So we had a class last night about radical revision.
Yeah.
And in that, I mentioned John Keats' idea
of negative capability.
And which is really a mandate for poetry but also
for living, and being comfortable with the unknown
and taking risks.
And
It's something that I try to do in the writing.
Not so much when I'm reading the poems, but tonight
I'm doing that in this sense.
It's a long poem, and I'm saving it
to the end of a long reading at the end of a long day.
So I'm hoping you'll stay with me.
Yeah.
OK.
So a little bit about the poem.
My wife always says that I say too much to introduce the poem,
but she ain't here.
So-- [LAUGHTER] so I'm going to introduce a poem.
I was living in DC for about 11 years.
And while I was there, one night in the early '90s, it's dusk,
I'm walking down the street and something flies towards me
and I thought it was attacking me.
I thought it was a bat.
It flies away, comes back attacks me some more,
flies away.
And what I noticed, it was a bird, small bird.
And it was coming and just really frantic
and then when it would fly away from me,
it was flying to where there was another bird that
had his foot caught in a closed car door.
So that bird was kind of beating his body against the door trying
to get free.
So the first bird was trying to get help.
And it was DC, '90s, rough neighborhood.
The only way that I could have freed the bird
would have been to open the car door, car alarm would sound,
somebody comes out the house, the bird's gone.
So I made a call and I kept walking,
and the bird flew out to me for a while
then it just gave up on me.
And when I first started writing poems,
I knew I wanted to write about that incident.
And I wasn't able to for at least a couple of decades.
Until I read this article about the jazz musician, Eric Dolphy.
And in the article, it said that one of his practices
was to go into wooded areas--
into parks, forests, and he would listen to birds
and he would try to transcribe their calls because he said
there was something earnest and honest in their music
that he wanted to get into his own.
And when I read that, it reminded me of the birds in DC
and then the poems started to happen.
But it's long, so stay with me.
And it has a bleeding title, which means the title bleeds
into the text--
I'm going to hydrate now.
Thank you for listening.
"Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls
of Certain Species of Birds,"
I think first of two sparrows I met
when walking home, late night years ago, in another city,
not unlike this--
the one bird frantic, attacking I thought,
the way she swooped down, circled my head,
and flailed her wings in my face,
how she seemed to scream each time I swung,
how she dashed back and forth between me and the blood
red Corolla parked near the opposite curb, how, finally, I
understood.
I spied another bird, also calling,
its foot inexplicably caught in the car's closed door,
beating its whole bird body against it.
Trying, it appeared, to bang himself free.
And who knows how long he'd been there, flailing.
Who knows-- he and the other I mistook, at first, for a bat.
They called to me--
something between squawk and chirp, something
between song and prayer--
to do something, anything.
And, like any good god, I disappeared.
Not indifferent, exactly.
But with things to do.
And most likely, on my way home from another heartbreak.
Call it 1997, and say I'm several thousand miles
from home.
By which I mean those were the days
I made of everyone a love song.
By which I mean I was lonely and unrequited.
But that's not quite it either.
Truth is, I did manage to find a few to love me,
but couldn't always love them back.
The Rasta law professor.
The firefighter's wife.
The burlesque dancer whose daughter
blackened drawings with ms to mean the sky
was full of birds the day her daddy died.
I think his widow said he drowned one morning on a fishing
trip.
Anyway, I'm digressing.
But if you ask that night--
did I mention it was night?--
why didn't even try to jimmy the lock to spring the sparrow,
I couldn't say, truthfully, that it had anything to do with envy,
with wanting a woman to plead as deeply for me as these sparrows
did, one for the other.
No.
I'd have said something, instead,
about the neighborhood itself, the car thief
shot a block and a half east the week before.
Or about the men I came across nights
prior, sweat-slicked and shirtless,
grappling in the middle of the street, the larger one's
chest pressed to the back of the smaller,
bruised and bleeding both.
I know you thought this was about birds, but stay with me.
I left them both in the street--
the same street where I'd leave the sparrows--
the men embracing and, for all one knows they could have been
lovers--
the one whispering an old, old tune into the ear of the other--
baby, baby, don't leave me this way.
I left the men where I'd leave the sparrows and their song.
And as I walked away, I heard one
of the men call to me, please or help or brother or some such.
And I didn't break stride, not one bit.
It's how I've learned to save myself.
Let me try this another way.
Call it 1977.
And say I'm back west, South Central Los Angeles.
My mother and father at it again.
But this time in the street, broad daylight,
and all the neighbors watching.
One, I think his name was Sonny, runs out from his duplex
to pull my father off.
You see where I'm going with this?
My mother crying out, fragile as a sparrow.
Sonny fighting my father, fragile as a sparrow.
And me, years later, trying to get it all down.
As much for you--
I'm saying as for me.
Sonny catches a left, lies flat on his back,
blood starting to pool and his own wife wailing.
My mother wailing, and traffic backed, now, half a block.
Horns, whistles, and soon sirens.
1977.
Summer.
And all the trees full of birds.
Hundreds, I swear.
And since I'm the one writing it,
I'll tell you they were crying.
Which brings me back to Dolphy and his transcribing.
The jazzman, I think, wanted only to get it down pure.
To get it down exact--
the animal racking itself against the car's steel door,
the animals in the trees reporting,
the animals we make of ourselves and one another,
flailing, failing.
Stay with me now.
Days after the dustup, my parents took me to the park.
And in this park was a pond, and in this pond were birds.
Not sparrows, but swans.
And my father spread a blanket and brought from a basket
some apples and a paring knife.
Summertime.
My mother wore sunglasses.
And long sleeves.
My father, now sober, cursed himself for leaving the radio.
But my mother forgave him, and said,
as she caressed the back of his hand,
now we could just listen to the swans.
And we listened.
And I watched.
Two birds coupling, one beating its wings as it
mounted the other.
Summer, 1977, I listened.
And watched.
When my parents made love late into that night,
I covered my ears in the next room,
scanning the encyclopedia for swans.
It meant nothing to me--
then, at least-- but did you know
the collective noun for swans is a lamentation?
And is a lamentation not its own species of song?
What a woman wails, punch drunk in the street?
Or what a widow might sing, learning
her man was drowned by swans?
A lamentation of them?
Imagine the capsized boat, the panicked man,
struck about the eyes, nose, and mouth each time
he comes up for air.
Imagine the birds coasting away in the waters, suddenly calm.
Either trumpet swans or mutes.
The dead man's wife running for help,
crying to any who'd listen.
A lamentation.
And a city busy saving itself.
I'm digressing.
Sure.
But did you know that to digress means to stray from the flock?
When I left my parents' house, I never looked back.
By which I mean I made like a god and disappeared.
As when I left the sparrows.
And the copulating swans.
As when someday I'll leave this city.
Its every flailing, its every animal song.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]