What can I say to introduce this?
I lived in a place in Phoenix.
It was an apartment complex that really should have been a motel.
And had a lot of the motel elements,
there was a little C shaped thing around the swimming pool.
And as I was living there, I thought,
I have to write a poem about this place.
And I took notes on everyone there.
And was not able actually to gather it together
while I lived there.
But later on, and when I moved to another, a little house,
I put the fragments I'd written on the wall.
And I convinced myself that someday they
would coalesce into a poem.
And actually, what happened was that I stopped
drinking coffee for a while.
And then one night I went to dinner with a poet
by the name of Pamela Stewart.
And I decided to have a cup of coffee.
And then I had another cup of coffee.
And I was telling her, this is great stuff,
do you want a cup of coffee?
Mind if I have a cup of coffee while I'm
waiting for you to answer?
And when I got home it was like 2:00 in the morning.
I was still up.
And I looked at the stuff on my wall.
And I thought, well, you don't have to do anything to this.
Just take this down and this down
and this down and type it all up and it's a poem.
So this is the--
and near the place where I lived was a disco,
it billed itself as, called the Incognito Lounge.
And so, these are the fragments which finally convinced me
that they had coalesced, although they appear exactly
as they were written when they were only fragments.
"The Incognito Lounge."
"The manager lady of this apartment dwelling
has a face like a baseball with glasses
and pathetically repeats herself.
The man next door has a dog with a face that talks
of stupidity to the night.
The swimming pool has an empty, empty face.
My neighbor has his underwear on tonight,
standing among the parking spaces,
advising his friend never to show his face around here again.
I go everywhere with my eyes closed and two eyeballs painted
on my face.
There is a woman across the court with no face at all.
They're perfectly visible this evening.
About as unobtrusive as a storm of meteors,
these questions of happiness plaguing the world.
My neighbor has sent his child to Utah,
to be raised by the relatives of friends.
He's out on the generous lawn again,
looking like he's made out of phosphorous.
The manager lady has just returned
from the nearby graveyard, the last ceremony
for a crushed paramedic.
All day, news helicopters cruised aloft, going what, what.
She pours me some boiled coffee that
tastes like noise, warning me, once and for all,
to pack up my troubles in an old kit bag
and weep until the stones float away.
How will I ever be able to turn from the window
and feel love for her?
To see her and stop seeing this neighborhood,
the towns of Earth, these tables at which the saints sit down
to the meal of temptations?
And so on.
Nap.
Soup.
Window.
Say a few words into the telephone,
smaller and smaller words.
Some TV, or maybe, I don't know, a brisk rubber
with cards, nobody knows how many there are of.
A couple of miserable gerbils in a tiny white cage,
hysterical friends rodomontading about goals,
as if having them liquefied death.
Maybe invite the lady with no face
over here to explain all these elections.
Life, liberty, pursuit.
Maybe invite the lady with no face over here to read my palm,
sit out on the porch here in Arizona while she touches me.
Last night, some kind of alarm went off up the street
that nobody responded to.
Small darling, it rang for you.
Everything suffers invisibly.
Nothing is possible in your face.
The center of the world is closed.
The beehive, the eight ball, the yo-yo, the granite,
and the lightning and the melody.
Only the Incognito Lounge is open.
My neighbor arrives.
They have the television on.
It's a show about my neighbor in a loneliness, a light,
walking the hour when every bed is a mouth.
Alleys of dark trash, exhaustion shaped into residences.
And what are the dogs so sure of that
they shout like citizens, driven from their minds in a stadium?
In his fist he holds a note in his own handwriting,
the same message everyone carries from place
to place in the secret night, the one
that nobody asks you for when you finally
arrive and the faces turn to you playing the National Anthem
and go blank.
That's what the show is about.
That message.
I was raised up from tiny childhood
in those purple hills, right slam on the brink of language.
And I claim it's just as if you can't do anything
to this moment.
That's how indistinguishable it all is.
Sunset Arizona, everybody waiting to get
arrested, all very much an honor, I assure you.
Maybe invite the lady with no face
to plead my cause, to get me off the hook,
or name me one good reason.
The air is full of megawatts and the megawatts
are full of silence.
She reaches to the radio like St Teresa.
Here at the center of the world, each wonderful store
cherishes in its mind unflappable mannequins
in a pale electric light.
The parking lot is full, everyone
having the same dream of shopping
and shopping through an afternoon that
changes like a face.
But these shoppers of America, carrying their hearts
toward the bluffs of the counters
like thoughtless purchases, walking home under the sea,
standing in a dark house at midnight
before the open refrigerator, completely transformed
in the light.
Every bus ride is like this one.
In the back, the same two uniformed boy
scouts depantsing a little girl.
Up front, the woman whose mission
is to tell the driver over and over to shut up.
Maybe you permit yourself to find it beautiful on this bus,
as it wasps like a dirigible toward suburbia,
over a continent of saloons, over the robot desert that
now turns purple and comes slowly through the dust.
This is the moment you'll seek the words for,
over the imitation and actual wood of successive tabletops
indefatigable.
When you watched a baby child catch
a bee against the tinted glass and were
married to a deep comprehension and terror."