So I'm going to read two poems from the section
that I wrote during COVID.
And I was reading the book of Revelation a lot,
thinking about apocalypse.
And so this has some references to that.
These two poems do.
And also, I wanted to do a shout-out to my friend David
John Robson, who--
I asked him if I could--
he wrote a great little phrase in an email.
And I said--
I thought, well, either I'm going to just steal it and not
tell him, or I'm going to tell him and then steal it.
So I told him, and he said I could steal it.
The phrase is "the fabled silicon mind meld."
And so, if you write poetry, you know
that you're always listening for great phrases
that people say by accident.
And they don't really need them.
[LAUGHTER]
You can just usually take them.
But I thought, that was in writing,
and David was very generous.
"A Ragged White Moth Passes By"
So we all lived through COVID and I
was trying to get at an experience of the moth that--
the moth of history that flies.
--"had no first line and the epic
was useless except for one elderly moth
flying through as the spirit of history.
The sickness was also flying though it was not alive.
When would they meet?
And when
we thought of the world soul, how could distances apply?
Past papered windows of locked-up cafés,
the quartz in the desert and the fabled silicon mind meld,
past the uninsured--
Mosses on buildings looked like themselves,
crowded but separate, social cell walls and stems--
each with a certain commitment to survive.
I, a poet on the island of a thought, with love nearby,
lit a candle through spring.
On and on
the little beasts visited.
No
666 for them.
The rat and bacteria and sparrow's gold corona.
The ragged white moth of history flew
over landfills and anti-sorrow of the flat few,
2 wings, 6 legs, or 4 wings depending,
flew with the m of our minds or the missing ones,
its faraway moth-babies in the drawers quietly eating
the sweaters of our mothers.
The jeweled threads of the protein
wove the sickness looking like life or death,
though truly it was neither
And parallel to that, in the green springing
hills the grace-footed dark-haired spirit
of the will-not-end--"