All interested persons at a coffee hour
Monday afternoon at 3:00, room 256 in the Student Union.
Because he's here for only one day,
he will not be meeting with classes.
So this is the only opportunity that people will
have to come and talk with him.
We'd like to get the first issue of the newsletter turned
in to the printers next week.
So if you haven't given me your good news for the newsletter,
please do so and give it to me on a scrap of paper
after the reading tonight if you like or give us a call.
We especially like news of publications, honors,
and awards.
And you know we only print good news.
We don't want to hear about your rejection.
[LAUGHTER]
I hope you can stay after the reading
tonight to meet Marcia Southwick.
We'll have the punch and cookies set up
in the breezeway between the two sections of the building
since they don't want us in the Student Union.
Marcia Southwick is currently teaching
at the writing workshop at the University of Iowa.
She's also taught at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri.
She, with her husband, Larry Levis,
founded and co-edited the Missouri Review.
She's recently co-edited an anthology
of women writers, which will be published soon by Macmillan.
Her most recent book is The Night
Won't Save Anyone from the University of Georgia Press.
It's a great privilege to introduce Marcia Southwick.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
It's nice to be here.
I think tonight what I'll do is I'll
read from the second half of The Night Won't Save Anyone
and then I'll read newer poems, because I'm
more interested in what I'm doing now than what
I was doing a few years back.
But just to explain to you a little bit about what
I'm trying to do now and was, I think,
in the second half of the book, not so much
in the first half of the book.
I'm very interested in a philosophical argument
that uses the image rather than statement in it.
The first four poems I'd like to read
are about the Connecticut River where I spent a lot of time
as an adolescent where the river meets the sound.
And the first of these is called "Upon Hearing
of a Drowning in the Connecticut River,"
and it's addressed to the drowned man.
"That you once lived here means nothing
to the edge of the lawn nor to the shrubs grown wild
beyond your dying.
The marsh goes on surrounding the fishing boats
and the boats keep drifting away past your terrible smile.
Leaves are lost or they are scattered like the shadows
around your address.
Your language has come and gone like a knock at the door.
So the time has come for the floorboards to be still
and for the windows to let your breath go out into the rain,
because you are walking somewhere else now.
And between here and wherever you are,
there is only this river freezing over.
The water gradually hardening into obsidian.
The stone bridge sprouting shadows like weeds.
In the neighboring field, two brown and white spotted horses
lean toward each other.
The thin smoke of their breath rising in the cold.
There is only this winter.
You fell into it suddenly and now you were like the swallow
those delicate bleached bones beneath the elm tree.
Now you were like the fox, that tattered fur and black blood
on snow."
And one thing about landscape and
about this particular landscape I'm writing about
is that it has somehow the capacity
to make you feel as if you're being witnessed by it as well
as the reverse.
And I think that enters my poems a lot, that feeling.
This one is called "The Marsh" and it's
about returning to the landscape after having
been gone for a while.
"The Marsh," and that feeling of being left out
of the landscape.
"Each time I returned to this place,
I expect to find a recurring distance between myself
and the huge trees as though I were
in a dream in which I could run toward them forever and never
get there.
Right now, the marsh seems unfamiliar because the crickets
have taken me by surprise.
Their singing has entered my mind just now even though I've
been hearing them all along.
So I'm almost afraid because there
must be other ways in which I am left out of the landscape.
It's as if the mallards stay hidden
in the grass for a purpose.
But I don't think they're there to make me understand what
I don't already know, only to point out
how often I'm surprised.
And that is why the mallards fly suddenly upward leaving
the grass empty and essential.
And when I try to summarize the difference between the tide
and the way I remember it, I find
myself unable to explain all that I have discarded--
the driftwood, fish skeletons, and chipped shells
are remnants of a past life I can't possibly understand."
Hey, you can come in and sit down if you want.
Sorry.
This next poem is "Winter Gulls."
"At first, I narrow my eyes because I
think that maybe the gulls want more from me
than simply my observation of them,
but then I realize I'm mistaken.
It's just that they are usually thought of as beautiful
while to me they look like scraps of dirty cloth
as they flap about over a dead fish left on the dock.
On another day, I might have exorcized them more easily
from my mind or I might have walked out to the wet rocks
and thought again of all the years the rocks
and the tide have stayed unmoved by each other.
But today, it's as if the grass doesn't
want to be disturbed by anyone walking too quickly.
So I stay in one place and keep staring at the gulls reeling
over the fish.
And I think of myself as elsewhere,
how around me there are always other people.
And to them, I am always there but never here.
And it seems to me that this is a terrible tragedy like losing
a best friend, though, everyone keeps
talking nevertheless, or calling to each other over what
they think is a not too serious distance between them.
But sometimes, like now, I can feel
that distance becoming acute.
It's as if I were asleep and trying to open my mouth."
This next poem is based on a story my mother told me.
An acquaintance of hers thought that the marshland
was so beautiful that she decided
she wanted to cast her husband's ashes out over the land.
And my mother said, all right.
But she was secretly angry about it
because she didn't really like the woman,
and it meant that the woman would keep visiting her.
And she actually admitted to me that she was angry.
So I said, I've got to write a poem about this.
Now, of course, my mother is angry at me
for having written a poem and it all accelerates like that.
That's the way relationships between children and parents
are.
It's called "Owning a Dead Man."
She really does own a dead man now.
"The geese fly off, but sometimes they
don't take their voices with them.
Stretched out like this, I think my future
is simple like a cornfield filling with light.
I'm happy because of the way the geese have left their shadows,
drawing on the lawn around me, and the way the long ducks
lean out into the water letting the unpainted boats
knock against them.
Once my mother told me a woman came to this place
with an urn that held her dead husband's ashes.
The woman's pale hands tossed bits
of gray white bone and soot under the marsh
where the quail hid.
My mother was angry that the bones had trespassed her land.
In a way she said, I own a dead man.
Now as I lie here I think of the coming winter of his bones
mixed with the bones of the mouse and the gull,
cleansed and shining in the new snow.
But if I try to think too deeply,
it's as if a bird were pulling straws from a dried out nest.
So I wonder if I have ever witnessed the middle of winter.
The birch trees' inability to lose anything more,
or if I've ever seen myself as more irrelevant than
in December.
In that cold and stillness, my blood
and my muscles contracting as I tramp through the snow
couldn't possibly mean anything.
And there are days when a landscape feels nothing
for its real trees, only for what lies still in the snow
or only for what has been.
The next group of poems are landscapes also.
It's an obsession, I think, but these
don't have a specific landscape as the others did.
And the first of these is a small incident
that happened to me when I was five and to my brother,
and it's called "The Burial Green."
"It was afternoon and my brother split a turtle's head
open in the rain.
The tiny skull glistened and soon the ants
knew every detail of cracked shell.
For hours, he sat in the blue shade
of the elm planning a burial for his small dead
until the shadows knew each curve of grass
around the green and orange spotted shell, a tiny helmet
filling with air.
It was spring and the bark on the dogwood trees
was slick and wet.
The cardinals twittered on the green feeder.
And my brother thought it was ceremony the way
the door to our white house opened and he entered,
done with the spade and boots.
The way my mother hovered in the doorway
and touched his shoulder without a word like the rain."
A friend of mine once told me, and I
hadn't known this beforehand, that birds fly low before rain.
And what impressed me about that statement
was that landscape had the power, or things in landscape
had the power to be ominous or to have omens to them.
So in this poem, I contain that idea
and I wanted to get the ominous feeling of the landscape
in also, and it's called "Landscape."
"The grass is not yet drained of color
and the birds are flying low as before rain.
The landscape has the look of something
looked at too long, a vanity by which things know themselves
as a mirror knows.
In August, you have found the day full
grown as a crop you are afraid to harvest.
You are the raven afraid of the ash tree,
or the snake which tries to coil itself
around a stream of water.
Though it tries and tries, the air
is still as futile just as gray.
Can you think of another landscape like this one,
of a pond as black and obscure?
The face is in the water flowed easily as leaves
or now they're blown about like bits of burnt paper.
This is the only landscape you know the wind obligated
to fill the curtain by your window,
and the ash is on the sill knowing
vaguely what they were."
Another friend told me, another piece of information--
I have more than one friend which now you
know that, told me that filled my sleep in winter
under the snow.
And somehow being a poet, I took that extremely literally
and worried.
Every time I walked out on the snow,
that I was going to crush a field mouse.
So I thought that the least I could do
is write a poem about it.
But the poem transformed itself immediately into a poem
about God, and I don't really know
how those these things work.
So it begins with mice and moves to God, and it's called "Dusk."
"I cannot worry about what lies beneath the surface.
So I walk into the fragile dusk, breaking
the backs of field mice still asleep under the snow.
The sunlight that does not reach me,
illuminates the distance between this world and God's, where
winter is simply the white of perfect concentration.
I would like to believe in God just
as I would like to believe there is an angel weeping
beneath the Chinese elms.
But he is an abstraction like forgetfulness or mathematics.
In the mind of God, winter can be
paraphrased as one dark tree.
And yet as I walk out over the frozen pond,
the pure white of this winter enters my mind.
And I become more open like a clearing in the woods
where light accentuates the dead underbrush without emphasizing
its ugliness.
And so I can live with my faults.
I can be touched and not feel like a passing shadow."
In the next poem, another landscape poem,
I'm trying to use the landscape to convey
a particular state of mind where it's a feeling of vulnerability
as if your nerves have been exposed.
And the poem is addressed for my mother and to my mother,
but it's also to me.
I didn't realize that till later that the poem is also
to me and about a connection between my mother and I.
And it's called "Beneath the Beech Trees."
"In winter, you began to forget yourself.
And little by little, you grew confident
until you were no longer afraid of the future, which
like a wheat field in snow seemed a place of exile.
And every morning seemed new to you
like the first day of marriage, and you
spent those days quietly wrapped in the invisible chrysalis
of yourself.
But then one day, you began singing and the voice was sad
as a prisoner's.
As we walked through the winter garden,
you pointed out that according to summer, we are extinct.
And that each season is unable to acknowledge
any other because they exist back to back.
But soon you became quiet upon hearing
the cries of the grackles as though you thought they'd
flown here from another world.
Or maybe you thought they had traveled the distance
between you and the landscape.
It didn't matter whether the grackles were
meaningless or full of meaning.
They weren't even a point of reference,
nor does it matter now how lost you
look beneath the beech trees.
Though to you, the trees may seem prophetic
because they live much longer than you do
and have a more direct connection to the future.
Yet here they are and here you are,
and you're holding your own."
This next poem began with an epigraph from Margaret, a poem
by Margaret Atwood.
And the epigraph is, I am a word in a foreign language.
And the poem is called "Poem in which I am an Old Woman."
I am a word in a foreign language,
but I don't know what the word is.
So I sit here quietly and alien to my name.
Around me, the hedges rustle, finches
settle on the roof unaware that nothing
has changed that the field has been plowed again
holding the seeds inside it like a secret.
And if there were a secret to be told,
it would be my name in another language
uttered like a prayer for rain.
The rain that is falling beyond me in another country.
The clouds drifting toward another year.
Now the finches scatter all at once.
There is a connection between myself and their cries.
If bird cries, or shadows, or too many barns on a hillside
are confusion, then maybe I should
continue to live in confusion.
But now it's as if the dusk doesn't have meaning anymore,
which makes me want to turn inward
like a rose turning to ashes, or become next to nothing
like the thin reeds.
Instead, I'm more like the brown snake.
Its color so obvious that it seems
to rub off a fine powder under the white stones
until nothing of me is hidden, no part of me
is crouched in the long grass.
And yet I can't see everything.
I can't know how exalted the owl feels
as it becomes what it is by navigating the air,
by closing in on the mouse.
Though like the mouse, I have learned
I am not acceptable to everything.
I'm not acceptable to the grass, which in this wind
seems to lean away from me and somehow
closer to the end of my life."
The last poem in the book is "The Night Won't Save Anyone,"
the title poem.
I'm trying to think of a way to explain it.
And the easiest way, I suppose, is
to describe the sensation I had while writing it.
I kept trying to put myself into a winter scene in the poem.
And each time I did that, I was also aware
that I wasn't in a winter scene, that I
was in a warm kitchen in Missouri writing a poem.
And for some reason in this poem,
it seemed too artificial not to recognize that.
And so somehow the poem, I think,
works on these two levels of myself inside the scene
and also myself outside of it writing the poem
and a view of both somehow.
"The Night Won't Save Anyone."
"Someday our bodies will no longer matter
and we will leave them in our sleep to travel easily.
But until then, I will tramp like this through the woods
and not worry that the snow falls gently between us.
What separates people happens by accident
like unexpected weather.
And it is also caused by the fact
that there's always another handshake to be done without,
always another unnecessary embrace.
It's the way there are those extra pear trees over there,
next to those extra houses which one day will be abandoned.
In one of them, a man and a woman are kissing,
sun is pouring into the windows.
And behind them, a gold paper fan
is spread out on the mantelpiece.
Now I realize they are my parents,
and everything seems suddenly empty.
Or maybe I'm afraid of losing what never
happens by having it happen.
I turn away.
It has grown darker.
The crows are where they aren't supposed
to be on the scarecrow.
The horses have already forgotten what daylight is.
The swallows are leaving.
A dried nest falls from the barn.
The smell of damp hay, steam rising from manure.
The boy ringing a bell doesn't care if I listen.
He doesn't mind if I come up to the house
or sleep each night on a torn sack in the barn.
I admire his indifference.
But how quickly the sun sets on this page.
The night has a certain, how shall I say it?
Style.
It is not concise, and reminds me of my own poems.
And the night won't save anyone.
It has another life as I do outside the poem.
And in that life, there isn't any landscape,
just the mind doing its work.
The mind which always wants to cling to such things
as deer trotting through rain.
While at the same time, wanting to be rid of them.
It's the way I try to visualize my childhood friends
and they grow smaller as if I am walking away from them.
Their faces begin to dissolve in a spiral.
I should have left them alone.
This has happened before.
Sometimes while I am sitting in my room reading,
my mind will pass through the book
the way water passes through a grid
and eventually finds itself joining a river which silently
passes from town to town by the factories and stockyards.
I turn the page, the shade deepens on the lawn.
I can remember the way I felt as a child
when I would go out into the woods
and think of myself as invisible.
I was convinced I could become part of the foliage.
Now I often feel the reverse, as though I stand out
in a landscape, a scarecrow in a burned field.
This makes me wonder if most people think that winter
is like an equation to which they're being added,
or maybe to them, the sky is just so much whiteness.
If so, they're better off because they
don't have to spend their time wanting
to be the perfect silence after a long rain,
nor do they have to worry about feeling
overlooked by the birch trees.
Instead, they can look into themselves.
But when I look into myself, I feel
as though I am looking into a pond in which the water is
hiding something--
the bones from last year's drowning,
the split jaw, the cracked skull.
I must go on admiring myself, though it's
the same as admiring a sunset which is to be feared because
of its nakedness.
And I go on believing that these words are real,
that they want to signify more than the rainy sky
or the early October evening.
But as I say each one, it looks for something concrete.
The way grief goes looking for a dead loved one or the way
a wind scavenges through yellow leaves,
looking for the visible part of itself."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Now I'll move on to some newer poems.
A lot of times when I'm writing, I'll
write in the present tense.
And what happens when I'm writing
the kind of meditative poem I do is that almost any feeling I
happen to have it that moment can enter the poem at will.
And it's hard to control that because sometimes you're
feeling different things.
But in this particular poem, doubt, the feeling of doubt
may be about writing the poem.
I think the act of writing the physical sensations of writing
have a lot to do with what enters the poem.
And anyway, doubt is the feeling that enters this poem.
It's a purified emotion, though, because I don't
describe what causes the doubt.
It's not attached to a real scene.
But then I always feel things that I
don't know what the causes are.
So "Small Difficulties."
"Is there any difference between what I am
thinking and the falling snow?
The snow is covering what I will soon forget.
The dry wheat fields, the pale leaves scattered everywhere
like small mistakes, and the red house
on the hill where the neighbors sleep
too soundly like lovers who haven't yet
considered each other's faults.
To the snow, my footprints are small difficulties
to be taken care of later.
My breath and the cold air are a contradiction of terms,
and these words are like bird cries
that cluttered the air for a moment then die.
If it's true that I exist in the shadow of my doubts
that have appeared like bad weather out of nowhere,
then this would explain why I feel like timber
about to be cut down.
It would explain why there is something not quite right
about the ice on the pond which seems to give off
a feeling of good intentions, even though it is dangerously
thin and it would explain why the light of the moon
out with me when it fails to enter my bedroom window.
On the nights, I wake from sleep and need
to know exactly where I am.
It would also explain why tomorrow, as it comes closer,
seems to have the look of already having been lived in.
And yet the sun still bothers to rise and set
over the dark barns and fields of disinterested cattle,
and the wind still bothers to touch the abandoned silos
as if to reassure them that they are still there.
So perhaps it's true that not all is lost.
The snow as it falls is repeating itself over and over.
It repeats what it is."
"The Body."
"In my future, there are ashes that control me
and yet I go on troubling the grass with my footsteps.
I am reminded that this is a place,
and that my body will never learn to speak
the pale language of the sun.
I am reminded that the light of each day
will not pass through my personal history
to clarify the events that have changed me.
The night is obligatory, and there's
no point in trying to investigate its origin in order
to alter the state of things.
Outside, the black birds will always
peck at the seeds on the tough brown lawns,
or disappear without worry into the sky, which
makes me think that the sky must be pure as a future
without sins.
And that one day, I would like to go there too
and be clear and shapeless without belongings,
because I've had enough of my body
that surrounds me with its blood, hair, and teeth.
I've had enough of this autumn which
is destined to fail as if the leaves contain
within them the instructions for falling,
or as if they will whirl in the next month on amazed
that the new season.
If it weren't for me, the coming night
would be a chemistry of perfect shadows.
And as I walk into the open field,
I feel that the shy grass doesn't understand
what it is like to be of solid weight and mass,
to take up space, and to shiver in the cold."
I usually don't begin a poem with the title in mind
at first, but this one I did.
And the title is "Solo."
And it reminded me of three things--
soul as in spirit, sol as in sun, and solo as
in singing or traveling alone.
Luckily, I didn't think of the sole of one shoe
or fillet of sole, because that would have been a disaster.
I thought of those later.
Anyway, I think I was trying to keep those three
meanings of the word into the poem subconsciously though.
I didn't really understand what I was doing till later.
"Solo."
"There are times that falter like flowers in front of me,
and times that take root in my chest like a change of heart.
Certain kinds of foliage respond to me.
Ferns, for example, are onlookers.
There are also flowers that have died only to be born again
like old opinions.
Perhaps it's true that my body won't always travel solo away
from the place of my birth.
I have come a long way through the serious underbrush,
and will probably come to a clearing soon.
I can't help thinking though of all the shadows
I've left behind, and that were once very important to me.
It would be useless to look for them now.
The way it would be useless to keep track of my footsteps
lost in the grass.
And though I would like to be grass which
doesn't defend itself but simply waits
to become undeniably green, I know that there's
nothing left to negotiate.
The old roads that used to lead somewhere
are now overgrown with weeds.
And the sun aches to occupy everything."
After writing a lot of these meditative poems,
it occurred to me that I should, as antidote in a way,
write something autobiographical.
And so this next poem is an attempt to do that.
It combines various scenes in my life together into one poem.
Also, the other thing I was doing in the other poems
is writing in a very long sentence.
And as an antidote to that, I tried a fragment, no sentences.
It's called "Doors Opening Here and There."
The only thing you need to know about it
is that my father who is a surgeon is also a sculptor
and has been trying to move from one career to the other.
And that's created some family turmoil.
"Doors Opening Here and There."
"A broken rain spout.
The dream about water rising up the stairs.
Mother and I trapped in a small rectangular room.
Her bones turning to plaster when I touched them.
A melon rotting on the kitchen sill.
Doors opening here and there into rooms
where no one is permitted.
Mother pushing farther away without the use
of physical force.
She looks at him as if from a great height,
the way one would look at stones on the ground
from the point of view of a roof.
All of this occurring over cups of coffee.
A few clouds scattered like minor complaints.
Mother's description of my brother's apartment--
no chairs, cardboard nailed over the windows,
and a wife who cries when he returns from work
and watches TV without speaking.
Her possible description of me, how one morning my son
carried handfuls of ashes out of the dead fire
and rubbed them into my hair as I slept
stretched out drunk on the white hatch.
Open windows, the wind disturbing the stillness
of the lamps and portraits.
The feeling of being lost among familiar objects,
of being unrecognized by the striped wallpaper
and dried flowers.
My husband in a closed room listening to Pachelbel in tears
because his father, now dying, used to close himself in a room
and listen to Pachelbel.
A crack in the wall that never shows itself.
My husband's father asleep in a chair in the blue living
room in California.
The wrong words that used to seize him, how will you
get there, the four lane hospital.
The calm white of the almond trees.
The rain speaking in extinct syllables.
Connecticut, what mother said to father
about his change of career.
I married a doctor not a sculptor.
Father was measuring the distance between my hairline
and my chin for the bust.
What father said to me on a ferry from Maine to Canada,
your mother's friends play golf.
I hate golf.
Noticed the apparent closeness of a couple
walking down the rainy street just
beyond the neatly trimmed hedges then
realized the rain was responsible,
not their emotions but the rain causing them to huddle together
beneath the umbrella.
No comfort in knowing the trees have flowered according
to my belief that they would.
A few blackbirds jarring the ear with insults."
The next two poems I'll read are about a particular problem
related to memory, and that is how
do you ever really know the particular facts behind what
you remember, whether they're true or not true.
Because any time you have emotional attachment
to a memory, it has the tendency to alter or change the facts.
The first poem, the emotional attachment to the facts
may have obscured them all together,
and it's a poem called "The Liar."
"Years ago, I hid beneath the porch of our white farmhouse
hoping that someone would notice my absence.
For hours, I tolerated the ants crawling over my legs
because I wanted to hear my parents
call out my name in worried voices.
Nothing happened.
My mother and father sat on the porch above me
and talked about setting traps for the mice that
invaded the house each spring.
Once, I painted a black half moon beneath my eye.
At school, I told a story that changed as the day wore on.
I'd fallen from a tree, I've been chased by my brother
with a stick, I had been slapped in the eye by my mother.
Soon, the black eye seemed so real to me
I didn't notice the black paint beginning
to smudge across my cheek.
Of course no one believed me, but the stories were true
and the paint was simply an excuse to tell them.
My mother had migraine headaches and used
to slap our heads to ease the pain.
Sometimes she chased us through the house
with a pair of scissors in her hand.
Later, when my eyes went bad, I was
relieved because I thought the doctors would finally
discover my concussions, but mother
wouldn't let them test me.
She didn't want anyone to know.
Now my mother claims not to remember any of this.
Either my mother is a mad woman or I am mad,
and this story is a lie.
Maybe it doesn't matter.
It only matters that something irrevocable happened
causing me to say all of this.
[APPLAUSE]
And here's another one about the same kind of problem,
but it's more of an abstract poem.
It's called "Why the Rain is Ignored."
"The rain on the roof doesn't understand
how complicated our memories are,
how we can choose to remember a hot day in Moscow,
and the faces of two peasants quarreling over a horse.
But not the room of a hotel we spent an entire winter
in nervous or drunk.
Maybe we don't want to remember the day
we saw two lovers quarreling.
It was November, and the elm trees around them
seemed unaware of the words flung like black coins
into the snow.
So we concentrate only on the floor in the thin layer of ice
on the pond behind them and try to forget that one of them
hurried out over the surface as the ice creaked
with the sound of a pine tree about to fall.
Once, I stood in a spring fog after hearing
the news of a friend's disappearance
I can't recall exactly how I felt.
But the jungles on the lawn seemed uncomplicated
as they tipped their heads in the sluggish gray air.
And a few pink blossoms fell easily from the magnolias
as if the trees were unafraid of their own nakedness.
Maybe we were part of a long story
to be told by someone who will purposefully
misinterpret what has happened.
So we shouldn't worry about the details of our lives.
It won't matter finally if we die in a yellow field feeling
the distance grow between ourselves and the flowers,
or in an empty street beneath the neon
sign of a bar in the silence just before someone touches
the ivory keys of a piano.
When we die, we do not reach a conclusion.
In the minds of others, the memories of us
will be altered or we will be ignored
like rain falling to the open windows of a house
where no one lives.
Here's another little tearful poem.
It's called "Boarded Windows," and it
began when I was living in Iowa City and had mice in my house
and was also feeling claustrophobic in this house.
So it consulates around that emotion,
and it's called "Boarded Windows."
"Will I die while thinking of dull gray houses
in the rain, attics where moss eat our clothes,
closets where mice sleep.
Drawers that won't open.
Doors that have lost their knobs.
Newspapers piled in the cellar or faded yellow wallpaper?
Will I die while thinking of apples rotting on the kitchen
table, white sheets on the line, dull knives, rattling pans,
rugs asleep in the hall, shoes thrown in the corner,
or red curtains pulled shut?
I don't want to die in the silence of floorboards waiting
for footsteps, old coats waiting to be worn,
mirrors waiting for eyes to look at them, windows waiting
for hands to close them, or flowers
on a table waiting for water.
I don't want to die because death reminds me
of an abandoned secret wanting to be told.
The secret is nothing can alter the sequence of events
that have led me to make certain wrong decisions.
The secret is my wrong decisions will crowd around me
in the end like apologetic children trying to convince me
of their good points.
The secret is my past will seem suddenly less
habitable like a quiet house with boarded windows.
And so I will refuse to think.
I will simply be aware of the rain falling
into the empty street when I feel my body being pulled
as if by gravity toward the end of things."
And then I think I'll end with two very new poems.
In fact, they may not quite be finished, but that's OK.
I learn a lot about them from reading.
I'll learn something by reading them.
At a class in Iowa, I was talking
to a student and I said, what would you most like
to write about right now?
And she said God.
And I thought, that's thinking awfully big.
Do you think he can really write a poem about it?
And I was trying to argue her out of it.
Well, of course, that night I went home
and wrote a poem addressed to God, and it's called "Prayer."
"It isn't up to something simple, dust, or poison
to decide the plans for us.
We were trying to fathom the desert white calendar you live
by and the white leaves outside the mind and heaven that
do not tell time.
We're trying to solve the riddle of our own yawns,
though we continue to yawn and call to you.
We tap our secular forks on the table.
We tap our feet on the wood floor.
This is a very poor prayer as it's spoken by the exact moment
half past 7:00.
For you, there is no change, no wind on your face and hands.
The wind that finds us here caught in our bodies
and hoping that it's worth it.
And what is lost, the connection between you
and the dead branches outside the window, the cross
and recross in the wind, between you
and the tiny statue of lovers covered with ice in the yard,
between you and the bird cries, which
also seem to have nothing to do with the placid light
of the moon.
All of this must mean something, even if the meaning
is being recorded somewhere in secret
among the white pages of your personal winter.
If you intend for us here on Earth
not to be any closer to each other than the squat hills
outside of town that roll in opposite directions
toward the bland flat plains, then believing in you
is unnecessary.
Like believing that the snow could cover our ill feelings as
if our ill feelings were a broken down hut, a last holdout
or believing that the rain could be a solution,
that it could somehow extinguish our anger.
Our anger, a small brush fire beginning to
sputter and blaze in the back woods.
Yet even if we are no more important to you
than roses thrown to an obscure fire that shrivel and turn
to ashes more quickly than we can say,
our lives have gone up in smoke.
Even if nothing changes and we never
know why the rain taps his undecipherable code
on the rooftops, or why the patches of sunlight
fall at random in the wrong places
on condemned factory walls, on the floors of abandoned
schools, on the unimportant back roads.
And even if the hours continue to crowd around us
like too many gray identical houses,
we will try to talk to you.
We will talk to you from where we live here
between survival and surrender.
And then the last poem is called "Blood."
And it's weaving three incidents together.
"We're are living according to a deadline.
That's the only explanation I can
find for the crowd that surrounded
the victim on the walk outside the restaurant
where I worked as a waitress in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970.
Nervousness passed from face to face as in the game telephone
we used to play as children, where someone whispered us
a secret and we passed it on until the last person
in the circle said it and the secret changed.
At some point in history, we must
have received the original instructions
for living but they are lost now.
All the handwritten messages that
explained what the years can't tell us
have been torn to shreds, all the explanations as to why
the years were out--
his blood on the walk.
And I remember now that a two-year-old leaned away from
her mother and placed a finger in the red pool near
the man's head as if she wanted to know how warm a dead
man's blood is has nothing to do with my life now,
has nothing to do with the way my mind cannot hold its
attention on what is directly in front of it.
This fall, the redbud I am planning
in the front yard and my own two ears
old who has taken the shovel from my hands
and is trying to dig, his face turning suddenly serious
and persistent as a gray sky.
That day I felt as though I'd walked out
of my childhood as out of a burning house
and into my 20th year.
I was afraid of the body on the walk and I wanted
to throw something heavy over, a coat,
but the little girl's mother did.
All my past fear seemed insignificant.
The time my father and I sailed out to a lighthouse
in the Chesapeake Bay, across rough water,
and I was afraid of the spray which flew in my face.
And of my father's laughter, which
sounded like nails shaken in someone's hands;
or the memory of trying to piece together a blue and white china
vase I threw in anger against the wall when I was five,
and the sudden fear I felt when the idea struck me
as it struck me again at 20 and now that the essential shapes
of things can all be lost.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]