in the end.
It usually does so what the hell?
The book is organized around two long poems.
24 poems, which I will spare you this evening.
But they're terrific.
You should read them.
But go ahead and buy the book.
Well, I want to read three, I guess
three, three poems that are sort of divisional poems
in the book, the first one, and one in the middle
and then one of the last ones.
The first one was a poem called "Virgo Descending,"
because it's about my family, my father.
And I'm a Virgo, and I was born on his birthday.
So how much more Virgo can you get than that?
He was a construction engineer, which
is why there's so much construction imagery going on.
And it's about going down into the Earth
to find the ghosts of one's past.
The original idea was me, of course, and Dante, and Homer
and everybody else--Pound, and so on.
Well, that's why it's the first poem in the book.
[INAUDIBLE] No, I guess that's no.
"Virgo Descending."
"Through the viridian and black for the burnt match,
through oxblood and ochre, the ham-colored clay, through plate
after plate down, where the worm and the mole will not go,
through ore-seam and fire-seam, my grandmother, senile and 89,
crimp-backed, stands like a door ajar
on her soft bed, the open beams and bare studs of the hall,
pink as an infant skin in the floating dark.
Shavings and curl swing down like snowflakes
across her face.
My aunt and I walk past.
As always, my father is planning rooms,
dragging his lame leg, stroke-straightened and
foreign, behind him.
An aberrant 2 by 4, he can't fit snug.
I lay my head on my aunt's shoulder, feeling at home,
and walk on.
Through arches and door jambs, the spidery wires
and coiled cables, the blueprint takes shape.
My mother's room to the left, the door closed.
My father's room to the left, the door closed.
Ahead, my brother's room, unfinished.
Behind my sister's room, also.
Unfinished.
Buttresses, winches, block-and-tackle, the scale
of everything is enormous.
We keep on walking.
And past my aunt's room, almost complete, the curtain's up,
the lamp and the medicine arranged
in their proper places, in arm's reach of where the bed will go.
The next one is mine.
Now more than half done, cloyed by the scent of jasmine,
white-gummed and anxious, their mouths sucking the air dry.
Home is what you lie in or hang above,
the house your father made or keeps on making,
the dirt you moisten, the sap you push up and nourish.
I enter the living room, It too unfinished, its far wall
not there, opening on to a radiance I can't begin
to imagine, a light my father walks from,
approaching me, dragging his right leg, rolling his plans
into a perfect curl.
That light, he mutters, that damned light,
we can't keep it out.
It keeps on filling your room.
That's the light of hell, boys and girls."