This is a poem about the first time
I saw two people making love.
I was very small and I watched it
through slatted window shades of of my parents' terrace
when I was supposed to be taking a nap.
I guess that must have been seven--
I don't really recall my age.
But I wasn't supposed to be there,
and they didn't know I was there.
And it wasn't my parents.
It was actually two people who weren't married to each other
and whose spouses were downstairs.
[LAUGHTER]
And so it was a Sunday afternoon and I
went running downstairs to tell my mother this incredible thing
I had witnessed.
[LAUGHTER]
And she said, now you must never tell Aunt Ellen.
[LAUGHTER]
I wish the poem was as sexy as the story.
I tried.
Other events in it, I spent a lot
of time driving cross-country and also driving just
between Iowa City and Denver, and Iowa City and Murray,
Kentucky, for reasons that involved,
in fact, lust and love.
So it seemed appropriate that the poem is also situated
in a motel room in Nebraska.
It's called Salmon.
I watched them once at dusk, on television,
run, in our motel room halfway through Nebraska,
quick, glittering, past beauty, past the importance of beauty,
archaic, not even hungry, not even endangered,
driving deeper and deeper into less.
They leapt up falls, ladders, and rock,
tearing and leaping a gold river and a blue river traveling
in opposite directions.
They would not stop, resolution of will and helplessness
as the eye is helpless when the image forms itself
upside down, backwards, driven up into the mind,
and the world unfastens itself from the deep ocean
of the given justice--
aspen leaves, mother attempting suicide,
the white night-flying moth, the ants dismantled bit by bit
and carried in right through the crack in my wall.
How helpless the still pool is, upstream,
awaiting the gold blade of their hurry.
Once, indoors, a child, I watched at noon
through slatted wooden blinds, a man and woman, naked,
eyes closed, climb onto each other on the terrace floor
and ride, two gold currents wrapping round
and round each other, fastening, unfastening.
I hardly knew what I saw.
Whatever shadow there was in that world,
it was the one each cast onto the other, the thin black seam
they seemed to be trying to work away between them.
I held my breath.
As far as I could tell, the work they did with sweat and light
was good.
I'd say they traveled far in opposite directions.
What is the light at the end of the day, deep, reddish-gold,
bathing the walls, the corridors--
light that is no longer light, no longer
clarifies, illuminates, antique freed from the body
of the air that carries it?
What is it for the space of time where it is useless, merely
beautiful?
When they were done they made a distance, one from the other,
and slept, outstretched on the warm tile of the terrace floor,
smiling, faces pressed against the stone.