I would like to thank you all very much for coming,
to thank the Poetry Center and all of its friends
for bringing me here.
I've been immensely happy, inexplicably happy
since my plane started coming into Tucson.
So I appreciate that, and thank you for a very, very wonderful
introduction.
I'm going to read a couple of poems
from my second book, Of Gravity and Angels, and then a selection
from The October Palace and then I
hope leave time for a good chunk of the newer work.
We begin with a poem called "Heat."
My mare when she was in heat would travel the fence line
for hours, wearing the impatience in her feet
into the ground.
Not a stallion for miles, I'd assure her.
Give it up.
She'd widen her nostrils, sieve the wind for news,
be moving again, her underbelly darkening with sweat.
Then stop at the gate a moment, wait to see what I might do.
Oh, I knew how it was for her.
Easily recognized myself in that wide lust.
Came to stand in the pasture just to see it played.
Offered a hand, a bucket of grain,
a minute's distraction from passion, the most I gave.
Then she'd returned to what burned
her, the fence, the fence.
So hoping I might see, might let her free.
I'd envy her then, to be so restlessly sure of heat and need
and what it takes to feed the wanting that we are.
Only a gap to open, the width of a mare, the rest
would take care of itself.
Surely, surely, I knew that, who had
the power of bucket and bridle.
She would beseech me, sidle up, be gone.
As life is short, but desire is long.