--series we're happy to get going again,
bring you some more words, the right words.
I'd like to tell you about a few other events that
are coming up fairly quickly that you may want to know about.
February 3, Ray A. Young Bear is going
to be reading here from a new book, which
is a book-length poem called Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint
Narratives.
He's from the Meskwaki, or Red Earth,
tribal settlement in Tama, Iowa.
And it's really an extraordinary book,
so I would really urge you to come.
That's February 3, here.
Also, right now at the Tucson Museum of Art downtown
there's an exhibit of work by the Guerrilla Girls called
Guerrilla Girls Talk Back.
And in conjunction with that, there's
going to be a feminist panel discussion talking
about what it takes for women to survive
in the arts that's called "Girls in the Jungle:
a Survival Course."
And that's going to be on Saturday, January 30,
from 2:00 to 5:00.
Yours truly will be moderator and one
of four panelists, the others also women artists in Tucson.
And so that, I think, will be a very interesting afternoon.
And the final announcement is that the Poetry Center
is currently taking entries for our annual poetry contest.
This is a contest that's open to graduate students
and undergraduate students.
There are money prizes, and all the winners
are invited to read in the spring at a ceremony
and celebratory reading.
So if you're interested in that, you
can pick up entries at the Poetry Center
or in the English Department.
I should tell you as well that we're
happy that the ASUA bookstore is back again putting
in extra hours to sell books this semester
after the readings.
And we have two books of W.S. Di Piero for sale,
the two latest books of poetry--
The Dog Star and The Restorers-- so those you
can get after the reading.
I'm very happy to introduce tonight's reader.
I've probably used this quote before because it's
one of my favorites, but one of the things Donald Hall says
about the history of writing is that the history of writing
is also the history of friendships.
And there are certain friendships
that come to you through your life as a writer that
mean a great deal, certain writers who come to you,
who feed your work for one reason or another.
And W.S. Di Piero has been that kind of a writer to me,
so it's great for me to be able to bring him to you tonight.
He grew up in South Philadelphia and has published
five books of poetry, including The First Hour, The Only
Dangerous Thing, Early Light, The Dog Star, and last year,
The Restorers, published by the University of Chicago Press.
And we hope that they will be bringing out a new book of poems
soon.
He's also published two quite stunning books
of essays on art and on writing and on experience,
and they are Memory and Enthusiasm, from Princeton
University Press, and Out of Eden: Essays on Modern Art,
from the University of California Press.
And one of the newer works in the art writing
that he's completed is the catalog essay
on the retrospective that's coming up
at the National Gallery on the photographer Robert Frank.
In addition to that, he's been a prolific translator
from the Italian.
There are three books out--
Leopardi's Pensieri, This Strange Joy:
Selected Poems of Sandro Pina, and The Ellipse:
Selected Poems of Leonardo Sinisgalli.
At a time when and in a culture in which
language is used most commonly for debased and/or ridiculous
ends, Di Piero has the audacity to insist
that words convey the truth.
His work is stark, tough, lyrical, uncompromising, humble,
and passionate.
As poet Alan Dugan says, he writes
about what is ludicrous in America and how it works,
and what is horrible in America and how that works too.
I'd add to that he also writes about what is sublime.
I turn to his work often to be dazzled
by the capacity for language to give thingness
to the weird mysteries of the inner life.
Please welcome W.S. Di Piero.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Alison, for that very lovely introduction.
I'm going to read mostly poems from my new book, The Restorers,
and a little bit farther on read some newer poems.
This is called "The Museum of Natural History,"
and it's a kind of evolutionary love poem
and is set mostly inside a Museum of Natural History.
And then there's a wipe, or a switch, to a lakeside close by--
at the museum, but out of doors.
"The Museum of Natural History."
"Dawn rises where the great hall ends.
The water hole's twilight shocking pink
erodes to backstage noises, shapes--
The antelope's indifferent head points its antlers
toward a wasp nest's corrugated skull-heap.
The sound track whines and mixes the varieties
of mud's coppery morning song.
And killing ground.
The numbed roar of big cats in the distance
cuts through the other hunger music.
Above, a hooter ridicules creation--
the thirsty me-monkey, the person snickering
nervous in the tree, waiting to shimmy down and drink
from the clear pool, the source, the ditch.
The diorama's temper fades toward dusk.
We move, outrunning that shriveled time,
into the room where we feel at once all sorts of blood
laboring separate in our veins, from savanna's matinal light
to stinking rock moss and pit slime.
The crocodile's muddy blood pumped twice,
a hundred years each time, whipped the dragon tail
to kill some absent or remembered threat.
Behind, the tortoise was another blear-veined rock.
You turned, stooped, bent your nose against the glass, inches
from the rattler's head slung midair
from its squat black perch.
I remembered later how you rapped hard, impatient,
at the glass.
To startle or wake the killer's attention?
At lakeside, the blood-drop pricked from rock
was a ladybug's carapace, flown in a blister of wingbeats
when you drummed your stubby fingertips,
when you drummed your thick red nails."
I knew a young boy who confided in his parents
that he didn't want to live any longer.
And when they were finally able to get the reasons out of him,
it was because he had been experiencing visitations
of creatures from the world of faery, who at first were
friendly, seductive, good companions to him,
and then began to terrorize him.
I was reading just the other day a remark
that Yeats makes about the Irish folklore and faeries
who were known to kill people.
And Joey, the boy in question here,
was really threatened, to the point of being suicidal.
And I wrote this poem out of that.
He's fine now.
The kid is fine.
This world dissolved, the faery world--
the faeries fled him.
This is called "The Faery Child."
"Saying his prayers, he hears them scrape their flesh up
from under the bed, their voices solid, animal,
like those his own chimes with all day, the human ones.
Except for the differentness, like fluted air,
wind through tall bending trees, or owl's cry too drawn out.
Their bodies are their voices.
They tell him how to live, that he will soon return with them,
to be of them.
Some days they rise behind the sofa.
Giggling, snorting, they finger the piano
and tap the TV buttons.
You're not of these things, they say, you can't belong to this,
you belong to the voices of our flesh, our life's yours,
we can make you really glad.
Once, swarming through the door screen
from the patio, hurried in their always near breathing voices,
they closed around him, holding hands,
locking dark on darker air, and he knew he could die for them
and live his heart away, at last, from their sounds that
are so beautiful they rip him from his place,
for they won't let the plain, vaporous, half-seen world
exist for him, their presences like pollen dust on the keys,
the screen-door latch, his books, his pens.
First time he saw them, from the school window,
they were gray-green scarves, tangled in a bush,
that turned to children grown moment to moment into adults,
and now their voices come like scarves
to swaddle him, untouching, cottony, ravishing him away
from engulfment in some middle, necessary world."
There are a handful of poems in this book which
are lives of the saints--
versions of lives of the saints--
and one of them I'd like to read.
It's a poem in three parts titled
"Saint Francis of Assisi," and it's set,
more or less-- the first and the last section
are set more or less in the present.
The middle section is set in 1944.
And my notion when I was writing it was I was feeling really
persuaded at the time that it's possible to exercise
what I thought of as an angelic intelligence in a poem, which
was sort of all migrating and it could have
different times all at once.
And I was trying to write poems in which I could get all this
"all-at-onceness" there.
And Assisi, as you probably know, is a hill town.
I happen to have been there at a time when there was a drought,
and that figures in one part of the poem.
Another part of the poem, the middle section,
takes place in the winter and has
to do with the wolves that come to the town behind the church.
And there's mention in it of Alexander's army,
and that mention comes out of Dante
in one of the scenes in the Inferno
when he describes the flakes of fire that rained down.
And he describes the sinners stamping them out
like Alexander's army was said to have done.
So it's this-- each section has a little subheading.
"Saint Francis of Assisi."
"The View.
The plain's hatching now after rainless months.
A dust devil rips through a peach orchard down there,
a seam snuffed by falling dust-fruit.
Behind the vine rows' shriveled abundance
a low fire runs ragged by the ditch, flaying the pale sod.
The voided skins wave.
September, thirsting, sings our Hosannah, shrieks red poverties
to old heaven's eye.
1944."
My sense is that this is sort of Francis's intelligence
working here, speaking all this, feeling all this.
"1944.
You want February?
Snow and sleet came down hard, heaven's post-Christmas gift
to freeze our eyelids shut.
Walking the icy ground, our shoes all shot with holes,
we did the Alexander's Army Ragtime Dance,
stomping snow off bones safely packed in newspapers.
From down below, we must have looked crazy happy,
dancing like Hollywood Indians, though who had anything to eat?
We dreamed lard.
So the wolves came, not straight into town, not into the piazza,
but near the outcrop behind the church.
God's design, the best, the way they
study the tired world makes them next to human, or more.
They're waiting while they move.
I'd worship that expectancy.
If I could talk to one, just a few minutes,
he'd teach me hunger's secrets.
So one awful night I wrapped my legs and feet,
stuffed more papers inside my pants and shirt,
than danced my way behind the church.
Faint gray writing on the snow.
Skin and bones, sneezes, frost feathers, drifting away.
Two of them walked back, canny bigshot archbishop warrior
types.
They said-- The moon's blue, we know
you want secrets, help, advice, news from this side.
Our truth is--
Forget likenesses, live inside your carbon soul,
the moon's black and blue.
In the soul's time, the world's one winter together.
Renunciation.
The snowy poplar seeds are everywhere,
balling against curbs and car wheels, sifting through gates,
doorways, kitchen windows, snagged
by white blossoms shaken loose from the nodding horse-chestnut
leaves.
We stand in their shadows--
our springtime's dark.
The debris scrapes our cheeks, clings an instant to our lashes,
chokes the soft breath before tumbling off the near precipice.
We want divine uncertainty.
O give us the Judas tree's blood shadows,
make us sick with rank pear blossoms,
blind us with earth's random pieces engorged with broom's
milky fallen-sun flesh."
This is a poem about being in a strange place--
in a hotel, very late at night, returning to your room--
my room, and opening the door and realizing just a moment too
late that it's the wrong door.
It's the wrong room.
And everything that happens in the poem-- when the door swings
open, everything that I see in the poem
takes place in the mirror.
Myself, a woman seated on a chair,
and a guy seated on the bed.
There's an epigraph to the poem, and the epigraph
is from Madame Bovary.
"The Hotel Room Mirror."
"But who was it, then, that made her so unhappy?"
"A half-room, foreshortened even more
in the huge speckled armoire glass,
the distance chopped, uncrossable, between your image
and where I stood twiddling the doorknob before I knew
my own key didn't fit, late night, your interior
so underlit that bluer shadows oozed your forms.
Already still too late, the door breezed open
where your back and thighs twisted
in the green winged chair, your body's light coiled, at rest.
Dressed, angled deeper in the surface, your man pleaded,
hands wide, as he flexed sharp from the bed's protesting edge,
the sheets pinwheeled beneath his weight.
Your glance and his--
haphazard, stark and unconcerned--
found mine in the frame, waiting,
though I stayed invisible to myself,
my stare like your bold forms inhabiting our depth of field,
in the scuffed glass transcribed.
It was already still too late to save you or be saved."
Some of the poems in this book have to do with--
not with politics per se, not with topical matters.
I don't write--
I hardly ever write topically in that way.
But there are some poems that have
to do with power and authority, murderous authority,
and this is one of them.
I lived in Italy for a while, and at one point
I visited Calabria.
And the woman who was sort of showing me around,
late one night we went out to get a bite to eat.
And we went to this little restaurant which
was built right on the beach--
the terrace of this restaurant was right on the beach--
and there was early-evening activities going on
on the beach.
Men, boys, and women crying for both of them
to come home and eat, and all this.
And the woman who ran the restaurant, when we first
got there, we started talking to her.
And we're talking in Italian, and my friend
mentions to the woman who owns the restaurant that I'm
an American.
And the woman immediately stopped speaking Italian,
and she said, so why are we speaking Italian, then?
She had moved-- she had fallen in love
with an Italian, who brought her from Ireland back to Italy.
[INAUDIBLE] And then she told me her story.
She told me this story, and a whole bunch
of things that were happening at the time and things
from her story sort of found its way
into this poem, which also ends on a bit of lore
about the swordfish.
So the title of this is "In Calabria,"
and my voice sort of crosses and slants across her voice
throughout the poem.
"The fishbone husband, aslant behind her paddling hands,
checked our plates then nosed back toward the kitchen.
She stood watching with us--
just beyond the terrace rail barechested men
hooted their sons from the cabin boat listing
on chocks that gouged a crooked trench down
to this small, noiseless surf.
Still Greeks, she said.
Sea salt in their blood, gills and seaweed
for brains sometimes.
Boys love it.
We tried once to open a place back home.
Wrong home.
Landlocked, half-dunce for the weird language,
my husband had to bring us back.
Reverend Paisley used to stop and take a bowl of soup.
A bad man then, a bad man now, visiting his mum.
The plump hands wagged her words the way
she shooed the boat, and boys, from our terrace,
down toward the sea.
Now that's all past.
Now is now.
The men peg down the boat, loop ropes on their shoulders,
and walk away, shouting at the skinny boys
to get back, be good, come on home.
You get such a lousy share once the broker takes his cut--
a young family, two houses down, brought swordfish
straight to market.
The bonfire, the black-smoke gasoline stench
their boats made, was like Ulster, like cars.
Scorch marks chip the water while she speaks.
The sea-bound dark thins out.
A few Formica tables, 10 customers,
her husband checking plates.
Her arms sweep the terrace--
So after Ireland we took this.
It's still too small.
But when we're ready to expand, the landlord, a nice man,
tells us someone won't be happy.
The world belongs to always someone else.
The full moon breaks the sea.
Above invisible boats, farther out,
fuzzed lanterns dangle, while the reaper
rows a wide quiet circle.
On nights like this, she says, the anchovies
swim toward light if it's quiet.
It's their turn, because the great one, the swordfish,
can't be caught, so they say, because the moon's not right."
Alison mentioned that I was born and raised,
and lived until I was 21, in South Philadelphia,
and though I've never been back to live,
I visit at least once a year.
And this is a poem--
it's called "Starlings."
And it's about the most common bird,
which also happens to be, like most of the human life
in South Philadelphia, immigrant populations.
And it takes place outside a bakery, early morning.
"Starlings."
"Snarls, bread trucks, yeast breathing inside huddled bags,
and sleepers completing lives behind their gray windows.
A whistle on the phonewires, feathers,
twitches, whistling down to the hot loaves.
Reeds everywhere, pulse, flesh, flutes, and wakened sighs.
An answer.
Radio news and breathers behind our windows,
birds' new voices changing, changed, to the unforgiving
hunger screech of immigrants."
And this is a little biblical poem, a New Testament poem,
coming out of the mind of a disciple at Gethsemane,
and what Judas was doing.
What he was doing, what he was saying,
and the kind of incoherence that betrayal
is-- the kind of incoherence that betrayal is.
When I wrote this I realized I was really
writing a poem about language-- something
having to do with language and belief.
So this is "Gethsemane."
"He had nerve enough to follow, dogging his heels, for what?
To learn a new vocabulary, a prayer,
down there in yellow iris that smelled like carcass?
He came back smiling.
The dog had its day, rolling in meat.
The meat was news--
The Word of God wants what we want, to be unchosen.
He must have made up his mind then.
What if he said, I don't see Him here, we'll check later?
Instead he gagged on words, like a mouthful of water brought
from the garden, that blood squirms from the blossom
loads and cracked boughs, and in the stagnant lake of the heart
the sprouting trunk splits, groans,
spilling wine, the spongy dirt inhaling any blood that falls,
and I'm falling into the tree and dogs
at lakeside bark at clouds.
Like that.
As if his own speech could infuriate time
while he waited for an act to come upon him--
as joy sometimes happens.
The soldiers-- were they his joy?--
got impatient.
So finally his bloodless lips screamed More life!
More salt!
before he gave away his kiss."
I'd like to read a few newer poems,
and maybe go back to something from this book at the end.
But my heart is really in these new poems, as things go.
As they always go.
And I've been writing poems which are almost--
are so clearly separated between poems
having to do with the Pacific, which
is where I've lived for 10 years,
and poems having to do with the Atlantic, and sort
of Northeasterly, Atlantic things,
that I decided I would read one from one side
and then read another from another side,
and see how they go.
This is a poem that comes out of my past.
And it has to do with a person in my family--
who wasn't really a member of my family,
but we all felt her to be such-- who had telekinetic powers,
and what that became to me.
The title of the poem is "Moving Things."
"My aunts mentioned her just once, calling her my aunt,
their sister, though she wasn't.
They mentioned the vinyl recliner
in the kitchen, the 'I Like Ike' poster, the Sacred Heart,
cabbage smells, sulfur, and shame.
Before jolted by the gift that called through but never really
for her, she became unpleasantly calm.
Moments later, after she said 'I don't want this
please,' God's love raced down the pulse into her look.
The neuron deity jangled things--
a table leg scraped the floor, a fork wobbled in a drawer,
knickknacks fell.
She nearly died each time it happened.
They said her mind just wasn't there,
or she wasn't in it anymore.
She sat helpless afterward, papery when they lifted her
from the vision seat to bed.
The might to move what her eye fell upon
is the image of her I keep, that fading, iridescent readiness."
My wife meditates and meditates on objects.
And we rented a house for a while in the--
I've lived in communities around Stanford University, where
I teach.
And we lived for a while in this one house
that had this fabulous lilac bush.
A real lilac bush.
California, you can't-- it's very difficult to grow lilac
in California.
They have a fake lilac that they call California Lilac,
and it's not lilac.
But we had this real lilac bush.
Whitman's lilac bush, I thought of this.
And we loved this thing.
And then we left the house, and the lilac bush
was taken out by people who came in after us
for reasons that are mentioned in the poem.
And once a year I do go east, and once I
brought a lilac-scented candle back.
And so the voice--
though I'm telling all of this, there
is quoted matter in the poem.
The quoted matter is her speaking,
the woman speaking in the poem.
And the war in the Persian Gulf two years ago
figures in this too.
"The Prayer Mat."
"'Bring me and California, you wrote, lilacs,
or something lilacky.
I miss you.
My meditation feels off.
And the people who rented after us
tore out those gorgeous lilacs--
they felt so Atlantic--
to make parking space.
Your candle's light burns early with a mockingbird's hysterics
in the walnut tree.
Also, smart bombs in a bunker.
Small war, small war.
Weepy green pulse smashed on impact.
Kneeling before the candle, you pray as you do--
as thought.
No request.
State of creation and your mind coursing in I
don't know what star gas torrent, praying for balance.
Buddha who rages, who smiles.
Conquest compassion, then evening news.
Presidents love their dune coon wars.
Why do they hate life in the name of life?
What a program-- to make more death, for God's sake.
And with Christmas lights.
Asleep, grinding your teeth, you twist and chop the air.
This morning I walked past your room.
Your little shrine's lilac smell came again.
What's sacrifice in your uncertain circle of devotions?
So many mornings you balance there, behind the door,
out of my sight."
And this is a poem which is a real Philadelphia poem.
They have the-- it used to be that the tallest
structure in Philadelphia was City Hall, at the top of which
was a statue of William Penn.
And for many years it was a kind of gentleman's agreement
in Philadelphia that no new building
would be built taller than the top of William Penn's hat.
I visited Philadelphia at a time when
they were doing a refinishing work on the statue,
so that the statue of William Penn up to here had scaffolding,
and the rest of him was being sandblasted and cleaned off.
And they had constructed by now--
if you go to Philadelphia in downtown,
they have these buildings, a couple or three of them,
which are taller than William Penn.
And all this takes place underground,
in the concourses-- the subway concourses.
The title of the poem is "The Sleepers."
And this is another of these poems--
I realize it's a lot of talk, other sort of debris
of conversation that just gets picked up by consciousness.
So this one is called "The Sleepers."
"Morning light peaking on City Hall slants
juicy wedges down the stairwells but can't seep this
far underground.
A man grabs air in his fists, panting.
Vapors feather from his lips. 'Well fuck me,
so then love is what?'
Sniffing, weeping almost, from urine fumes, he and his friend,
suits and ties, Hall attorneys maybe, turning to leave.
The concourse squirms with sleepers
twisted in cardboard cribs like children brought home late,
pulling covers tighter.
'For her?
She says, love, Jamie, what's love?
I say I don't know what either of us is doing.'
Subway cars scraping behind the tiled walls
don't wake the breathing heaps of clothes.
William Penn's chalky, sandblasted hat and face moon
above the scaffold racks that hobble his legs.
Two blocks away, a corporate center's chrome-trimmed seagreen
glass rises higher than the pilgrim's crown.
A woman rubs her gray head against the tiles--
the spot gleams when she totters away, called back to our life
by a boombox thumping the corridor.
Trashy, blood-clotted water oozing from the walls,
streams across the floors and the sleepers
are drowning without a cry.
When I prowled here 20 years ago,
I thought love's better part came from books,
a word was desire's sulfur arc from breath
to instinct's needy sound, an is or see that might take me out
of this life.
A dreamy, ignorant, woozy literalist,
I wanted scenic hardware.
Born here, I'd make my dripping underground love's pattern
for a nice false heaven.
Smoke films the greasy middle air.
The harder I listen, the more Jamie's words
bleed into echoing hoots, turnstile cranks, footsteps,
whistles--
Wet larval streaks scribble then and now across the floors.
Penn's statue, watertight, gleams
above, custodial, second-tier in the skyline.
Two bodies curl tight over steaming grates--
one foot withdrawn shyly under wraps--
while heels rap past their solemn heads.
We step around the storm-drain seeps,
the city weeping in our tunnels, leaving us alone."
I went out to visit that mission, San Xavier, yesterday,
and thought that I would, I don't know,
try to give back that experience by reading this thing, which
is about a mission in California called San Antonio de Padua.
The really interesting missions in California
are the more remote and more decrepit
missions that don't live their lives for others,
for the money, the money populations that tour.
And San Antonio de Padua is one of them.
It's a most strange place because a US
military reservation has been built--
and is now run--
all around this mission, so that in order to get to the mission
you have to pass through a military checkpoint.
And you have the feeling of being
in a military compound of some kind
as you're driving toward the mission.
There are strange names to roads and spots and arrows,
everything seems to be in code.
And before you get to the real mission,
there's a building that looks like the mission
but isn't the mission.
And all this sort of figures in the poem.
The two voices that you will hear briefly in the poem,
one is a maid.
I ask a question of a maid, and she answers.
And then a little bit later, we hear a little bit
of an old padre who works the garden at this mission.
"San Antonio de Padua."
"The soldier-- the only one in sight--
stroked his skeletal teenage mustache
and waved me through the gate.
A medical helicopter on its pad, open-eyed and dense
like a housefly.
Rows of tanks, half-tracks, other green vehicles.
Rows of barracks with packs of new sports cars
squared off on sunny lots.
Basketball and tennis courts.
Road signs point to code-named spots folded into the hills.
In the Valley of the Oaks, the first to answer Father Serra's
mission bell brought others, and others,
until 10,000 sheep grazed valley-wide
around this hub of vineyards, workshops, tannery,
the church and plaza.
Hot wind running in the irrigation ditches
brings smells of sage and live oak.
By the Church door, an olive tree
stands taller than the facade.
Wind turns its leaves.
Dried grasses stir.
A red convertible squirts down the road,
its engine whine soaked up by the wind.
I came hoping to find something left over
from that collaboration on divinity,
the Roman God planted in our sun.
Despite the sentry's word, I stopped a half-mile short
at an unmarked Mission Style building off the road.
The Mexican cleaning woman, the only person there,
said it was, or used to be, the officer's club--
I saw a kitchenette stacked with whiskey cartons--
the rooms modeled after friars' cells,
but the real mission is down the road.
'Where is everyone?' 'Oh,' she said.
'They're all here.'
In the garden, I name what I can remember.
Agave, wisteria, yucca, persimmon and fig,
'cactus' for the dozen kinds I count, when a voice behind me
says it's always water.
An old padre in coolie hat and smock points to open trenches
cut crosswise up and down the garden,
like the Church floorplan.
'New pipes, but what good when there's no rain for five years?
We always need more water.'
The cross blazed on a treetrunk two centuries ago
now lies exposed, complete, grown over in the oak flesh.
A pomegranate tree, the only plant from mission days,
bears small, waxy, Baby Jesus fruit.
Outside, I trace my map to crumbling beehive ovens,
then the massive irrigation system slaves dug.
The helicopter passes.
Church walls drenched in ochre, collapsed kilns
for firing tiles, tens of thousands of tiles--
fire and dirt seem to enclose, include, everything.
I know an abstract painter who justifies his work
because even before our early ones painted shapes of deer,
bison, hands and spears, they painted their own bodies, as
if to pull earth over us to protect us from heaven,
or to prepare us to make images of this world.
Pink wash aureoled around the windows, turquoise window
frames, red arches painted around arches, stencilled oak
leaves--
Inside the cool church, above the altar,
old pudgy, white, misshapen stars
tumble across the blue wood firmament."
This is prose.
I have written a couple of these things,
and I don't quite understand them, but they seem right.
And both of them are prose things.
And both of them had the same origins
in somebody else's poems, in poems
by a 19th-century Italian poet, Giacomo Leopardi.
And this poem has its origins in a poem of his
called "La Ginestra"--
the broom, or the flower of the desert.
And this sort of got started in that, but became this.
And the broom that I speak of here
is Scotch broom, which is a very common plant that
blooms beautifully and everywhere
in northern California in March.
And the title of the poem is "Windy Hill."
Windy Hill was a spot not far from where
I live where I liked to walk, though it's not
windy in the poem.
And anyway, all different times and places
tumble together in all this.
Everything all at once.
"Windy Hill."
"The Scotch broom beside the road
softens the winter greens, greener
now after the rainstorms, eager headstrong green
with those fragrant plants bristling under the eucalyptus,
though the wind is so still we can barely smell them.
A few bushes straggle this far up the trail
where last year, one year ago in fact, we
saw rootless, astral mistletoe draining
from our favorite live oak tree that cracked the depth of space
behind us-- we felt dizzy, fallen out of context.
We remember, who was it, told us about someone
who has kept herself alive with mistletoe treatments for cancer
that doctors 10 years ago swore would kill her in a year.
Washed out in sunlight, Orion's lines
run clear and pure somewhere up there
in front of the galaxies, those snakes' nests.
Halfway up, we're more exposed.
Fewer trees, tall motionless grass.
20 years ago, after our insomniac concierge
kept us awake half the night breaking bottles
in the courtyard below, and after we
watched the greasy Bay of Naples greening the rockwall,
we took the bus and walked through the imagined ash
of Pompeii.
The couple caught in bed, the mother arbored
over her child, the panicked dog, and those leafy wakeful
faces painted or mosaicked on the walls.
An army streaming from its anthill up the glassy madrone
bark reminds us that when the big aftershock wobbled telephone
poles several days after the earthquake,
we were in the balcony, swaying in the tree
while Aida sang triumph down in her tomb.
Nobody panicked.
At the top, we'll be just above the skyline road.
The broom is still flowering somewhere near freeway ramps,
by ditch water, at the edges of pastures and artichoke fields.
We remember to separate them from other yellows.
Not mustard flowers.
Not sourgrass.
Those plaster casts in the ruins remind us
of the crooked groundswells in Mathew Brady's photographs,
though I think as much about the portrait of a woman
holding up a stylus and wax tablet like trophies
or captions, a writer, like the woman with cancer.
In the end we want a passion for form, not for efficient mastery.
Plots in starlines, origins in dirt,
an African princess singing above the pit [AUDIO OUT]
--gray ocean we can't see, where gray whales and their calves
are swimming north again."
That poem is a hallucination, I think.
That's what it is.
I don't know what to read.
I don't write poems--
I don't know.
I don't lack a sense of humor, and I write poems which I hope
are not humorless, but the humor does not sort of spill out
at you, I guess.
How much time do I have?
I don't want to go on and on.
I'll read just a couple.
This is called "Story Corner at the Point Breeze Branch,"
and it's a branch library.
And I had things turning in my head when I was writing this.
This really was meant to be a poem about poetry
as derangement-- poetry tries to make a story
as a kind of derangement.
And the voice I started to hear was a voice somebody
who's like-- does a story corner at a local library
and is speaking to children and starts
coming undone in the attempt just to tell consciousness.
And I was struggling with it, and I was reading some Ruskin
at the time, and Ruskin was talking
about the golden apples of the Hesperides
and his understanding of that story.
And I was struggling a lot, and then I
got a telephone call, which is in the poem
because the telephone call helped
me pull everything-- everything somehow came together.
It's a very strange experience with something completely
outside you and fortuitous.
Makes the structure for you, for what structure there is.
It helps knowing I went to a Jesuit college,
and the commencement address that we listened to in 1969
was just unthinkable, just unthinkable.
So this is this person.
Me-- my consciousness here is telling the story
to these children.
"Story Corner at the Point Breeze Branch."
"For the dragon who guards the golden apples of the Hesperides
never sleeps, for he keeps the reckless fruit
rolled in his coils, and it is said he mocks human voices--
ship's captain, queen, shepherd, and priest.
And it is the sleepless dragon of the horde who speaks now
to you in these thousand scaly leather skins of words in time.
Curious George is barking up the wrong tree.
And do we know what means to bark up a tree,
or between the devil and the deep blue sea?
Before the Green Giant leaves Arthur's hall,
he lifts the lantern--
his talking head-- to the fat, feckless bourgeoisie.
Though heir to righteousness, I am
king to fish, fish in the deep blue sea.
For I, too, am eaten by Leviathan
and childed in the dragon's heart.
And who can sleep?
So many scenes.
Lemon oil rubbed on oak tables, flashcards
stapled to the wall, spines and dust.
My lifestream's glossary-- tin, cellar, anagram, endocrinology,
boogie-woogie, suture, ruby, saxophone, cantaloupe.
America and its lists--
voting rolls, Washington's wall of names,
death's chiseled registers, like the first writing,
wherein we learned how much an Assyrian landowner paid
for tomb materials.
What slaves did that work?
In 1969-- commencement--
Father Guido McGintley, SJ, LLD, commended us to country,
that some may die as others before us
in the Holy Spirit's name.
That was our dragon's voice.
Not, next to me, lanky Eddie's.
Shit.
Oh, shit.
What blessing was that?
Jesuiticality, yo.
For whom I make this spiel--
because after 20 years, he phoned
to commemorate our lost or misplaced friends.
In sleep, sightless, mud-paste shades reel and tilt behind you,
for in dream story we see with eyes at the back of our heads.
Imagination convenes us there, makes us a one and us.
Once, driving across the Bay Bridge,
between the flashing girders I saw
figures scissored into being out of the misted light.
My unreal company, permanent visitant, fierce into me.
So remember, the golden fruit coiled in the finny arms
was Juno's wedding gift from Earth
when she married heaven's dictator president.
For the dragon does not change or move.
Wordless, paying attention, wrapped in ventriloquist flame
and whirlwind.
Tell your parents what you learned today--
that it's been raining, weeds waist-high and the river rising.
Take care going home.
The way is perilous, and you'll hear
voices call to you-- voices from the sewer traps."
And I'll read another.
I'll read one more poem.
And the title of the poem is also--
it just spills into the beginning of the poem.
And it treats a character I once met who called himself
the Original Rhinestone Cowboy.
And it's set in southern Mississippi, near the Gulf
there, and that figures into it a little bit.
And he talks, I talk, and they spill together.
"The Original Rhinestone Cowboy is
saying, moments after the rainstorm,
that he can ignite ruby and sapphire scales, gemstone
chips of every kind, by picking his guitar,
filling his fist with notes, then tossing a wedding
arcade over all our heads--
I'm dreaming jewels for you people.
Here they go!
His knobby hands conduct the burger stand's neon buzz,
the day's last light, green and violet sparks--
take them!-- fluttering down last-ditch yellow,
delta red marbled under our car wheels,
in oil-slick backwater we can see offshore.
He tells this dream with fact.
He is the original only one.
Accept no imitations.
He is homeless, plain unhoused, but glad to be.
His benediction, falling on us who paused to hear,
tips our ears and lashes, returns us
to the Garden, our idea of it at least.
We can already taste the finite shudderings
of what was left to us.
His guitar, he says, is a democracy of good intent,
and if some nights it's not so good, that's all right too.
Cars swing into the lot, nick bags from the pickup window
and slide away.
The headlights prick tintype sequins
dripping from his buckskin.
He gestures down the strip, to Frosty, U-Haul, fried chicken,
crystal used-car domes--
I want you all to dream of being commonwealth, united
in a rhinestone resurrection, proud, for we're all Americans
and have worse things in store.
Trucks grinding toward the interstate toot twice for luck.
He waves-- I'm someone who's not going someplace else,
I'm an original, I don't travel too well.
To the rain-smeared cars, the strip, the truckers, to us,
he confers the rest of nothing's colors in his hands--
Bless you children.
Fear not the rain.
I say bless you all.
The O.R.C. says just you wait."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]