Thank you.
It's great to be back in the land of the aguas.
The last time I was here, it rained three days straight.
The only other time I was ever in Tucson,
it rained three days straight.
So I recognize it.
I came with a raincoat.
I was ready.
I've been talking non-stop, so I mean, talking a torrent.
I've been causing it.
Actually, Frost said that talk, he did this water metaphor.
He said, "talking was a hydrant in the yard,
and poetry was a faucet in an upstairs room.
Turning on the first takes the pressure off the second."
I'll shut up.
[LAUGHTER]
Some of these poems are in voices.
I wanted to read a couple of poems in voices, partly just
because of Oklahoma City today.
These two acts of God were voices that came over the radio.
I tend not to listen coherently to the radio,
I think that's the value of the radio.
Television requires you to actually go in and live there.
Radio permits it to live in you, somehow patches of it
can come through.
But as a result, I missed who exactly these people were.
And they spoke in very characteristic ways,
and I tried to, after they spoke, tried to just catch
patches of what they said.
By and large, it's quoting.
If you know who these guys are, I will credit them from here
on in.
Much of this book actually owes its language to other people.
Acts of God--
Tornado.
"I said, the people, come inside.
They would be safe in the building.
So many of those people die.
You can see my guilt.
I could see hands, to a lady, moving.
I knew the lady.
You can see my guilt. Sometimes, I
want to run to get away from it.
I ask forgiveness, night and day.
I ask it from the cemetery.
I can never dream this storm away.
It was over for maybe minutes, and it was never over."
This woman, the way she spoke was extraordinary.
I mean, it was clear that she wasn't
a native speaker of English.
But she also had this way of letting her unsettledness,
a very fundamental global unsettledness,
from this storm enter into her language somehow.
And so, when she said, "I could see hands, to a lady, moving."
At first, I had thought it was the rescue
workers going toward her.
But then she said, "I knew the lady.
You can see my guilt."
And then you realize, she's the one on the inside of the rubble.
That it's hard because, at the end, she said, you know,
"It was over for maybe minutes, and then it was never over."
You realize that in many ways, you can't tell the sufferers who
survive apart from the ones who don't.
That the suffering is shared.
And you feel tinges of that in this guy's account of being hit
by lightning, also, I think.
"It pushed me backward.
I could see my friends go backward, too.
As from a blast, but slowly.
Very slowly, everything was in a different time.
It burned inside my body.
I could feel my hands curl up.
My pocket got on fire, I didn't want to reach in there
and take a handful of the hot.
My money hurt.
I'm different now, forever.
Put that fact into your book.
My hair used to be straight.
My eyes, you see, they're gray as ash.
They used to be light blue.
You live, if you're lucky.
But take my word--
it changes how you look."
I read that once at a community college,
where people were required to come to my reading.
And they tried to add a little extra incentive
by holding it in a snack shop.
[LAUGHTER]
So, there was a double effect of people who resented being there,
and who also really wanted to eat their hot dogs.
So there were-- especially people
in the back were like, it was as though the wagons were
drawn around the hot dog fire or something.
I saw a lot of backs.
But at the very end, there was this one shy girl who
raised her hand at the end of that poem, where,
"you live if you're lucky.
But take my word, it changes how you look."
And she said, "Do you mean, look from the inside,
or look from the outside?"
She was so tentative and so sweet.
And I said, "Yes!"
So happy!
Stop your hot dogs, you others.
I'm not sure she was entirely satisfied either,
I think she wanted an unambiguous answer.
But she was on the verge of a great discovery.
[LAUGHTER]