I'll read one or two other poems from this book
and then go to the new book.
And this one is kind of continuing the mood.
It's a little more pissed off.
I'm sure that everybody in here knows someone who's--
this is analogy for someone who's not dead,
who's just blowing their life.
And I think we all probably qualify.
I don't think it's probably possible to really completely
do otherwise.
But this is somebody who is sort of actively doing so
and the grief in it comes to me both from contemplating
this person I love's life and also thinking about Mandelstam,
who's very present in this poem.
And many other poets oppressed and therefore
destroying themselves.
But also the people in Sierra Leone
this week whose hands cut off.
It's titled "In The Pasture."
"What am I supposed to put now into the sea of fulfillment.
The broken record of swaying platitudes.
I press out hard along the hurt, the campaign road.
I press my thoughts, my tiny informers.
The Earth curves more than I had thought at first.
My mind, my thoughts in uniforms.
I press them out like little hieroglyphs
onto the mudslide where the clods and lips are moving now.
Who will you be?
What will you say when it says, repeat
after me and you can't hear it for the din
the black soil makes.
You come with your ploughshare there in your mouth.
It is sharp.
It works for free, which sharpens it.
It cuts into any distance freely thinking how good to die.
Half out of their mind the words run fast and hard
over the muddy fields, seeking out boundaries,
splendid declivities.
Who will you be when it comes your turn?
When I look up, I see the body of my friend
climb up over the hilly rise and re-descend.
There is an other side, my mind knows this.
I see my friend climb down, straight down into the open
where there once was pasture.
I see the sunlight beat him down.
I see how hard it beats with its clean sticks.
I see him going in--
it's down of course--
under such loving into the mound it has prepared for him,
this golden freedom with its filamentary sticks.
Later at night, the fires on the horizon line
make clear, splendidly clear, who we must be, and who
(I sleep so badly now) they are.
You have to live, something keeps
whispering by day, in sun, under its army's yellowest of boots.
And you, it is so prominent the way
you walk over this soil, your soil.
Your mind held up there in its fiery cavity
even the day before yesterday still sparkling
like oxygen in the air.
How much room you carry about you over this field--
I'm sorry-- how much room you carry
about in you over this field.
And tell me, did you volunteer?
Are you the last free man alive?
Are you so full of life, billowing dresses
on the lines, blousy hypotheses the butterflies can make over
their field.
Can you pick your way among the among, and the illustration of,
and the once still architecture of the grandeur
of the sensible.
The obvious.
The inevitable.
The true.
The chestnut trees.
The clean white napkins folded under there.
The stars in the day sky.
The petticoat of morning mist and the great coat of frost.
What is it my friend will have to find, breaking
down and breaking down.
The Earth curves more than we had dreamed.
The slope cannot be staved against rain waters.
The day before, the syllable that
grows its root into some tiny sleeping God
and makes that great sleep shudder back awake.
The last slaves, when will they be alive?
The space in the heart, when will it be planted shut,
tamped down, choked off with root, with growth.
That final thirst-less silencing.
My friend is lying in the Earth.
No, my love is in the Earth.
He's weathering gingerly the hurt of its down slope.
So I can't see him anymore from here.
Materiality has dwindled.
What is it, muddy God, that has increased therefore
according to your lore?
The day before, the day before yesterday
appears spruced up here in my cavity.
My hole, my grandest architecture of syllabled form
building, clean, numb, lidded gaze.
A book is lying in the dust where we last lay.
The grass is bloody under it but that's a whim of blood,
you know, a tiny thirst.
What does Paris look like now.
The eye darkens and the great cities kneel.
The monster of the mind moves easily
among its morals, its constant inward sucking curl.
The day is measured out in grams of light.
The monster measured out in grams of light moves
gently over the playing field.
Dragons of changes and adjustments,
mightiness of redefining and refinement.
I love the uniforms my thoughts are wearing.
The heels.
The sleeves.
The black where nothing disappears.
I love the stitching in each breath thread hard and tight
into each breath holding the great coat on
that we'd be better looking elegant informers,
so well dressed as to be almost transparent.
Tender like the pasture.
Thick and clear like a hole that can be jumped into.
Oh Earth, voice, string, gardener, lens,
hear the hard damp in these our syllables.
We dare not pray.
Hear us as the cloth, the needle.
The low buzz of the trees in constant wind terrifies.
The leader here has cheeks shaved clean
and can't misfire because he is enslaved
and as God's son is not allowed to miss.
Someone bites his cigarette.
Someone bites hard and lets himself
go thinking how much he'd like to measure and to draw
this hole he's forced into.
How much he loves the soil they're shoving now.
Lovers of poems, of flowering, of all
miss delivered messages down his wide throat."