--bookstore, and I'm sure she'd be happy to sign copies
after the reading.
And I would also hope that you'll
join us for a reception following the reading.
It should be just outside the auditorium.
The next two readers on our schedule
are Michael Collier on Wednesday, October 4,
here in Modern Languages.
And he is a graduate of the University of Arizona's MFA
program and will be returning to Tucson.
So I'm sure you won't [AUDIO OUT] that one.
He will be followed by the fiction writer
Jeffrey Eugenides, who is the author
of an astounding first novel called The Virgin Suicides.
And he will be reading on Wednesday, October 18, also here
in Modern Languages.
As I'm sure you know, the National Endowment for the Arts
has suffered considerable setbacks and severe budget cuts
in the last few months.
And readings like the one you're at this evening are in jeopardy.
The University of Arizona Poetry Center has, in the past,
received funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.
And they have helped to underwrite a portion
of our reading series.
I encourage you to become involved
in a dialogue with our senators and representatives
about the issue of funding for the arts, and the literary arts,
in particular.
There's information in the back, on one of the chairs set up
in the back, from the Literary Network, which is an advocacy
group that is doing work on behalf of American writers
and readers.
I encourage you to get in touch with them
if you want more information or to call me at the Poetry Center,
and I'd be happy to talk to you about it.
Pattiann Rogers is the author of six books of poetry,
the most recent of which is Firekeeper: New and Selected
Poems, published by Milkweed Editions in 1994.
Firekeeper was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one
of the best books of poetry to be published in 1994,
and received the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award
from the Texas Institute of Letters,
and which we learned just this week
is a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize, which
is given jointly by The Nation magazine and the Academy
of American Poets for the best book of poems published
in the past year.
We're pleased to be able to share
this time of great anticipation with Pattiann.
Rogers' other awards have included two NEA fellowships,
a Guggenheim fellowship, and a poetry fellowship
from the Lannan Foundation.
She teaches semesters in the creative writing program
at the University of Arkansas and is currently
on the faculty of American University in St. Louis.
Pattiann Rogers is engaged in what the poet Louise Glück has
referred to as the steady upward labor of being a poet.
She is a writer at work, taking, as her subject,
no less than science and the natural world, religion,
in as much as any careful study of nature
is religious in its exactitude, and the human experience,
as seen through the refractory lens of the material world.
Rogers finds meaning and poetry under rocks,
inside saguaro cactus, or in the aura
and mythology we create around enigmatic natural figures,
such as the white deer or Steller's jays avoiding
the death site of one of their own.
Rogers has produced some of the most stunning lyric moments
about nature and has been lauded by her [AUDIO OUT]
for her loving dedication to earthly space.
Terry Tempest Williams has called Rogers' poems, quote,
"translations of our dreaming life."
And nature writer Barry Lopez has said, quote,
"if angels were to agree upon a language to describe creation,
a tone of voice, and a point of view that would adequately
celebrate the divine, these would be the poems they would
write."
Pattiann Rogers takes her place among what
has evolved as a distinctly American genre that
features writers grappling with issues of humanity's place
in the natural world, a world defined
by the actual and metaphorical existence of the frontier,
from Emerson to Thoreau, Edwin Muir and Willa Cather, Marianne
Moore and Amy Clampitt, and on to Rogers
and her contemporaries.
Rogers does as her predecessors have done and explores
the very fabric of what it means to be alive,
to be breathing and thinking [INAUDIBLE] world.
It's my pleasure to introduce Pattiann Rogers.
[APPLAUSE]
That was a beautiful introduction.
Thank you very much.
I'm happy to be here and proud to have
become a part of the tradition of the Poetry Center here.
I give a lot of readings, or I have,
over the past several years.
But it seems like I'm always going somewhere
I've never been before.
So a big country.
Anyway, I've never been to Tucson before,
so I'm glad to be here and to take part in--
Gary Nabhan is here.
I was just going to say, the stinking-hot desert, right?
[LAUGHTER]
But that's not my phrase.
I didn't make that up.
All the poems I'm going to read are from the Firekeeper.
I like to go back to earlier poems
and pair them with more recent poems
and find connections when I put the poems I select for a reading
together.
Seeing connections in poems that were maybe
written several years apart is interesting to me to do that.
So the first two poems I'm going to read tonight
are a kind of poem I like to write,
which is an attempt to see if I can't prove something
with language.
I have-- maybe all poets secretly have the belief
that if they just get something said right,
it would have to be true.
So I keep working at that.
The first one is titled "On the Existence of the Soul."
"How confident I am it is there.
Don't I bring it as if it were enclo--
[AUDIO OUT] a fine leather case to particular places
solely for its own sake?
Haven't I set it down before the variegated canyon
and the undeviating bald salt dome?
Don't I feed it on ivory calcium and ruffled shell bellies,
shore boulders, on the sight of the petrel motionless
over the sea, its splayed feet hanging?
Don't I make sure it apprehends the invisibly fine spray
more than once?
I have seen that it takes in every detail I
can manage concerning the garden wall and its borders.
I have listed for it the comings and goings
of 100 species of insects explicitly described.
I have named the chartreuse stripe
and the fimbriated antenna, the bulbed thorax
and the multiple eye.
I have sketched the brilliant wings of the trumpet vine
and invented new vocabularies descri--
[AUDIO OUT] the interchanges between rocks
and their crevices, between the holly lip
and its concept of itself.
And if not for its sake, why would I
go out into the night alone and stare deliberately straight
up into 15 billion years ago and more?
I have cherished it.
I have named it.
By my own solicitations, I have proof of its presence."
Well, were you convinced?
[LAUGHTER]
Must be something there.
Otherwise, what are we doing all this for?
The second poem is also another attempt at a proof of a kind.
And I read this poem one summer, and my husband
happened to be in the audience.
And there [AUDIO OUT] two men sitting in front of him.
And when I said I was going to read this poem,
one turned to the other one and said,
I'll bet you she can't get through it without stumbling.
And the other one took the bet.
Anyway, I got through it without stumbling.
But after my husband told me this,
and I realized somebody thought this was hard to do,
I can't do it anymore.
So anyway--
[LAUGHTER]
So don't place any bets on me.
But we'll see if I get--
I'll try.
"In Addition to Faith, Hope, and Charity."
"I'm sure there's a god in favor of drums.
Consider their pervasiveness-- the thump, thump, and slide
of waves on a stretched hide of beach,
the rising beat and slap of their crests against shore
baffles, the rapping of otters cracking mollusks with stones,
woodpeckers beak-banging, the beaver's
whack of his tail paddle, the ape playing the bam [AUDIO OUT]
own chest, the million tickering rolls of rain
off the flat leaves and razor rims of the forest.
And we know the noise of our own inventions--
snare and kettle, bongo, conga, big bass, toy tin, timbals,
tambourine, tom-tom.
But the heart must be the most pervasive drum of all.
Imagine hearing all together every tinny
snare of every heartbeat in every jumping mouse and harvest
mouse, sagebrush vole and least shrew living across the prairie;
And add to that cacophony the individual staccato tickings
inside all gnatcatchers, kingbirds, kestrels, rock
doves, pine warblers crossing, criss-crossing each other
in the sky, the sound of their beatings overlapping
with the singular hammerings of the hearts of cougar, coyote,
weasel, badger, pronghorn, [AUDIO OUT]
ponderous bass of the black bear;
And on deserts, too, all the knackings,
the flutterings inside wart snakes, whiptails, racers
and sidewinders, earless lizards, cactus owls;
plus the clamors undersea, slow booming in the breasts of beluga
and bowhead, uniform rappings in a passing school of cod or bib,
the thidderings of bat rays and needlefish.
Imagine the earth carrying this continuous din,
this multifarious festival of pulsing thuds,
stutters and drumming, wheeling on and on across the universe.
This must be proof of a power existing somewhere definitely
in favor of such a racket.
[APPLAUSE]
Anyway, I think I did get through that din.
All those thitterings and stutterings.
But just think, they all are out there this very minute.
Well, I'm going to talk about one
of those little small creatures.
I grew up in Missouri and really had my background under--
in a forest.
So I was always under trees.
Well, when we moved to Houston, or just outside of Houston,
I had a very different environment to get used to,
because we lived on the side of Houston that doesn't have trees,
because--
part of it does.
Houston used to be the beach of an ancient sea.
But we lived on the side that was the sea bottom.
Anyway, it's a kind of a Beaumont clay soil out there.
Anyway, we didn't have any trees.
So this was the first time I had ever really actually seen
the moon rise from the horizon, and seen it full,
and seen it go clear across the sky and sink,
and the same way with the sun.
And we lived across from a field.
And I knew there were mice in that field,
because our cat would bring home one every once in a while,
an unwilling visitor.
Anyway, so I thought about how the sky just came right down
flat to the Earth.
And I had just never thought of that before.
And I thought about the mouse out in the field.
And so this is a poem that rose from that kind of vision.
And the title is "Being Accomplished."
"Balancing on her haunches, the mouse
can accomplish certain things with her hands.
She can pull the hull from a barley seed in paperlike pieces
the size of threads.
She can turn and turn a crumb to create smaller
motes the size of her mouth.
She can burrow in sand and grasp [AUDIO OUT]
crystal grain with both of her hands.
A quarter of a dried pea can fill her palm.
She can hold the earless, eyeless head of her furless baby
and push it to her teat.
The hollow of its mouth must feel
like the invisible confluence sucking continually
deep inside a pink flower.
And the mouse is almost compelled to see everything.
Her hand, held up against the night sky,
can scarcely hide Venus or Polaris or even
a corner of the crescent moon.
It can cover only a fraction of the blue moth's wing.
Its shadow could never mar or blot enough of the evening
to matter.
Imagine the mouse with her spider-sized hands holding
to a branch of dead hawthorn in the middle of the winter field
tonight.
Picture the night pressing in around [AUDIO OUT]
forced, simply by their presence,
to fit its great black bulk exactly
around every hair and every pin-like nail, forced
to outline perfectly every needle-thin bone
without crushing one, to carry its immensity right
up to the precise boundary of flesh but no farther.
Think how the heavy weight of infinity,
expanding outward in all directions forever,
is force, nevertheless, to mold itself
right here and now to every peculiarity of those appendages.
And even the mind, capable of engulfing the night sky,
capable of enclosing infinity, capable of surrounding itself
inside any contemplation, has been obliged, for this moment,
to accommodate the least grasp of that mouse,
the dot [AUDIO OUT] her knuckle, the accomplishment of her
slightest intent."
[APPLAUSE]
Well, I'm going to read a couple of poems now
that really have nothing to do with this stinking-hot desert.
But I will read a stinking-hot-desert poem
in a minute.
But I hope you know I don't really think
the desert is stinking hot.
But it's a phrase I've gotten used to hearing.
Anyway, the first poem I'm going to read that doesn't have one
single thing to do with the desert is called "Rolling Naked
in the Morning Dew."
And I think that's probably because you
wouldn't want to try that around here,
supposing you even had dew.
Do you ever have dew?
Oh, you do have dew.
OK, you have dew.
[CHUCKLING]
But I've seen a lot of plants that I don't think
I'd want to roll naked over--
[LAUGHTER]
--just in the few hours that I've been here.
So anyway, this, we have to imagine, right?
We have to project ourselves into a different landscape.
"Rolling Naked in the Morning Dew."
"Out among the wet grasses and wild barley-covered meadows,
backside, frontside, through the white-clover and feather
peabush, over spongy tussocks and shaggy-mane mushrooms,
the abandoned nests of larks and bobolinks,
face to face with vole trails, snail niches, jelly slug eggs;
Or in a stone-walled garden, level with the stemmed bulbs
of orange and scarlet tulips, cricket carcasses,
the bent blossoms of sweet William, shoulder over shoulder,
leg over leg, clear to the ferny edge of the goldfish pond--
some people believe in the rejuvenating powers
of this act--
naked as a toad in the forest, belly and hips, thighs
and ankles drenched in the dew-filled gulches of oak
leaves, in the soft fall beneath yellow birches, all
of the skin exposed directly to the killy cry of the kingbird,
the buzzing of grasshopper sparrows,
those calls merging with the dawn-red mists
of crimson steeplebush, entering the bare body then,
not merely through the ears, but through the skin
of every naked person willing every event
and potentiality of a damp transforming dawn to enter.
Lillie Langtry practiced it, when
weather permitted, lying down naked every morning in the dew,
with all of her beauty believing the single petal
of her white skin could absorb and assume that radiating
purity of liquid and light.
And I admit to believing myself, without question,
in the magical powers of dew [AUDIO OUT] and breasts
of Lillie Langtry, believing devotedly in the magical powers
of early-morning dew on the skin of her body lolling in purple
beds of bird's-foot violets, pink prairie mimosa.
And I believe, without doubt, in the mystery
of the healing energy coming from the wholehearted belief
in the beneficent results of the good delights of the naked body
rolling and rolling through all the silked and sun-filled,
dusky-winged, sheathed and sparkled, looped and dizzied
effluences of each dawn of the rolling earth.
Just consider how the mere idea of it alone has already caused
me to sing and sing this whole morning long."
Well--
[APPLAUSE]
You don't need to clap.
You don't need to clap every time.
Anyway, I have to tell this joke,
because a friend of mine, who was giving a reading of his own,
read a poem of mine before he did his reading.
And afterwards, two women came up to him and said,
do you know Pattiann Rogers?
And he said, well, yes, I do.
And they said, well, when you see her,
will you please tell her that we have formed a group,
and we meet twice a year, and we roll naked in the morning dew?
[LAUGHTER]
So I always like to let the audiences know that, in case you
want to form your own group, because it's fast spreading
across the country, I think.
Well, I said I was going to read two poems that
didn't have anything to do with the beautiful, warm desert.
And "Rolling Naked in the Morning Dew" was one.
And now I'm going to read a poem about toads.
But I think you do have toads in the desert.
And when it rains, that's when they come up and lay eggs.
And everything has to happen real fast
before the pond disappears, or the--
right?
[INAUDIBLE]
Pardon?
Spade-foot toads.
OK.
I don't know if I have a spade-foot toad in here.
But anyway, I wrote this partially
because when we were living in Houston, we--
Hurricane Alicia went through.
And of course, Houston is far enough from the coast
that there wasn't a lot of damage.
Of course, we lost our electricity, and nobody wanted--
knew what to do, because everything
I could think of to do needed electricity.
Anyway, so the hurricane did come through.
And it was still pretty strong.
The wind was blowing, and branches were breaking off
the trees, and fences were blowing down, things like that.
And right below our bedroom window,
outside, there was probably a toad.
Anyway, it was singing.
It sang through this whole thing.
The wind is roaring, and everybody is scared,
and we don't know what's going to happen.
And this little toad was just happy as could
be, had some water.
Anyway, so I just thought that was kind of a power.
But that's the title of this poem, "The Power of Toads."
But actually, it's about a different kind of power.
And it's the way with all poems.
They're not about what they are about.
It's what makes people mad at poets,
because why don't you write what you're [INAUDIBLE].
I had questions from the audience at West Point once,
and everybody was being very polite.
They're cadets, and they have to be polite.
[CHUCKLING]
I think they get some kind of demerit or something
if they're not.
But finally, one raised his hand,
and I called on him, because they were just asking, when
did you start writing poetry?
And stuff like-- why don't poets just come right out
and say what they're talking about?
[LAUGHTER]
Why beat around the bush the way you do?
So anyway, just contrary, I guess.
So this is ostensibly about toads.
And it's also about something else.
And there are human beings in the end.
So if you're not interested in toads, just hang on,
and there's a human interest as we get to the end.
OK.
But everyone should be interested in toads, right?
Absolutely.
"The Power of Toads."
"The oak toad and the red-spotted toad
love their love in a spring rain,
calling and calling, breeding through a stormy evening clasped
atop their mates.
Who wouldn't sing, anticipating the belly pressed hard
against a female's spine in the steady rain
below writhing skies, the safe moist jelly effluence
of a final exaltation?
There might be some toads who actually believe
that the loin-shaking thunder of the banks, the evening filled
with damp, the warm softening mud and rising riverlets
are the facts of their own persistent performance.
Maybe they think that when they sing, they sing more than songs,
creating rain and mist by their voices,
initiating the union of water and dusk,
females materializing on the banks shaped perfectly
by their calls.
And some toads may be convinced they have forced the heavens
to twist and moan by the continual expansion
of their lung sacs pushing against the dusk.
And some might believe the splitting light,
the soaring grey they see above them are nothing but a vision
of the longing in their groins, a fertile spring heaven caught
in its entirety at the [AUDIO OUT].
And they might be right.
Who knows whether these broken heavens
could exist tonight separate from trills and toad ringings?
Maybe the particles of this rain descending on the pond
are nothing but the visual manifestation
of whistles and cascading love clicks in the shore grasses.
Raindrops finding earth and coitus
could very well be known here as one.
We could investigate the causal relationship
between rainstorm and love by pondside, if we wished.
We could lie down in the grasses by the water's edge
and watch to see exactly how the heavens were moved,
thinking hard of thunder, imagining
all the courses that slow, clean waters might take
across our bodies, believing completely in the rolling
and pressing power of heavens and thighs.
And in the end, we might be glad, even if all we
discovered for cer--
[AUDIO OUT] was the slick, sweet promise of good love beneath
dark skies inside warm rains."
Well, see, I suggest that after you have done the rolling part,
then you do this other investigation.
[CHUCKLING]
It's a scientific experiment, right?
Well, anyway, that leads into a couple of love poems.
This first one is entitled "Love Song."
"It's all right, together with me tonight,
how your whole body trembles exactly
like the locust establishing its dry symbol,
quivering, even in the farthest branch-tip leaves of the tree
in which it screams.
Lying next to me, it's all right how similar
you become to the red deer [AUDIO OUT] agitated,
pacing on the open plains by the sea, in its sideling,
haunch against haunch, in the final mastery of its mounting.
And it's all right, in those moments,
how you possess the same single-minded madness
of the opened wood poppy, circling and circling,
the same wild strength of its golden eye.
It's true, you're no better than the determined boar,
snorgling and rooting, no better than the ridiculous ruffled
drumming of the prairie chicken, no better
than the explosion of the milkweed pod spilling
the white furl of the moon deep in the midnight field.
You're completely indistinguishable
from the enraged sand myrtle absurd
in its scarlet spread on the rocky bluffs.
But it's all right.
Don't you know this is precisely what I seek?
Mad myself [AUDIO OUT] every last droop and pearl-dropped
oval, every nip and cry and needle fine boring,
every drooping, spore-rich tassel of oak flower,
all the whistling, wing-beating, heavy-tipped matings
of an entire prairie of grasses, every wafted,
moaning seed hook you can possibly manage to bring to me,
that this is exactly what I contrive to take into my arms
with you again and again."
I read that poem in Missoula once.
And afterwards, two men came up.
They were brothers from Boulder.
What that has to do with anything, I don't know.
But--
[CHUCKLING]
And he wanted to know what book that poem was in.
And they said, we want to buy that book
because we want our wives to read that poem to us.
[LAUGHTER]
So if anybody wants to know, it's in this book.
OK, the next one--
this is another love poem.
I'm not going to read love poems all night,
so don't be counting on that.
Now, I know you've got a lot of hummingbirds around here.
And I'm going to try to-- hoping to go to the museum
tomorrow and see the hummingbird aviary, right?
Where they're zooming all around.
So you probably know that the male hummingbird
courts the female by displaying, in front of her,
flying up and then dropping and then flying up and then
dropping.
And this evidently is a wonderful-- well,
it works, right?
[LAUGHTER]
So it's pretty exciting.
Anyway, I thought it--
I think it's pretty exciting.
See, I think I like all this.
I think it's wonderful to be a female
and have the guys all doing things, trying to impress you,
right?
So anyway, I think it's romantic.
So this poem is titled "The Hummingbird: A Seduction."
"If I were a female hummingbird perched still and quiet
on an upper myrtle branch in the spring afternoon,
and if you were a male alone in the whole
heavens before me, having parted yourself, for me,
from cedar top and honeysu--
[AUDIO OUT] and earth down, your body hovering in
midair far away from jewelweed, thistle, and bee-balm;
And if I watched how you fell, plummeting before me,
and how you rose again and fell with such mastery
that I believed, for a moment, you were the sky,
and the red-marked bird diving inside your circumference
was just the physical revelation of the light's most perfect
desire;
And if I saw your sweeping and sucking performance
of swirling egg and semen in the air, the weaving,
twisting vision of red petal and nectar and soaring rump,
the rush of your wing in its grand confusion
of arching and splitting created completely
out of nothing just for me;
Then when you came down to me, I would call you my own spinning
bloom of ruby sage, my funneling storm of sunlit sperm
and pollen, my only breathless piece of scarlet sky,
and I would bless the base of each of your feathers and touch
the tine of string muscles binding your wings and taste
the odor of your glistening oils and hunt the honey
in your crimson flare, and I would take you and take you
and take you deep into any kind of nest you ever wanted."
Well, I said, too bad my husband is not a hummingbird, right?
[LAUGHTER]
But he does his best.
[LAUGHTER]
We have to help our human husbands along, right?
OK, the next poem is entitled "Geocentric."
"Indecent, self-soiled, bilious reek of turnip and toadstool
decay, dribbling the black oil of wilted succulents,
the brown fester of rotting orchids,
in plain view, that stain of stinkhorn down your front, that
leaking roil of bracket fungi down your back,
you purple-haired, grainy-fuzzed smolder of refuse,
fathering fumes and boils and powdery mildews,
enduring the constant interruption
of sink-mire flatulence, contagious with ear wax, corn
smut, blister rust, backwash, and graveyard debris,
rich with manure bog and dry rot,
harboring not only egg-addled garbage and wrinkled lip
of orange [AUDIO OUT] mold, but also the clotted breath
of overripe radish and burnt leek,
bearing every dank, malodorous rut and scarp, all sulphur
fissures and fetid hillside seepages, old, old dependable,
engendering forever the stench and stretch
and warm seethe of inevitable putrefaction,
nobody loves you as I do.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I have two jokes to tell about that.
One was that a poet came up to me after I read that once
and said he didn't know whether that was
about the earth or my husband.
[CHUCKLING]
And the other was, oh, this isn't a joke.
It's really why I wrote the poem,
because those of us who enjoy the natural world
and write about it are always being accused
of refusing to look at the repulsive and bad things
about the natural world.
So I just made a list of every repulsive thing
I could think of, and then said, so what?
I love you anyway.
All right, the next three poems are
going to be about death because poets have to write about death.
That's one of our subjects.
And anyway, I think we ought to write about death,
because it's like I said.
If it wasn't for death, we probably
wouldn't be writing any poems at all, right?
Because if you have infinity to do it in, why do it today?
So--
[LAUGHTER]
Anyway, so we've got to hurry here because we
don't have much time.
So we've got to write [AUDIO OUT] we can get
written in our few brief years.
Oh, OK.
So that's what the subject is going to be here
for the next three poems.
And really, I have six more poems.
So these three and then three more.
So the first one is called "The Next Story."
"All morning long, they kept coming
back, the jays, five of them, blue-grey, purple-banded,
strident, disruptive.
They screamed with their whole bodies from the branches
of the pine, tipped forward, heads toward earth,
and swept across the lawn into the oleanders,
dipping low as they flew over the half-skull and beak,
the blood-end of the one wing lying intact,
over the fluff of feathers scattered and drifting
occasionally, easily as dandelion--
all that the cat had left.
Back and forth, past one another,
pausing as if listening, then sharply cutting the morning
again into shard upon shard of frantic and crested descent,
jagged slivers of raucous outrage,
they kept at it, crying singly, together,
alternately, as if on cue, discordant anthem.
The pattern of their inconsolable fear
could be seen against the flat spring sky as identical
to the pattern made by that unmendable shatter
of disjointed rubbish on the lawn, all morning long.
Mothers, fathers, our kind, tell me again
that death doesn't matter.
Tell me it's just a limitation of vision,
a fold of landscape, a deep flax and poppy
filled gully hidden on the hill, a pleat in our perception,
a somersault of existence, natural, even beneficent,
even a gift, the only key to the red-lacquered door
at the end of the hall, water within water, those old stories.
But this time, whatever is said, when it's said,
will have to be more reverent and more rude, more absolute,
more convincing than these five jays who have become the five
wheeling spokes and stays of perfect lament, who,
without knowing anything, have accurately matched the black
beaks and spread shoulders of their bodies to all the shrill,
bird-shaped histories of grief, will have to be demanding
enough, subtle enough, shocking enough, sovereign enough,
right enough to rouse me, to move me from this window where I
have pressed my forehead hard against the unyielding pane,
unyielding all morning long."
Oh, OK.
I forgot the-- well, OK.
The next poem is "The Dead Never Fight Against Anything."
"It's always been that way.
They've allowed themselves to be placed, knees to chin,
in the corners of caves or in holes in the earth, then covered
with stones; they've let their fingers
be curled around old spears or diadems or favorite dolls,
the stems of cut flowers.
Whether their skulls were cracked open
and their brains eaten by kin or whether their brains were
pulled by tongs through their nostrils
and thrown into the dog's dish as waste
are matters that have never concerned them.
They have never offered resistance
to [AUDIO OUT] tied to rocks below the sea, left
for days and nights until their flesh washed away, or likewise
to being placed high in jungle trees or high on scaffolds
alone in the desert until buzzards, vultures and harpy
eagles stripped their bones bare.
They have never minded jackals nosing
at their haunches, coyotes gnawing at their breasts.
The dead have always been so purely tolerant.
They've let their bones be rubbed
with ointments, ornamented with ochre,
used as kitchen ladles and spoons.
They've been imperturbably indifferent to the removal
of all their entrails, the resulting cavities filled
with palm wine, aromatic spices.
They have lain complacently as their abdomens were infused
by syringe with cedar oil.
They've allowed all seven natural openings of their bodies
to be closed with gold dust.
They've been shrunken and their mouths sewn shut.
They've been wrapped in [INAUDIBLE] bound
upright, facing East, hung above coals and smoked,
their ears stuffed with onions, sent to sea on flaming pyres.
Not one has ever given a single sign of dissent.
Oblivious to abuse, even today, you
can hit them and pinch them and kick them.
You can shake them, scream into their ears.
You can cry.
You can kiss them and whisper and moan,
smooth their combed and parted hair,
touch the lips that yesterday spoke,
beseech, entreat with your finest entreaty.
Still, they stare, without deviation,
straight into distance and direction.
Old stumps, old shameless logs, rigid knurls, snow-faced,
pitiless, pitiless betrayal."
Actually, it's going to be seven poems because I don't know how I
left this poem out, the "Justification of the Horned
Lizard" poem, because, see, I wrote "The Dead Never Fight
Against Anything" after I wrote "Justification of the Horned
Lizard."
And I realized it was the flip version of that poem,
because the dead don't fight against anything,
and that seems a betrayal of those of us
who are still alive and struggling with things.
And this poem is about the horned lizard.
And probably, everybody here knows about horned lizards,
right?
That their method of defense is to spray blood out of their eyes
at whatever they feel is threatening them.
That's one of their defen--
then to bury themselves in the sand, right?
Am I right?
And I was going to tell--
well, I know someone who said that when he was a boy,
one thing he used to do was--
he lived around the desert--
was to, when he could catch baby horned lizards--
and he would put one in his mouth
and then go up to his mother and open his mouth
and stick his tongue out to show her.
So I thought that sounded just like a boy.
[LAUGHTER]
There are only a very few enthnobiologists
and boys who are interested in horned lizards, right?
OK, so this is my poem for desert people.
"Justification of the Horned Lizard."
I hope I don't mispronounce anything.
If I do, I'm sure I'll be told about it after this reading
by someone.
"Justification of the Horned Lizard."
"I don't know why the horned lizard wants to live.
It's so ugly-- short prickly horns and scowling eyes,
lipless smile forced forever by bone, hideous scaly hollow
where its nose should be.
I don't know what the horned lizard
has to live for, skittering over the sun-irritated sand,
scraping the hot dusty brambles.
It never sees anything but gravel and grit,
thorns and stickery insects, the towering creosote bush,
the ocotillo and its whiplike branches,
the severe edges of the Spanish dagger.
Even [AUDIO OUT] in waves in the current by the bank or the blue
[AUDIO OUT] fronds of the water clover.
It will never have a smooth glistening belly
of white like the bullfrog or a dew-heavy trill like a mating
toad.
It will never slip easily through mud
like the skink or squat in the dank humus
at the bottom of a decaying forest in daytime.
It will never be free of dust.
The only drink it will ever know is in the body of a bug.
And the horned lizard possesses nothing noble--
embarrassing tail, warty hide covered with sharp dirty scales.
No touch to its body, even from its own kind,
could ever be delicate or caressing.
I don't know why the horned lizard wants to live.
Yet threatened, it burrows frantically
into the sand with a surprisingly determined fury
of forehead, limbs and ribs.
Pursued, it even fights for itself,
almost rising up, posturing on its [AUDIO OUT] legs,
propelling blood out of its eyes in tight straight streams shot
directly at the source of its possible extinction.
It fights for itself, almost rising up,
as if the performance of that act, the posture,
the propulsion of the blood itself,
were justification enough and the only reason needed."
See, to me, that's one of the things that's
so affirming about the natural world,
that there's no question that life is good.
And so you walk out into a landscape.
There's nothing there but yes.
Yes.
Put asphalt over us.
We're going to come up through it anyway,
so that kind of thing.
Anyway, I wrote this also because I'd
been reading a lot of contemporary poems
in which poets were complaining about their--
and I thought, I don't know any poet that has a life as bad
as the horned lizard, and--
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE] the horned lizard seems to think
it's worth fighting for.
So OK.
It's getting warm in here, isn't it, a little bit?
This is the last poem.
That poem was not about death, obviously.
It was about life.
But this is the last poem about death.
And the title is "Trinity."
"I wish something slow and gentle and good would happen
to me, a patient and prolonged kind of happiness coming
in the same way evening comes to a wide-branched sycamore
standing in an empty field; each branch, not succumbing,
not taken, but feeling its entire exi--
[AUDIO OUT] a willing revolution of cells; even asleep,
feeling a decision of gold spreading over its ragged bark
and motionless knots of seed, over every naked, vulnerable
juncture; each leaf becoming a lavender shell, a stem-deep line
of violet turning slowly and carefully to possess
exactly the pale and patient color of the sky coming.
I wish something that slow and that patient would come to me,
maybe like the happiness growing when the lover's hand,
easy on the thigh or easy on the breast,
moves like late light moves over the branches of a sycamore,
causing a slow revolution of decision in the body; even
asleep, feeling the spread of hazy coral
and ivory-grey rising through the legs
and spine to alter the belief behind the eyes;
feeling the slow turn of wave after wave of acquiescence
moving from the inner throat to the radiance of a gold belly
to a bone-center of purple; an easy, slow-turning happiness
of possession like that, prolonged.
I wish something that gentle and that careful
and that patient would come to me.
Death might be that way if one knew how to wait for it,
if death came easily and slowly, if death were good."
All right.
The three last poems I'm going to read are all bedtime poems--
put you to sleep.
[INAUDIBLE] is titled "When At Night."
"Suppose all of you came in the dark, each one, up to my bed
while I was sleeping; suppose one of you
took my hand without waking me and touched my fingers,
moved your lips the length of each one, down
into the crotch with your tongue and up again,
slowly sucking the nipple of each knuckle with your eyes
closed; suppose two of you were at my head, the breath of one
in my ear like a bird/moth thuddering
at a silk screen; the other fully engaged, mouth tasting
of sweet meats and liquors, kissing my mouth;
Suppose another drew the covers down to my feet,
slipped the loops from the buttons, spread my gown,
ministering mouth again around the dark of each breast,
pulling and puckering in the way that water in a stir
pulls and puckers a fallen bellflower into itself;
Two at my shoulders to ease the gown away, take it down
past my waist and hips, over my ankles to the end of the bed;
one of you is made to adore the belly; one of you
is obsessed with dampness; at my bent knees
now, another watching, at my parted thighs, another;
and one to oversee the separation and one to guard
the joining and one to equal my trembling
and one to protect my moaning.
And at dawn, if everything were put in place again, clothing,
feeling, my legs together straight,
the quilt folded and tucked to my chin,
if all of you stepped back away into your places,
into the translucence of glass at the window,
into the ground breezes swelling the grasses,
into the river of insect rubbings below the field
and the light expanding the empty spaces of the elm,
back into the rising black of the hawk deepening the shallow
sky, and we all woke then so much happier than before, well,
there wouldn't be anything wrong in that, would there?"
See, I have to tell you, that's--
[CHUCKLING]
In case you think we've just experienced an orgy, the title--
do you know where the title comes from?
"When At Night"?
Yes.
So "When at night, I go to bed, 14 angels 'round my head."
So these are all angels, so it's all right.
So--
[LAUGHTER]
The next poem-- now, you can go to bed with that poem if you
wish, or here's another poem about sleeping, because, see,
I think there's something about sleeping,
or watching someone else sleep--
it hardly matters what--
well, I won't say this entirely since we've
had a crime committed recently while someone was asleep.
But typically, the person looks so--
I want to say innocent, but that's not the exact word.
It's something we know about life when we see someone asleep.
And this was a poem in which I tried
to [AUDIO OUT] that question.
And I don't know that I did it completely.
But anyway, that was the impetus of the poem.
"When You Watch Us Sleeping."
"When you see us lying scented in our nightclothes,
the patchwork quilt wadded at our feet,
coverlet kicked aside, when you see us still
at midnight, our bare arms covered
with the moon-shadows of the hemlock
by the window, our hands latent and half-open
on the pillows by our heads;
When you come upon any of us buried
but breathing, close to the earth,
motionless as oak leaves beneath drifts of oak leaves
or curled inside silk body-vases hanging from greasewood
and vetch or sprawled, languid under the broad branches
of a baobab in summer heat, when you hear us humming hoarsely
sometimes, scarcely wheezing, murmuring like white hens
at their roost;
When you watch the [AUDIO OUT] on the banyan, cool and slender
as a pod, the onyx grain of his eye closed deep
in green sunlight, when you can see how he obviously possesses
in his body, even in the slack scaly skin of
rose beneath his jaw, even in the posing net of his ribs,
even in the corpuscle of blood at the tip of his tail,
how he possesses in his body alone all
the power he needs to rise and declare, not merely truth,
but rapture;
The living body asleep, so great a sum of beauty
that a billion zeroes follow it, the eyes sealing the head so
tightly during those moments that the infinity
of possible heavens inside can be clearly perceived by anyone;
When you watch us sleeping, when you see the purest architecture
of the ear, the explicit faith of the knee,
the [AUDIO OUT] guiltless unforgiving adoring sweet
momentary tremble of claim in the breast--
aren't you sorry?
Don't you love us?"
The last poem, then, is entitled "Before I Wake."
You may know it's a take-off of the old prayer "Now I Lay Me
Down To Sleep."
I used to say that-- now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
But I think it's "I pray thee, Lord"--
T-H-E-E, whether that makes a difference to anybody.
It kind of does.
The rhythm of it changes.
I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep.
"Before I Wake."
"The turning of the marsh marigold coming slowly
into its emergent bloom underwater, the turning
of the coral sands over themselves and over their dunes
and over the scratchings of the scarab
beetles turning over the dung of the desert doe;
the pivoting of the eye of the bluefish turning
inside the drawing light of its multiple school
shifting its constellation in the dark sea;
this is the prayer of sleep in which I lay myself down
to dream.
The quiet enclosed by the burrowing wolf spider dragging
its egg sac to the surface to sun;
the stillness covered by the barren strawberry making
its fleshless seed on the rocky hill;
the study in the desert mushroom knotting itself
in the arid heat; the silence of the fetal sea horses
bound in the pouch of their father;
this is the dream of the soul in which I lay myself down to pray.
And I've asked the out--
[AUDIO OUT] motion of the hollow web of the elm making leaf,
and I've asked the inward motion of every glinting fin making
the focus of the carp, and I've asked the involution of the egg
buds carried in the dark inside the cowbirds circling overhead,
and I've asked the tight coiling and breaking of light traveling
in the beads of the sawgrass and the net of the sea oats
splitting and binding and splitting again over and over
across the open lands to keep me in this dream tonight through
one prayer more."
Thank you.
You've been a wonderful audience.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you all for coming tonight,
and join us for a reception in the back.