"Two kinds of dying, then one of each is easy,
like the sadness that weds us.
There are two ways to be alone.
One is filled with sunlight, and the yellowing aspen turn it
by alchemy into themselves."
And then I'll just read a couple of poems from this book.
Probably by now, everyone knows what the uncertainty principle
is, Heisenberg's principle.
I used to have to explain that.
But by now, history moves so fast.
The best explanation I ever heard of it--
it's the idea that the presence of an observer
changes what's being observed, whether it's anthropology
or particle physics.
The best illustration I ever heard of it
was Douglas Hofstadter, which he said
it's like dropping a quarter into your couch,
and you reach down in there, and you try to get that back.
But as you push your hand down, spreads
the cushions of the couch, and the quarter just keeps going.
And in this case, the couch is infinite.
[LAUGHTER]
So I was thinking about that, and I
was thinking about some things that were going on
and that will become clear in the poem.
And I was also thinking about those guys, the polar explorers,
those guys who went to a lot of effort to reach the North Pole.
And if you get close to the North Pole, at a certain point,
your compass doesn't work anymore.
It just goes around and around.
And so you have to start navigating
with the stars and the sun.
And then I was thinking, after all that effort and months
and eating dogs and stuff, you get to the North Pole.
And then where's north?
You got 360 degrees of south.
Was that-- well, that's true.
[LAUGHTER]
"The Uncertainty Principle."
"The real is not what happens but what is about to happen,
whatever you were dying for before.
Knowing is just feeling with a sense of direction,
and thinking tags after like a string
of tin cans, annoying everyone.
Something was about to happen.
My mother said I'd never make it back in time
by the way she looked at me forever.
She wasn't thinking.
I pledge allegiance to her eyes, don't envy me.
When you reach the North Pole, the idea of North
becomes unrealized, free.
Which north was true?
Which south was home?
What is it you are dying for?
Only the stars, which do not know, can tell.
Only the stars, which do not know, can tell."
Yeah.
For a couple of these poems that I'm going to read,
it will be helpful to know that I was born in 1950.
This poem is called "Independence Day, 1956--
A Fairy Tale."
"I think this house's mouth is full of dirt.
Smoke is nothing up its sleeve.
I think it could explode.
Where I am, in the dirt under the floor, I hear them.
They don't know.
My mother leaves each room.
My father enters.
Now she is cleaning things that are already cleaned.
My father is in the living room.
He's pouring.
Rum into a glass, gas into a lamp, kerosene into a can.
He pours capped fuses, matches, dynamite
sticks into his pockets.
He pours rounds into the .45 which
he will point skyward and hold next to his ear
as if it were telling him things.
Where I am, the spider spins.
The broken mouse drags a trap through lunar talc of dust.
Where the bitch whelps is where I wriggle on my belly, cowardly,
ashamed, to escape the 4th of July.
I think the house is very ready.
It seems to hover like an 'exploded view' in a repair
manual, parts suspended in disbelief, nails pulled back,
aimed.
My father goes out.
My mother whimpers.
There will be no supper.
She opens the firebox and stuffs it full of forks.
"The Weather Spider."
A spider lives in the barometer.
It's a white spider, and it was born there.
Sometimes, it rains from a clear blue sky,
or rain falls without touching the ground, or it doesn't rain.
Of course, we had weather before the spider,
before the barometer, so it isn't that.
We have thunder and winter, dry lightning
unraveling the tree and the three good horses under it,
snow leaving the Earth and falling straight
up back into the cloud.
Anybody got a match?
Anybody got a thimble full of blood?
After a slim night storm, the spidery likenesses of aspens
memorized the north sides of the trees themselves.
Wouldn't it be wrong to say the new buds wait?
She denies.
Do you think the spider doesn't matter
to weather just because it lives in the barometer?
The first light seems to like it in these glass branches.
The whole morning is given to unilateral disarmament
of all the sides.
Beneath the glass, the spider's indifference towards us
grows immense, indomitable.
Anybody got a thimble full of blood?"
"Art Class."
"Let us begin with a simple line, drawn
as a child would draw it, to indicate the horizon.
More real than the real horizon, which is less than line,
which is visible abstraction, a ratio.
The line ravages the page with implications
of white earth, white sky.
The horizon moves as we move, making us feel central.
But the horizon is an empty shell, strange radius
whose center is peripheral.
As the horizon draws us on, withdrawing,
the line draws us in and requiring further lines,
engendering curves, verticals, diagonals, urging shades,
shapes, figures.
What should we place, in all good faith, on the horizon?
A stone?
An empty chair?
A submarine?
Take your time.
Take it easy.
The horizon will not stop abstracting us."
Well, you remember a couple of years
ago when everybody was talking about Christopher Columbus.
His day was yesterday, I think.
And a couple of years ago, there were people saying,
you can't celebrate Columbus, because he was bad.
And there were other people saying, sure,
you can celebrate Columbus.
He was good, and it went on like that.
[LAUGHTER]
This poem is called "On Exploration."
"A hawk drops to the treetop like a falling cross.
The haybarn is ticking.
The Universe has everything.
That's what I like about it.
A single chubby cloud beelines downwind, trying
to catch up with the others.
Yellow leaves plane across the water, drifting the inlet.
The pond is a droozy eye.
Details tend to equal each other, making decisions harder.
Is polio an endangered species?
The Universe is mostly empty--
that's important-- a fractal palindrome
of concentric emptinesses.
Is there life out there?
Are there lawns?
Columbus is famous for discovering
a place where there were already people killing each other.
Nothing missing.
Nothing new.
Let's pick wildflowers.
Let's take a meteor shower.
Let's live forever, and let's die, too."
"The War That Isn't What You Think."
"The little wind I saw curving and lifting
the black mare's mane never came this way, though I waited,
face tilted--
to wind as heliotropic is to sun.
We have to keep our disappointment alive.
We have to sustain our appall, act
surprised that humanity has, again today, failed
to evolve away from meanness, that we ourselves
have failed in this.
Invisible earth, I still can't feel any wind,
can't feel, though I hear cottonwood leaves that
hung still turn sudden, turn all-at-once, like
small birds in a flight of small birds, turning,
like one thing instead of many.
Turn silver side to the wind when it comes,
shiver and moan when it comes.
O wind, immaculate, that lifts the mane, immaculate,
that turns the silver leaves, that bears away
the smoke of sacrifice.
The wind, when it finds me, bears no trace of sage-sweet
horse smell, no color black, no softness of muzzle of the mare,
her mane curving and lifting where she grazes the horizon
down to nothing."
Jane made an allusion to Greek fragments,
so I should read this.
It's called "Sapphic Suicide Note."
"Day out, no worldly joy, italics mine."
There aren't any italics in it.
This poem came out of a-- well, I've
never really written poems on request.
I don't intend to really do that.
But I got asked to write a poem about a painting,
along with a number of other poets.
And all the other poets went through this catalog.
We were supposed to write a poem about a painting
in a certain art collection.
And all the smart guys went through,
and they chose paintings that had stuff in them, you know?
[LAUGHTER]
I chose Mark Rothko because I like Rothko, you know?
And I this is really just a poem about the stuff in a painting.
So this painting-- it's called Untitled, 1968,
and it's a fairly typical Rothko painting, if you know his work.
It's a red-- well, it's many reds,
but it is red in color field, and it
has just a slightly less red band across the middle of it.
"Untitled, 1968, for Mark Rothko."
"There's no such thing as an emergency.
Betrayal is eventual.
The bridge is a river, when you think about it, river of blood,
when you think about it.
The Lord giveth.
Highest echelons of quietude.
A veronica in each sunset.
In every blackening bandage in the hospital's unspeakable bins,
a veronica.
Someone suffered here.
The elevator of blood rose like any other.
Why not.
Our nets were full of sunset when we hauled them in.
The red sail filled and pulled us darkward.
Blood in the drumroll blossomed.
The Lord giveth.
Thou shalt. Change the bandages when they blacken.
Don't think about it.
Set the red sail and disappear.
Slow drip in silence.
Don't say a word.
Don't say the wineglass on the sill is a sun-dried Sangreal.
It's a landscape.
You just can't bring your body.
The bridge is an inward horizon.
The bridge has arrived in time for us to cross.
I know because someone, or his assistant, suffered here."
"Resurrection Update."
"And then it happened.
Amidst cosmic busting and booming,
gravity snapped, that galactic rack and pinion.
Trees took off like rockets.
Cemeteries exploded.
The living and the dead flew straight up together.
Only up was gone.
Up was away.
Earth still spun as it stalled and drifted darkward, sublime,
an aspirin in a glass of water."
I'll try to read a poem that I've never read before.
I'm not even sure I like it, but we'll find out.
It's called "You Know What People Say."
Sulky what-ifs.
They bumblefuck the metastuff.
Diffidence their stock in trade.
Cozy hell-- cozy, hell.
They make a mockery of irony.
They hold Special Olympics in wit.
What was Shakespeare's blood pressure?
Lots of luck.
Vertical river, cloister of thunder,
bleeds the ship's fell sail.
God comes in for a landing.
He lowers God's landing gear.
He raises the holy spoilers, lowers the sacred ailerons.
He imagines reality.
Tried everything in life?
Try living.
Sulky what-ifs are dumbstruck.
Drumsticks.
Their spiritual actuality is empirical.
What if uppity angels?
What if there really were rules?
What if those angels melted in the rain?
If reality is illusion, wouldn't it
stand to reason that illusions are real?
A lot of dumb questions.
Impingement of external objects or conditions upon the body
palpitate apostasy.
The oppressed must free the oppressors to free themselves,
see?
The soul is euphemism for the body.
What does willing mean?
Do you sense my sense?
Am I fashionable?
Objective as an angel in--
where'd you get your soul, Kmart?
Screaming from a safe place?
Nine smocked doctors, three unmasked.
One has left his face sewn to the pillow.
One holds a lace fan like a hand of cards she
studies, considering the risks.
She is the loveliest doctor.
Her doctor-father scolds her right
there in front of all the other doctors.
They are aghast.
They kneel and don carnival hats with feathers.
I don't think they are really doctors.
The trees are real.
They are green kachinas.
Dark rooms of wind are installed in the house of barbarism.
The norm is always incorrect.
If what?"
I'm going to put--
in this next book, there's going to be page--
I wrote this poem before I wrote The Meadow.
It's a little prose poem, and it ended up
being page 131 of The Meadow, but I never
published it as a poem.
And since it was written as one, I
thought I'd just go ahead and publish it again.
It's called "Small Countries."
"In defense of whatever happens next,
the navy of flat-bottomed popcorn cloud
steams over like they are floating down
a river we're under.
To the west, red cliffs, more pasture,
the blue Medicine Bow with stretchmarked snowfields,
quartzite faces like sunny bone.
I'm worried about Lyle getting back from town with his oxygen,
but then I see him through binoculars
turn the Studebaker, antlike, off the county road
and up the four-mile grade.
So small down there that I want to imagine
his hands on the wheel, still strong, his creased blue jeans
and high-top shoes I know he wears to town.
He turns off the road on a small knoll
about halfway up and stops the truck, facing the mountains.
He still looks small against so much space,
but I can see his left arm and shoulder,
and the brim of his hat lowered as he lights a smoke
and looks off toward the mountains.
And small countries of light and dark rush across the prairie
towards him and over him."
This is a kind of a weird poem, and it's also an older poem
that I didn't put in the last book of poems that I published,
and it's kind of stayed around and somehow survived.
But I had a problem with it because somewhere years ago,
someone told me this wonderful word,
and I remembered being told, I think,
that it was Swedish or something, I think,
because that's what I assumed it was.
And the word is "svaha," and I was told that it means
"the space between the lightning and the thunder,"
which I thought was great, because we don't have a word
for that.
And so years and years later, I'm putting this manuscript,
and I start to get nervous about this word
because maybe you should double-check it.
And so I asked a Swedish person that I know.
She recognized this word, and she said, no.
So that left me knowing what the word meant,
just not knowing what language it was in,
which is just playing hell with the note,
see, at the end of the book.
I'd seen the word used by Gary Snyder in a completely different
context, and I suspected since he used it, it must be Sanskrit.
So I went to the Sanskrit dictionary.
And indeed, I found the word, but it doesn't mean "the space
between the lightning the thunder."
It means "to squander one's inheritance."
[LAUGHTER]
And there's also a similar word very close to that, [SANSKRIT],
which means "excrement of dog."
[LAUGHTER]
So I just deleted the note, and I don't know what to do now.
[LAUGHTER]
But every time I give a reading, I can explain this,
and you know that I meant the space between the--
I meant that I thought that there was this word, see?
[LAUGHTER]
So this is "Big Thompson Svaha."
Big Thompson Canyon in Colorado is where--
I think it was in 1972 or '74 or something like that--
they had a flash flood, and 220 people were killed.
"Down from the weary steeply buttressed cirques
over snow-fat stands of evergreens,
the river gathers rain into her skirts and hurries it away.
Smithereens of broken mountains blush and steam and yawn.
There is no word in English for the gap between the look
of lightning and its clap.
After a moment of deep consideration,
permission to resume our lives again.
Tomorrow, they will pick limp fishermen from limbs of trees
that never meant to bear, and oldsters from Dubuque will point
to where their cottage went, while unexploded propaned bob,
nudge, and spin, so unashamed in the deep permissionless
consideration that waits for us birth light, death row, taken."
"In the stunned little interval between winter and spring,
like the held gasp of surprise preceding real wonder,
I'm a flashlight in daylight.
Green stirs low down and shows through dead blond shocks
of grass, and gray aspen flowers dangle above old snowbanks--
I go around like a feral saint.
The timber hoards its meager crust of snow.
I used to walk over the hill to visit my neighbor about now,
just because he was still alive after another winter.
We'd look out the window at the groggy meadow,
not much to say by the end.
This year, my neighbor is dead, so I walked the hill anyway.
There's his dead house.
There's his dead fence.
The timber hoards its meager crust of snow.
I'm a gunnysack of gravel.
I'm sudden as a gust of light.
This is just the stunned little interval after another winter,
the held gasp of surprise preceding real wonder."
This poem, I don't know if I need to say anything about it,
really it was kind of a funny story involved with the people
who pub first-- this is also a pretty old poem--
who wanted to publish this in a magazine.
There's the second line in it is Shirley's old photographs.
And this magazine was really concerned about getting
sued and stuff, so they called me up
and they said, who's Shirley?
Are they really her photographs?
And they're old photographs.
They're not photographs she took.
They're photographs she collected.
So I had to explain this to this woman.
She's getting very, very nervous.
And so I said, well, you know, why don't you call Shirley?
And she said, well, how do I get in touch with her?
And I said, well, the easiest way is,
because Shirley lives out in Laramie, and she's--
I told this New York City editor,
she's the president of the Albany County Cow-Belles
Association, which is an auxiliary to the StockGrowers
Association.
And these photographs actually appear
in a book that was published by the Albany County Cow-Belles.
It's a book of pictures of one-room schools,
and it was called Cow-Belles Ring School Bells.
So I said, go ahead.
Call her up.
[LAUGHTER]
And it was getting pretty quiet on the other end of the phone.
The poem's called "Booklearning."
She did call her up, by the way.
And I think they talked for several hours.
[LAUGHTER]
"There are certain constants in Shirley's old photographs
of one-room schools in Albany County, Wyoming.
For one thing, the schoolmarms are the only ones
whose clothes ever fit.
A few depict the pale ragamuffins
on horseback, sometimes three or four astride the one
quixotic nag that brought them.
One shows the four resident scholars
perched on the roof of their log alma mater, massive and gloomy
as a wooden raft.
But most are more formulaic, children mustered against a wall
to stand in gap-toothed rows, wildly varying in height
and age, pale in their tight or tent-like collages of clothes,
their cowboy hats and galoshes, fresh as mushrooms
from the log dark where they learned, too dim to photograph.
Staring straight into the sun of a winter afternoon
chosen for its brilliance, trying
not to blink for long enough.
Indeed, these pictures make Albany County look
much [AUDIO OUT] than it is.
The children look like they are burning up
in so much resisted glare.
Never mind the snowdrift loitering
on the right, even paler than the squinty grimaces.
When they go back in, they'll all go blind awhile again,
this time in darkness, where they could see before.
They are learning things whose relevance to the clear light
they go home in is only promised."
Yeah, this poem's a little longer,
but I'll go ahead and try to read it anyway.
It's called "Western Civilization."
Get it?
"1.
That woman still lives at her ranch.
You can ask her.
Maybe she knows.
As near and far as the rest of us can tell,
the barn and sheds were built in the Great Depression.
Someone had money and a big idea,
far and away the biggest idea I've ever seen.
Pat says there must have been a hundred men, shepherds
and shearers, working there.
It's one of those things that not only is, but seems,
larger inside than out, like a planetarium or an orange, even
with Wyoming around it and real stars flying away.
Just stick your head in there.
Its dark will make you dizzy.
It has an underneath too low to stand in unless you are a sheep.
The loft vaults like a dusky church.
2.
All that summer, I balanced water,
coaxing the desert into pasture, with eight cubic feet per second
for two thousand acres.
Horseback, shovel on my shoulder along miles of ditches--
stalling here, releasing there, water over the deepening green,
keeping it living--
herons and cranes, regal in meadows, strings of ducklings
frothing the ditch to get away.
3.
One day riding ditches, I saw Clay.
He was on the hill against the sky, flapping his arms at me.
They were going to bulldoze the corrals at the shearing sheds,
intricate maze of gates and pens Clay
as a kid had built with his father,
before they lost their ranch, before Frank died,
before the family had to move away.
The new owner was razing everything.
I guess he had some kind of idea.
Clay didn't need any gates, but, as Pat said, that's Clay.
I met them at the shearing sheds.
Pat held a wrecking bar like a steel snake.
I just can't stand tearin' apart all them guys's dreams, he said,
looking shy.
Hell is when you know where you are.
4.
On the barn roof, a loose piece of tin flaps in the wind
like a broken wing.
Wyoming whirls in the sun.
Up in the loft a pair of shears, oh, fifty or sixty years
forgotten there, floats in noonlight, bearing up
some dust, just a pair of spring-steel scissors,
two knives joined at the hip, with smiling edges.
An owl the color of things left alone
flaps out of the gable door.
Hell is when you know where you are--
mazes of pens and gates dreaming sheep; miles of ditches
dreaming green.
5.
No one living knows who built the shearing sheds,
unless maybe that woman, and I'm not
about to ask her, ever since she tried
to stab her husband with a pair of scissors.
He was ninety-one and barely held her off.
Later she claimed she was just trying
to cut his heart medication out of his shirt pocket--
dope, she called it--
and the old man had to leave the ranch, where
he didn't last long.
They bulldozed the corrals.
We got forty gates.
We took them someplace safe.
Now the vast, dim barn floats like an ocean liner
whose doldrums are meadows spinning into brush,
and everywhere you look Wyoming hurries off.
All night the stars make their escape.
In the loft a pair of shears cuts woolly moonlight.
All day a piece of roofing slaps in the wind.
A startled owl flaps out of the gable.
Hell is when where you know where are, and it's beautiful.
You saved the gates for nothing.
You balanced the water to keep the green from spinning away
into sage, same gray as the wing that just now shaded your eyes."
I don't know.
I'm not sure I should read this poem it's really not PC at all.
[LAUGHS] Come on.
You want me to read it?
Please.
It's pretty bad, Dennis.
OK, I'll give a try.
Actually, it's OK, because it's all quotes, this poem.
[LAUGHTER]
I didn't say any of it.
The poem is called "Rintrah Roars,"
which refers to one of Blake's crazy emanations.
And at least in the poem that I got sort of inspired by,
Rintrah is the just wrath of the prophet.
And since I'm no prophet, I had to just use prophetic quotes
that I heard one week.
Giotto, you know, is the Italian medieval painter
who liked Saint Francis a lot.
And I think everything else is pretty clear.
Maybe it's too clear.
"My father-in-law writes from Umbria,
where peasants eat songbirds for lunch and pray beneath frescoes
by Giotto--
Saturday, 30 January, last day of the season wherein
big men can kill little birds.
Lyndon Johnson, while being escorted by a young marine who
said, 'That one over there is your helicopter, Sir,' replied,
placing his arm around the boy, 'Son, they're all
my helicopters.'
[LAUGHTER]
Sam said, 'I might be white bread,
but there is one pissed-off nigger in my heart.'
McPherson says he doesn't see anything
in the world worth coming back for.
He wants to get off the wheel, says,
'I don't want to come back as anything--
not even a bumblebee.'
So I say, 'Oh, Jim, you'd make a good bumblebee.'
[LAUGHTER]
But I was thinking--
That should be enough for anybody's God.
Pruitt said, 'Man, I wouldn't fuck her with your dick.'
It would be trite to describe the clocksmith's house--
the way it sounded like bees in there.
'You can never have enough clocks in your house.'
This from a man who had thousands in his.
I asked, 'You probably don't even hear them anymore.'
He said, 'I hear them when they stop.'
Lyle said, 'It's all right to be a fool;
it's just not all right to be a old fool.'
Steve, the banjo wasn't all they smashed.
It was every window.
It was every thing I had.
You don't want to feel the wind blow
through your house that way.
Another friend said, 'I am chained to the earth to pay
for the freedom of my eyes.'"
Yeah.
"Expecting Company."
"Death is when the outside world wants to get away from itself
by going inside of someone.
Till the walls cave in.
Till the roof is gone.
I'm floating face up on a sea of adrenaline.
A broken window hangs around my neck.
I have to make more room in here.
I have to get rid of the furniture."
I'll read a couple more poems.
It's "Christmas, 1960."
"Some of my friends were hoping for BB guns.
I had it over them.
My dad gave me a .30-.30.
What a great guy.
He gave me-- [AUDIO OUT] and when I fired it,
he always stood behind me to catch me
when it always knocked me down.
He was getting me ready to kill a deer that fall.
He taught me to sit stone still in a rock outcrop
at the bottom of a draw.
He was going to drive the deer down
to me, close enough to kill.
Even a child could kill that close.
The other thing he taught me was the 20-minute nap,
the way you get your sleep in war.
We practiced daily.
Like somebody threw a rock through the window from
the outside and covered the bed with broken glass,
that's how I lay next to my father on the bed while he took
this 20-minute nap, breathing in through his nose and out through
his mouth.
And I lay there, light beside him, under orders.
It wasn't child abuse.
He never touched me.
I would have levitated if he taught me that.
I wasn't napping.
I was not daring to move, for fear he'd wake.
I was paying attention to the aspen wood paneling, the knots
like birds' eyes in the--
[AUDIO OUT] like Ophelia was how I
felt, as the raptors' eyes grew faces, wings.
My face felt like it was pushing through from the other side
of a looking glass.
Could I have floated like the dead?
I would, but like the living, sank.
The birds with eyes, not all of them friendly, swirled over me.
I saw a drop of blood at the center of everything.
I knew what God was.
I knew I was my father's little teddy bear of stone."
"Postcard."
"Days are cubes of light that equal each other.
Whether anything happens in them or not,
no matter what anyone did or didn't do, they are equal.
The emptiest are lovely, though one
is drawn to the bright-edged shards of days
that cracked from disappointment and longing.
Some days I go looking for oceans.
If I find one, I search the beach for the teeth
I left in a glass of water in a motel room in Nebraska.
I'm losing the ability to tremble.
I find appearances helpful.
Some days I go looking for the sky."
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]