I'm going to read about eight or nine poems.
There are all a little bit longer than normal.
I'm not sure what normal is.
A little bit longer.
And they're all from a new book titled
Erosion, which is due out in a few months from Princeton.
I grew up in Italy and none of the poems in my first book
really have anything of that country in them.
I lived there until I was 17.
Didn't really speak English fluently until I was about 18.
And I tried very hard and in my new work
to introduce myself to a country which
represents my parents' exile.
And from which I have exiled myself again by coming home.
As you can see that the term home is confusing.
So this first poem I wrote in effect
as an introduction for myself to this place,
which is the Italian landscape.
I use a painting in it by Piero della Francesca,
an Italian Renaissance painter.
It's a painting of the Virgin Mary about to go into labor.
And she's unbuttoning her dress.
And the attending angels are about to close curtains
and preclude us from witnessing the birth of Christ.
And I was very moved by this painting so I used it.
"In this blue light, I can take you there.
Snow having made me a world of bone seen through to.
This is my house.
My section of Etruscan wall.
My neighbor's lemon trees.
And just below the lower church the airplane factory.
A rooster crows all day from mist outside the walls.
There's milk on the air.
Ice on the oily lemon skins.
How clean the mind is.
Holy grave.
It is this girl by Piero della Francesca unbuttoning
her blue dress, her mantle of weather, to go into labor.
Come, we can go in.
It is before the birth of God.
No one has risen yet.
To the assembly.
To the museums.
Sorry.
no one has risen yet.
To the museums.
To the assembly line.
Bodies and wings.
To the open air market.
This is what the living do.
Go in.
It's a long way.
And the dress keeps opening from eternity to privacy.
Quickening.
Inside at the heart is tragedy.
The present moment forever stillborn.
But going in, each breath is a button coming undone,
something terribly nimble fingered
finding all of the stops."