WEBVTT

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Thank you, and thank
you for being here.

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And thank you, Mark, for
a lovely introduction.

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I'm going to be reading
from two books this evening:

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Voyaging Portraits
and Breaths' Burials.

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I say two books,
but basically, I

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feel I've been writing
one book for the better

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part of 25, 30 years.

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So one ongoing--

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I think devotion to it.

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A particular vision
in poetry, one

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that I think traces
an itinerary.

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I think every poem
I've ever written

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has a certain urge, a certain
desire to get somewhere,

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to reach somewhere.

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The poems seem to travel
from a here to a there,

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from an I to you.

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From a now to an
ever eventual then.

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And doing so, the verb attempts
to reverberate, the sound

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to resound.

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And the poem would
become ideally

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a kind of resonant surface--

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what I even call
a sonorous mirror.

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At least this is the
ambition of the poems.

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The first poem is called,
"Along Lines, The Lines Move."

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And it's a poem that
all my poems usually

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begin with a particular physical
instance, particular moment.

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And this was a moment, a
very damp spring in Provence.

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Sweet peas, which usually
grow along the ground.

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Suddenly with all the darkness
rose up into the trees

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and hung from above, from
the eyelids from the pines.

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And it inspired the immediate--

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the instigating image
for the poem, out

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of which the rest evolved.

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Along Lines, The Lines Move.

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So damp all spring, the sweet
peas rose as if sipped--

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pink, carbuncular--
into ilex and pine.

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Festooned, impossible.

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Along lines the pressured
fragments: steel, nacre, dew...

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the scrapped world's:
was what we'd

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drawn, quickened into taut
running strips of sequence.

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Shale fitted,
intricate, to foam.

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Breath-set, the sectioned
waves (were what,

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in saying would take us.

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Along lines, the lines:
is how the wrist works,

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and the linked articulating
bones of the light.

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Is what would bring us, of
all words, you, the furthest;

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would bring us our arms under,
a tongue twisted through teeth).

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Is why the grapes loom
and the crinkled hearts

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of the hollyhock.

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A bulge of ocher over
the black abutments.

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Way, ways: in a flush of wind.

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Your tall body
flares into focus.

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