Thank you, and thank you for being here.
And thank you, Mark, for a lovely introduction.
I'm going to be reading from two books this evening:
Voyaging Portraits and Breaths' Burials.
I say two books, but basically, I
feel I've been writing one book for the better
part of 25, 30 years.
So one ongoing--
I think devotion to it.
A particular vision in poetry, one
that I think traces an itinerary.
I think every poem I've ever written
has a certain urge, a certain desire to get somewhere,
to reach somewhere.
The poems seem to travel from a here to a there,
from an I to you.
From a now to an ever eventual then.
And doing so, the verb attempts to reverberate, the sound
to resound.
And the poem would become ideally
a kind of resonant surface--
what I even call a sonorous mirror.
At least this is the ambition of the poems.
The first poem is called, "Along Lines, The Lines Move."
And it's a poem that all my poems usually
begin with a particular physical instance, particular moment.
And this was a moment, a very damp spring in Provence.
Sweet peas, which usually grow along the ground.
Suddenly with all the darkness rose up into the trees
and hung from above, from the eyelids from the pines.
And it inspired the immediate--
the instigating image for the poem, out
of which the rest evolved.
Along Lines, The Lines Move.
So damp all spring, the sweet peas rose as if sipped--
pink, carbuncular-- into ilex and pine.
Festooned, impossible.
Along lines the pressured fragments: steel, nacre, dew...
the scrapped world's: was what we'd
drawn, quickened into taut running strips of sequence.
Shale fitted, intricate, to foam.
Breath-set, the sectioned waves (were what,
in saying would take us.
Along lines, the lines: is how the wrist works,
and the linked articulating bones of the light.
Is what would bring us, of all words, you, the furthest;
would bring us our arms under, a tongue twisted through teeth).
Is why the grapes loom and the crinkled hearts
of the hollyhock.
A bulge of ocher over the black abutments.
Way, ways: in a flush of wind.
Your tall body flares into focus.