The next three poems are my way of continuing the introduction.
I want you to know me through these three short pieces.
The first is called "Biographical."
It's really autobiographical.
I had an argument about that with somebody
in Becky Byrkit's class recently.
She said, well, if it's autobiographical then
you should say autobiographical.
And she scared me.
I didn't change it.
[LAUGHTER]
For some reason, fear wasn't a good rhetorical tool that night.
And the next one is called "The Million Dollar Pet Sex in Fat
City," and the next one, "The Wounding We Call the Windy
Forest."
And I'm reading these to you because I
think they kind of characterize the tenor and the tone of some
of the interior voices that I carry around with me,
and I want you to know about them.
I think you should know about these things.
"Biographical."
"So, the reports are in.
If a person permits circumstance to make of her a thing,
she will suffer.
Last night I talked to my lover except she wasn't my lover.
In the story she told, I was a dear, dear rabbit almost no
one would want to leave.
There're just arrangements one has to make sometimes
that govern a life.
Call it a sea change.
The scene was the shore.
I had climbed up on some large rocks early on.
From there I called to everyone I knew.
A bright line of vegetative life lined the view hundreds
of coastal days.
Not nearly enough.
From there I think it might be possible to break out
of the usual pattern romantique and create
a love which is not of the paradigm the ancients describe.
But then I would like to think it
is possible to be a woman who sells melons
beside a stream in the story where the Buddha's teaching can
be overcome.
In the story I told, I had the usual trouble with God.
I was lying next to a small woman in a bathing suit,
containing a tremendous fear that I would not
be all right, that I would not be loved again.
That story starts where some desert quail
keep asking me to go back to the dream in the middle distance.
In it, my four sisters' faces light up near some blasted
rocks, and a sea bass wants to walk out."