The book closes, and I'm going to close on seven odes.
They're called "The Odes of Estrangement."
But the subject matter in each of the seven odes
changes entirely, but there are levels of intensity
and they seemed to lead one into another, intensify as they go
and lead finding into a single theme.
Hopefully, the threads weave into a single fabric.
The first ode is called "Already After."
"For the pages of the voice vanish fast as they're turned.
liquescent, the very same spaces just after:
their glistening residue, what toads
or the fat calyx of certain marsh flowers
still sometimes exuded.
Had stopped talking, telling one another each other's name.
The contours, the exact volumes our sleep had taken.
Ask yourself occasionally: Still there?
As your brow rising through the bright oval
came to meet the black liner.
Had let, let one another out, hadn't we,
and found the immensity beyond somehow smaller?
Was wind, though, and the unmistakable scent everywhere
of salt, of salt pervasive, as if
reclaiming the very least cavity indentation of memory itself,
crowding it, vacuous.
Avocet, you would still occasionally,
as if interject, pointing out a relic in itself,
that elegant stilt, its beak an upturned tendril.
While the word itself flew forward upon on some illegible
board to enter, already, the already after."
The second ode is called "Pastorale."
"Written, the words become anyone's, no one's, wouldn't
need you now.
The flowering fruit tree is what you'd
scribbled in white bars across so much mute scoring.
On that broken ground, its raised chords,
wouldn't even need yourself."
The third ode is called "St. Ursula, Venice,"
and arose out of the famous painting by Carpaccio where
Ursula dreams her martyrdom.
"Her dream, frozen in ocher pigments, had set yours adrift.
So little now to keep you, the stays, the moorings
fast to their own wobbling reflections.
Bit by bit, had worked free, hadn't you, broken miracle
into so many constituent parts?
Weren't these indeed our last relics, the petal and fracture,
the pieces still somehow withstood?
Swarm, then, to what?
For the sections themselves, as if long for deployment,
your breath to bud in the very midst of the fresh numbers.
Alternately, you are and aren't, depending on the sounds
you'd employ, no matter how sham, tenuous,
the kind of paradise murmured you'd project."
The fourth ode is called "Eurydice."
"Through the mirror's very heart had run shafts,
hollowed corridors, saw you raw as hair perched within its
deepest cell, spoke because you couldn't.
Rolled you supple as your own shadows
over the lip of so much stasis.
These, then, were the words, the offerings
of the open, the empty of the thoroughly extricated.
Who, then, in this vacuous ballast would save whom?
through the late drafts, driven currents,
your ankles quiver quick as fish.
Here, where the mouth draws on memory alone, where bulky,
pendulous, each organ weighs exactly that of a breath.
But no, there's no one, nothing you yourself might have echoed,
but the light as it shifts over so much idle decor.
You, whose lease glance makes a ladder,
a scale onto an octave in which heap of whispers,
the instrument itself won't even be housed nor its innumerable
parts methodically shredded."
The fifth ode is called "Potentio."
"Followed yourself through your own displaced work sites,
whole weeks of the white scaffolds
of a single refractory sound, yours
these arms, organs awaiting conveyance, the buoyancy
of some exact syllabication.
Doves, juniper, the bright lime quarries just over,
isn't this what you'd worked towards,
the world, the world's, the very magnitude you'd thin to?
wedge, transparent?
Whereby the dahlias, gargantuan, their red petals
undulant as octopi.
Whereby the air, the uttered air,
which you'd bring in measured increments
through all that depredated space.
There, in that late country, you would no longer be yours.
You would already have reached by then the may, the might,
the ever-narrowing coils of some tenuous could."
The sixth ode is called "The Grottos."
"Is always toward the furthest and finally towards the lost,
themselves, that the senses transit,
slip furtive, that bunched in muscle
we'd lusted, it seems, after so very little,
channels, conduits, the secret history, perhaps,
of history itself written in dark drafts, elusive scribbles,
as if inadmissible mass in its very densities were riddled.
And you, nothing more than this breath that edged,
tongue that insinuated.
Oh, eyes so pale, you'd written they'd promised grottoes, oh,
holy the grottoes, the hollows, the weird birds
of our own disarticulated heart.
What, in default, had been plundered, relentless?
An earth, but elsewhere.
Isn't this what you meant, what you'd say,
what the eyes rising, yes, so pale, so impervious, already
divulged?
For here's only here in the vocable's forced retention.
Past, past ourselves in our own sonorous dispersions
resonates the gloriole, the ring of things released.
The rocks just now, as if afloat in the puddle
of their own shadows and the papery pink blossoms
of the cistus, rife with light, with the very light,
it would seem, of some ultimate equipments.
Massed now along the edges, awaited--
you had written-- no, not the barge, the puffed barge,
but the particle, but the predicate befitting.
Yes, holy the grottoes, the hollows,
those extricated worlds which lie luminous with sound there,
just there, past the inviolable lines of our own foreclosures."
And the last ode, the seventh ode, is called "The Relics."
And here, the persona is one of a street person,
his arm in the garbage of syntax, the garbage of language,
the wasted use of language reaching down
through the garbage can for the words, for the word,
for the vocal of befitting at the very base of so much
syntactic trash.
"As if chained to those clouds, what
billowed against the blind walls of your forehead sought losses,
didn't you?
those elaborate excavations in which
unearthing less, ever lesser, only kept what you hadn't found.
Relics, what the breath once had buried,
had enveloped in so much verbiage the still drifting
digits, nimbi of the indissasociable.
Would traffic, wouldn't you, in those omissions,
in that much empty imprint?
You, living as you did towards the very end,
at the earth's virtual completion, rummaged,
didn't you, amongst those spent sonorities?
There, just there within systems so dense,
so perfected, their only attributes themselves,
picked, didn't you, at that syntactic trash?
Oh, hollow, you wrote, the heart's a hollow, a hole
in which, a window in which, a cloud in which,
in which nothing, really, but occasionally
some occasional hiatus really, a where
whereby a small smattering of rays,
perhaps, might alight occasionally,
like in some kind of pantoscopic vision,
might even, through the medium of some artifice,
like a kind of spray, say, pelt the heart, putting
it to rest momentarily, with something unlikely as a smile,
so dolorous, so beatific, you'd swear that what you had just
witnessed was not only real, but real in such a way
that nothing, in fact, could ever again presume
to such consummate reality, notwithstanding the fact
that occasionally, and so on,
et cetera, et cetera, for in the name of nothing
had reached this abundance, in the name of name,
finally, this nominal diktat.
Scoop, you'd whisper, and feel your lips
curl to the injunction.
For under, just under, as if buried in sacks soft
as organs, the sacks themselves jingling dully
with their own unrecycled waste, would
lie the first banished strata, would lie, that is,
that iridescence, the puffed vapor
of some long since discarded compound.
Scoop, you'd murmur, would hear yourself murmur, as time
after time would plunge through that wasted idiom, would poke,
wouldn't you, through so much scroll, the unrolled printouts
of some post-historic infallible.
Oh, less, so much less, even less
than the refuse you'd work through,
would lie at last, that broken vocable.
Oh, worthless as wind, as light itself,
would it slip, ineffable, from your fingers?
Would, it from the claw your fingers
formed as they'd pick, jab, grapple at its very edges?
Oh, blown weather, disbanded heart, whatever utters,
utters nothing, really, and makes of that nothing lyric,
its only measure."
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]