WEBVTT

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The book closes, and I'm
going to close on seven odes.

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They're called "The
Odes of Estrangement."

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But the subject matter
in each of the seven odes

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changes entirely, but there
are levels of intensity

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and they seemed to lead one into
another, intensify as they go

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and lead finding
into a single theme.

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Hopefully, the threads
weave into a single fabric.

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The first ode is
called "Already After."

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"For the pages of the voice
vanish fast as they're turned.

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liquescent, the very
same spaces just after:

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their glistening
residue, what toads

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or the fat calyx of
certain marsh flowers

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still sometimes exuded.

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Had stopped talking, telling
one another each other's name.

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The contours, the exact
volumes our sleep had taken.

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Ask yourself
occasionally: Still there?

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As your brow rising
through the bright oval

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came to meet the black liner.

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Had let, let one
another out, hadn't we,

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and found the immensity
beyond somehow smaller?

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Was wind, though, and the
unmistakable scent everywhere

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of salt, of salt
pervasive, as if

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reclaiming the very least cavity
indentation of memory itself,

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crowding it, vacuous.

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Avocet, you would
still occasionally,

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as if interject, pointing
out a relic in itself,

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that elegant stilt, its
beak an upturned tendril.

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While the word itself flew
forward upon on some illegible

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board to enter, already,
the already after."

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The second ode is
called "Pastorale."

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"Written, the words become
anyone's, no one's, wouldn't

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need you now.

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The flowering fruit
tree is what you'd

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scribbled in white bars
across so much mute scoring.

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On that broken ground,
its raised chords,

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wouldn't even need yourself."

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The third ode is called
"St. Ursula, Venice,"

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and arose out of the famous
painting by Carpaccio where

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Ursula dreams her martyrdom.

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"Her dream, frozen in ocher
pigments, had set yours adrift.

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So little now to keep you,
the stays, the moorings

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fast to their own
wobbling reflections.

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Bit by bit, had worked free,
hadn't you, broken miracle

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into so many constituent parts?

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Weren't these indeed our last
relics, the petal and fracture,

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the pieces still
somehow withstood?

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Swarm, then, to what?

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For the sections themselves,
as if long for deployment,

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your breath to bud in the very
midst of the fresh numbers.

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Alternately, you are and
aren't, depending on the sounds

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you'd employ, no matter
how sham, tenuous,

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the kind of paradise
murmured you'd project."

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The fourth ode is
called "Eurydice."

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"Through the mirror's
very heart had run shafts,

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hollowed corridors, saw you
raw as hair perched within its

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deepest cell, spoke
because you couldn't.

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Rolled you supple
as your own shadows

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over the lip of so much stasis.

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These, then, were the
words, the offerings

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of the open, the empty of
the thoroughly extricated.

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Who, then, in this vacuous
ballast would save whom?

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through the late
drafts, driven currents,

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your ankles quiver
quick as fish.

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Here, where the mouth draws
on memory alone, where bulky,

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pendulous, each organ weighs
exactly that of a breath.

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But no, there's no one, nothing
you yourself might have echoed,

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but the light as it shifts
over so much idle decor.

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You, whose lease
glance makes a ladder,

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a scale onto an octave in
which heap of whispers,

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the instrument itself won't even
be housed nor its innumerable

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parts methodically shredded."

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The fifth ode is
called "Potentio."

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"Followed yourself through
your own displaced work sites,

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whole weeks of the
white scaffolds

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of a single refractory
sound, yours

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these arms, organs awaiting
conveyance, the buoyancy

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of some exact syllabication.

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Doves, juniper, the bright
lime quarries just over,

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isn't this what
you'd worked towards,

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the world, the world's, the
very magnitude you'd thin to?

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wedge, transparent?

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Whereby the dahlias,
gargantuan, their red petals

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undulant as octopi.

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Whereby the air,
the uttered air,

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which you'd bring in
measured increments

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through all that
depredated space.

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There, in that late country,
you would no longer be yours.

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You would already have reached
by then the may, the might,

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the ever-narrowing coils
of some tenuous could."

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The sixth ode is
called "The Grottos."

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"Is always toward the furthest
and finally towards the lost,

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themselves, that
the senses transit,

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slip furtive, that
bunched in muscle

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we'd lusted, it seems,
after so very little,

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channels, conduits, the
secret history, perhaps,

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of history itself written in
dark drafts, elusive scribbles,

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as if inadmissible mass in its
very densities were riddled.

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And you, nothing more than
this breath that edged,

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tongue that insinuated.

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Oh, eyes so pale, you'd written
they'd promised grottoes, oh,

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holy the grottoes, the
hollows, the weird birds

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of our own disarticulated heart.

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What, in default, had been
plundered, relentless?

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An earth, but elsewhere.

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Isn't this what you
meant, what you'd say,

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what the eyes rising, yes, so
pale, so impervious, already

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divulged?

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For here's only here in the
vocable's forced retention.

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Past, past ourselves in our
own sonorous dispersions

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resonates the gloriole, the
ring of things released.

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The rocks just now, as
if afloat in the puddle

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of their own shadows and
the papery pink blossoms

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of the cistus, rife with
light, with the very light,

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it would seem, of some
ultimate equipments.

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Massed now along
the edges, awaited--

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you had written-- no, not
the barge, the puffed barge,

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but the particle, but
the predicate befitting.

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Yes, holy the
grottoes, the hollows,

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those extricated worlds which
lie luminous with sound there,

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just there, past the inviolable
lines of our own foreclosures."

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And the last ode, the seventh
ode, is called "The Relics."

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And here, the persona is
one of a street person,

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his arm in the garbage of
syntax, the garbage of language,

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the wasted use of
language reaching down

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through the garbage can for
the words, for the word,

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for the vocal of befitting
at the very base of so much

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syntactic trash.

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"As if chained to
those clouds, what

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billowed against the blind walls
of your forehead sought losses,

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didn't you?

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those elaborate
excavations in which

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unearthing less, ever lesser,
only kept what you hadn't found.

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Relics, what the
breath once had buried,

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had enveloped in so much
verbiage the still drifting

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digits, nimbi of
the indissasociable.

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Would traffic, wouldn't
you, in those omissions,

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in that much empty imprint?

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You, living as you did
towards the very end,

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at the earth's virtual
completion, rummaged,

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didn't you, amongst
those spent sonorities?

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There, just there
within systems so dense,

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so perfected, their only
attributes themselves,

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picked, didn't you, at
that syntactic trash?

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Oh, hollow, you wrote, the
heart's a hollow, a hole

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in which, a window in
which, a cloud in which,

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in which nothing,
really, but occasionally

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some occasional
hiatus really, a where

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whereby a small
smattering of rays,

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perhaps, might
alight occasionally,

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like in some kind of
pantoscopic vision,

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might even, through the
medium of some artifice,

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like a kind of spray, say,
pelt the heart, putting

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it to rest momentarily, with
something unlikely as a smile,

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so dolorous, so beatific, you'd
swear that what you had just

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witnessed was not only
real, but real in such a way

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that nothing, in fact,
could ever again presume

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to such consummate reality,
notwithstanding the fact

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that occasionally, and so on,

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et cetera, et cetera, for
in the name of nothing

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had reached this abundance,
in the name of name,

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finally, this nominal diktat.

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Scoop, you'd whisper,
and feel your lips

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curl to the injunction.

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For under, just under, as
if buried in sacks soft

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as organs, the sacks
themselves jingling dully

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with their own
unrecycled waste, would

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lie the first banished
strata, would lie, that is,

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that iridescence,
the puffed vapor

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of some long since
discarded compound.

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Scoop, you'd murmur, would
hear yourself murmur, as time

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after time would plunge through
that wasted idiom, would poke,

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wouldn't you, through so much
scroll, the unrolled printouts

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of some post-historic
infallible.

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Oh, less, so much
less, even less

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than the refuse
you'd work through,

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would lie at last,
that broken vocable.

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Oh, worthless as
wind, as light itself,

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would it slip, ineffable,
from your fingers?

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Would, it from the
claw your fingers

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formed as they'd pick, jab,
grapple at its very edges?

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Oh, blown weather, disbanded
heart, whatever utters,

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utters nothing, really, and
makes of that nothing lyric,

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its only measure."

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Thank you very much.

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[APPLAUSE]

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