Hm, trying to debate whether I want to read
you the new one or the old one.
The new one's kind of long.
I'll read you the new one.
It takes 12 minutes to read.
I hope this is OK.
It's not boring.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I promise it's not boring.
[SIGHS] I've timed it.
I've read it once before.
This is going to be in the APR, next issue or the issue after.
It's again, it's playing with the look on the page.
It's got four words in the corners of the pages.
See?
So it's nailed up like that.
The idea of the nails came from--
our family has Martin Luther in its ancestry,
and I like the idea of nailing, nailing something up.
So I nailed it up with four words,
and APR is accommodating it by putting in a little space.
This is about geology and addiction,
syntactically deranged in each little packet.
It's got these little stanza packets that
are neither stanzas nor lines, but anyway it's
called "A Geology."
I will read the corner words first.
And that way I won't interrupt the reading of the poem,
and then I'll read the poem rather fast.
I know I read it too fast, but it's the way it sounds to me.
"Range, conditions, locust disagree, features outcropping,
silence re-used, daylight, suture, excellent, fault, trap,
enact, telluric, avail--" How did I choose these?
I chose them.
"Plate, porch, proud civilian, bedding, mica, stars, Mexico,
slide, metal, shists, bubbles, fault, fault, fault, fault."
That's it.
"A Geology."
"What we love can't see--
if Italy looks like a boot to most people,
California looks like the skin of a person
about to sit down, a geology.
Consider the coast range--
we can achieve the same results by pushing a pile of wet papers
from the left, and finally they were just in love
with each other.
Consider the fault line with only two sides of it.
How come you never thought of one of them?
A place we love can't see--
a condition so used to becoming.
Those who have straddled reference
know a map will stand for wholeness.
When you were trying to quit the drug and broke in half,
you said...
and you had to trust it--
that is, needing it.
Landforms enable us to scare, where Berkeley is once
a shallow sea, with land forms to the West called Cascadia.
No kidding.
I read this.
A geology breaks in half to grow.
A person whose drug like a locust
jumps across someone's foot singing,
we disagree with D who hates similes.
The transverse range is holding Los Angeles, spit out
a desert on their hazard side, a power transformed
from a period of thrall into an ordinary period of lying here.
There are six major faults.
There are skipped verbs.
There are more little thoughts in California.
The piece of coast slides on the arrow.
Down is reverse.
Subduction means the crust goes underneath the continent, which
is rather light.
It was my friend.
I needed it.
The break in the rock shows forward.
The flash hurts.
Granite is composed of quartz, hornblende,
and other former fire.
When a drug is trying to quit, it has to stretch.
Narrow comes from the same place as glamour.
A scarf hangs over the edge, as it does from Monterey
to Santa Barbara.
When we were trying to quit, it had to shout.
The rest of our party had gone up ahead.
Exaggeration has no effect upon silence.
It took my breath.
I gave it willingly.
I told it to, and the breath listened.
Consider the place of I-80 towards outcroppings.
When you've gotten to Auburn, a whole dog shaped ground
has broken through, the rock struggling
with features, its bachelor joy caused by the power that
has kissed you.
What happened happened a lot, not to glamorize
what can't be helped.
A bunch of fiery islands floated over and sutured themselves
to us 100 million years ago.
I like to hold one, just really light it, put my mouth on it.
It's appropriate to discuss features
when we speak of California, daylight's treatment
of a sudden movement in rock.
It pretended not to mind.
You passed him on the path.
Miocene lava smiled as it ordered the darker color
to sit down.
When he was trying to quit, he based his reasoning
on the way mountains slip.
California's glaciers never reached the sea.
The drug was trapped in me and fit.
The Klamath Mountains love the veins
of excellent, excellent stress.
See figure 12.
Between the time two mountains slip-- nothing,
between two points of resolution-- nothing less,
a little more, almost, and the slip happened.
It happened a lot, just 30 million years ago.
I saw between the flames four types of instruments.
With one, they touched my mouth.
With another, you touched her feet.
Rocks of the oldest time are barely represented.
This is the voice from the cave Illyria.
The fault went under artichokes in 1982, makes you love it up
here.
I talked to the permanent fire about it.
What pushes up from under isn't named
or is that what makes you do this
to yourself, what makes you a language caught up
under like a continent.
I was inhaling, though they told me not to.
In the Gabilán Range, small volcanoes erupted softly,
then this throw rug over the carpet in a bowling alley
type of effect.
A California is composed of moving toward, away, or past.
A skin is not separate.
A poem is composed of all readings of it.
Elements redeem themselves plenty.
Alchemists say so.
I gave my breath quite easily then.
Sorry, it's ashes.
Sorry, it's smoke all the way down.
Gravity has to practice.
The disciple of angles smashed planet after planet,
rubbing the cave of chalk onto his cue
and put them into corners, like a Aquinas' five proof,
proofs for the existence of God.
Nice touch on that boy.
Nice touch on those, who sleep till noon,
sleep the sleep of the uninsured till noon and wake
with maps of Sacramento on their hands.
What made the Sierra lift from the right?
Telluric Pop-Tart-- geologists refer
to the range as trapdoor-like.
[AUDIO OUT]
A power has twinned itself in that place.
We follow it until we are its favorite, then we live.
Does the drug recover?
The Pacific plate began this recent movement
20 million years ago.
Fresno was underwater.
The small creatures barely noticed.
I smelled it until it stopped looking pretty.
Let's call a spoon, a spoon.
We dig right down into ourselves for the rocks
of the middle kingdom--
gold folded into the mother lode, often twinned with quartz.
They seem to like each other.
Addicts stay on the porch lighting them,
and elsewhere, structures of several lighthouses--
lighthouse cliffs recall the tremors that brought them here.
That extra island on the belt, Cascadia--
I whirred the wheel, and the continent moved over,
but I still wanted it.
Los Angeles, cheap betting, you'd
allow her to go first, then you'd go.
Pull the youngest blanket over her.
Bang.
If that's how you like it, fine, like warm sandstone.
We're living at the dawn of creation
as far as California is concerned.
The skin goes first.
Most beaches are losing sand.
It drifts south to Mexico.
He sold it.
She mixed it.
We bought the f-- in 1980 x trying
to endure the glass front curve in the unaccountable ghost man's
pleasure.
Get down off that ladder, you.
Ceiling stars, little fiery islands
were light as they ordered Nevada to move over.
The white thing took her breath.
She let it slide.
It recognized what to do after it started no change.
Seeing you is methadone for seeing you.
The numbers of-- the number of faults in middle California
is staggering-- that is we stagger over them until it's
difficult to follow our own.
Each tremor is the nephew of a laugh, sandstone, shale,
chert from the Triassic near I-forget-ville.
He lined them up.
They made white sands stretch marks on her body,
like public transportation, very coastal, very Sierra train
tracks, that click, click down the sides of thighs,
stretch marks where the soul has grown too quickly
from inside, but in a way, not really.
A geology has its appetites.
New islands were forming to get the gist of it.
Much of the coast moved on its own to get free.
Sometimes, he'd just pass it to us, the prince of stains--
the universe cried through him.
The sea was glassing itself over Half Moon Bay.
Should have dropped again suddenly--
she'd have gone back in the service of that burnt-out Eden.
It's appropriate to discuss what can't be helped,
fire lights, shists, cherts, marbles,
an angel in the enunciation, little sub-zero Mary,
kneeling before you in the bathroom,
while you were burning your skin off.
You went East, and you went South.
They took out their little fear schedules--
the Pacific plate on the left, moving
North, while the right stands still if you look down on it.
There's no way to say progress had been made.
I never did not think about lighting them, not one day,
as if a requiem could help how chords fell off the bottom.
Cascadia breathed.
I tried program.
H tried program after program.
D tried specific harvests of bubbles, ashes, little metal
on the stove.
The rest of our party had gone up ahead.
Don't name it.
The lithosphere likes to float on the asthenosphere,
the soft mobile voice of the unseen.
I slide below you sweet and high.
It wants to hear you.
It wants to touch you.
It wants to be happy.
And it wants to die.
Fire lights, shales, cherts, marbles,
press pound when you are finished.
No one knows why the ark of miner islands
sewed themselves to us in that way.
When I put it to my mouth, I had no ability to stop it.
The sea ate the colors 100 million years ago.
A geology is not a strategy.
When an addict tries to leave, the desire
to make himself over shifts from what it felt
like to have been a subject.
LA will dwell beside San Francisco eventually.
Attempting to pun on the word fault--
all right, say plot, all right happens.
The tendency to fault relieves the strain.
New islands were forming to get the gist of it.
We wanted the extraordinary stranger in our veins--
the question of whether it's better not
to have been held by something.
The oldest limestone prevalent between Big Sur and Calaveras
is not better than say any other kind of rock.
The suffering wasn't luckier.
It wasn't a question of asking.
In the instead hour, the minutes of not recovering
from the difference of what we loved, sameness is also true--
world, like a spider, sucking the carapace the same color
as itself.
In the expiation of nature, we are
required to experience the traumatic narrative of matter.
The rocks under California are reigning in their little world.
This was set down in strata, so you
could know what it felt like to have been earth."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]