From her home in Northern Ireland,
this event is part of a statewide festival called
Arizona Salutes British Arts.
We are a bit more sanguine about that association
since there has been a peace in Northern Ireland
since we planned this reading.
Medbh McGuckian was born in Belfast,
where she now lives with her husband and four children.
She received a BA and MA degrees from Queen's University
in Belfast, where she was also the first woman
to be named writer in residence.
She's the author of four books of poetry,
The Flower Master, Venus and the Rain, On Ballycastle Beach,
and most recently, Marconi's Cottage.
In a recent review that was published,
her work was compared to both Emily Dickinson and John
Ashbery, an odd fusion of influences one might think.
I scratched my head many times and went back and back
to her poems, and finally said yes, McGuckian's poems
do share the immediate and shape shifting energy of Ashbery,
along with the quirky interior sense of spiritual urgency
one finds in Emily Dickinson.
It's truly an honor to have her with us.
Please welcome Medbh McGuckian.
[APPLAUSE]
After many vicissitudes--
I love that word--
I'm here.
And I'm very happy to be here.
Believe me, I'm very happy to be here.
So I hope we are celebrating the peace.
And I begin with some--
I have lost my--
OK, I begin with some early poems,
which for some reason being in Arizona, a couple of early poems
I had seemed to fit with the landscape
that I'm suddenly plunged into.
Very amazing moonscape of a landscape that I'm in.
And it's very much more beautiful
than I had imagined here.
So this is a poem I wrote a long time ago.
And just the kind of vegetation in it,
and just the kind of stage managing going on in the poem
reminds me just of being here in Arizona.
So don't worry about what it means,
just accept that it's something.
It's probably something to do with sex.
But you can work in as you go along.
Anyway, really, it's just about my inner world,
and this was how I felt. So it's called "Story County,"
and I'm dedicating it to the state of Arizona.
"Loose strife will not soothe the thirst of tall grass.
Migrating with the luminous speed,
the gay feather adds to the Indian pony.
The seried steps of the sidewinder.
The flavor of the garter snake.
Its early blush is green and warm.
It coarsens with the summer, till the cows
are lost like the toad's voice, or the crocodile
in the jaws of family life.
The smokescreen of religion.
The meadowlarks sing in the spurs of prairie roses.
Wine red fields of blue stem do what the wind says.
Like a mermaid wheelchair, I manicure demurely.
Stone houses, rock, maples, timber, birds.
The wooden country soil is a varnished sheen.
I'm done with pumping water in Story County.
Breeding tangle legs and self-heal.
Hawkweed and bluets, also known as Quaker's ladies, innocence."
Totally opposite to go back to my own country,
and to go back into Ireland, and give you
some idea of Ireland's history.
And we were talking last night about hot toddies,
and actually some people were drinking hot toddies.
So this is a poem dedicated to the hot toddy, I suppose,
and to all that side of things.
So it's an Irish poem, and it's called "The Cure,"
which is a euphemism for whiskey.
And boy could you do that sometimes.
So it's called "The Cure."
And again, it's an early poem, so you must forgive
some of the extravagances.
"What is more beautiful than potatoes in bloom?
A redhead swinging poitín from her breasts.
A smuggler from the cradle, with no character to lose.
She gives no dry bargains.
She's the doe in the still.
Grain sprouts under the bed, steeps in the false gable
to keep red Willy's tongue as rough as corduroy.
It would make a rabbit spit at a dog
to see it swallowed by hat makers and French polishers.
Once a man gets land, he loses his thirst.
They should have been canonized.
Who sprayed water on the worm?
Vapor, kettles, nipple.
In the Diocese of Derry, it's a reserved sin."
Speaking of sin, what do we see?
Do we ever speak of anything else, I wonder?
I have been talking about sin all day today.
And this is one dedicated to Trevor Weekes, who was my host
last night and very genial.
And it's about stargazing, and he's an astronomer.
And it really was dedicated originally
to my sister, who also is an astronomer.
So it's called "Magazines."
And again, as with a lot of my poems,
the titles would play on the two meanings of that.
Because magazines as glossy magazines,
fashion magazines but also powder kegs, or building up
of explosives, which was what was happening
in the country at the time.
See, it was a very explosive situation.
So it's a very explosive poem, really--
"Magazines."
"The sun is quiet.
It's so dark, the women in their houses
keep the lights on all day.
Their heated germs unwinding.
They do not worry about water running out
in the fringes of their appley beds.
They are deep sky observing with their eye cups, Ju cups,
curved spiders, the software of cosmic time.
In the hall, a bronze sculpture of Saturn,
sunrise taken at the moon's straight wall.
Glossy blow ups of a lunar earth rise.
A talkative Martian sunset, while this week's star
Atlas muscles Keiron in as Pluto's hanging plant.
Scrapbooks pile with jetty slides.
The powder room at the country and western dance."
And finally from this early bunch, an Indian poem.
We went to an Indian reservation yesterday,
and I was very moved by the poverty and the beauty of it.
And this is just sort of a pastiche of Paul Muldoon, who's
always nattering on about Indians in a very
patronizing way.
But don't repeat that.
But this is equally patronizing.
But this is the woman.
And it's, again, I suppose about sexuality.
But it has a double edged title, again,
because it's called "Pemmican," which is the paste,
or the cakes, that Indians--
it's a name of Indian food, but it's also an emergency food
supply, which again at the time, there
was all sorts of strikes and goings on in our country.
And people were constantly filling their cupboards
with tinned foods for the strikes.
I mean, I just remember doing that.
And people were even doing that last--
when the ceasefire happened.
The Protestants were going out filling their cupboards
with tins, food for the nuclear war that was going to happen.
And so as a result, the people lived off these tin foods
for a long time.
So anyway the title called "Pemmican."
And it's just a tribute to being here.
They know nothing about the place really,
but neither does Paul anyway.
"The buffalo in rut is a bull.
His skin will make a firewood boat
across the mussel shell river.
The locusts feed on the artemisia shrubs.
The ravens on little distant bear,
dreaming in the cherry tree.
We are his red tipped Osiris, his special one with the feather
tuft.
Wears white cosmetics, wormwood on her fingers.
In the bison dance, we swing claw necklaces and eagle fans.
The hourglass is meeting on our blankets."
And this book is all about flowers.
It was supposed to be all about flowers.
But again, it was about something else as well.
And I'll just read one longish poem
in it, which is all about flowers,
and just different kinds of flowers,
and different kinds of moods, and different kinds of states,
and everything else.
So it's in four sections and called "The Orchid House,"
Part 1.
"A flower's fragrance is a woman's virtue.
So I tell them underground in pairs
or in their fleshy white sleeves,
how desirable their shapes.
How one was lost for 60 years with all its arching spikes,
its honeyed tessellations.
And how in bloom, they will resemble moths,
the gloss of mirrors.
Christmas stars, their helmets blushing red-brown when they
marry."
Part 2-- "In my alpine house, the slavery I
pay my willful gentians, exploring all their pleats
and tucks as though they had something precious deep inside
that beard of camel hair, in the throat.
Touch them, ease their hand so slowly through their thumb hole
necklines, till they sit like tailors in their Earth shoes,
their watery husbands' knots.
No insects visit them, nor do their ovaries swell.
Yet every night in Tibet, their seeds are membraned by the snow.
Their roots are bathed by the passage of mouth water.
They tease like sullen spinsters.
The dew fall of summer limes."
Three-- "The disdain of green summer cloud on our glasshouses
has bred out the tomatoes coat of hair.
And flowers yield themselves less foolishly than deer
that fan their cologne with the affluence of flattened tears.
They must be harvested at dawn before their permafrost has sunk
beyond a skater's melted world.
Rude as hyacinths circling a private room at night.
To this tall icicle, my geranium oil.
The spills of my patchoulied shawl."
And the last one--
"The begonia's soil is rich and wet.
I tuck it in around her, as I would pat my hair,
straightening her tubered root.
We keep our sources secret.
She swells with lymph and electricity.
Her fibers transparently taped up.
And I sprout willowy as any sweet begonia."
The last book was kind of a preparation for death
and a preparation for birth.
Sometimes I think they're not that distinguishable.
And an early poem in this--
my father had been ill for some time.
And it seems as if I was ill also.
I mean, he couldn't be ill without me being ill.
And so I mean, the sicker he got, the sicker I got.
Of course, he had to sort of look after me far more
than he was able to look after himself.
And I never bothered looking after him, of course.
So anyway, this is about my father's illness.
And it's an early poem trying to come
to terms with the idea of losing him, never mind the fact of it.
So it's called "The Invalid's Echo."
"It was as if he put a thermometer back in its holder
without shaking it, or snatched a cigarette out of my mouth,
like a secret breath.
The way he put his finger on the rest, and we were disconnected.
The thinnest paper was an unblue that had summoned him.
It took five calls.
Sitting behind a desk, waking him prematurely,
as a parent poem, out of an unfrightened 10 year
stretch of love for 20 minutes by an open window.
His foliage was unlike that of any other.
His sound was like nothing else.
My ears were never rested.
I would have spent the rest of my life felling his timber,
never taking my eyes off him, always
looking straight at his mouth if that was how he liked it.
He practices at death with each embrace.
In the language of our grandmothers
who spoke God's name continually,
forgotten by our own free will.
He says a prayer for the dying over himself and me.
His endearments execute the house's deepest reds.
A house heals easily.
Bloodshed in the past loses its hue.
If I could die the same death in the same air as him,
I would wish my grave untended to, like everybody else's.
Like the bulb that has not been washed
since the revolution, the hole in the ceiling that
has left a little pile of plaster on the floor.
I think his family is so ancient.
His heart must still be over on the right, though I
have searched for it before in full swing
until it shrank to nothing, merging with my name that
comes from nowhere and is owner less,
like all we can see of the stars.
Now, like them, I lie with my bottom.
His chance neighbor, watching the entrance
to the house but not the house.
The long autumn has scattered its poisonous seeds,
so I will have no October child.
By the time I have the dream that he
will seek the word with his fingers, the word that
can scarcely be used.
That having forgotten everything,
he will imagine the sky in its second appearance
as the quintessence of blue.
I will be freezing in my short jacket.
In my last dream, it was after January.
I was buying food for him, when a truck I have lost track
of, came rattling into the overfull-filled courtyard."
And to balance that-- one must always balance these things--
one about my mother.
I've never written a half decent poem about my mother
because I don't know.
It's just one of those things.
But this one is I guess is a jealousy poem and lots
of Freudian things in it.
But it's called "Flowered Sitting-room."
And I dedicated it to Ann Weekes.
We cheered ourselves up immensely
talking about our mothers for the last couple of days.
So it's dedicated to Ann and to her mother.
And both of our mothers are in this situation.
They probably had these very dynamic husbands,
who wore themselves out and abandoned them early on.
So they're left with memories.
And they're left sitting in a room.
And the room is their world, really.
And it was particularly my father's world
because my mother had him totally under her thumb.
And she would say, now, redecorate this room for me.
And the room would be redecorated every year.
And it always looked exactly the same,
but my father would have to spend days and days staggering
up and down, a labor of love for her.
And now that he's not there, the room hasn't been decorated.
So it's a poem called "Flowered Sitting-room."
And the flowered sitting room is,
my mother is a flowered sitting room,
as far as I'm concerned and more like a Sitting Bull, sorry.
OK.
Anyway, so tribute to my mother here.
OK.
No, she's quite sweet, in an attempt at sweetness.
Anyway--
"Your low roofed, half kitchen, half parlor,
old type of motherhood loses the sun.
Two fields from the house, your Snow White companion, morning,
makes the land more silent than if we had never heard of him.
You touch one of his bitten apples
with your lips not soft, almost without thinking
of the first signs of winter breaking up.
In your heart's heart, this is your world
for the moment, daily, before your eyes,
for three short long months.
A flower that looks thick, round, and double
faces a gradual death.
But what is your experience of the flower,
if not a vision so absolutely untransferable that when early
summer, now our new neighbor, colors his evening kiss with
your resting place, you see, in him, the impersonation of me."
So I'll go on to some more recent poems.
And this is one--
my father had been dead a year when I wrote this.
And it's a kind of reminiscence of his birth.
Oh sorry, not of his birth, of his death, of his death birth.
And it's not as harrowing as the other one
that I was going to read.
And I don't think I can read the other one.
So this is one where I'd sort of come to terms with it.
So I hope it's not as depressing as it sounds.
It's called "The Nearness of the Grape Arbour to the Fruit
Cellar."
I better say that again, so you can think about it,
"The Nearness of the Grape Arbour to the Fruit Cellar."
That's C-E-L-L-A-R.
"Like an open prayer against the body,
two roads cross exactly on that corner.
So it seems like an end but is not, as marriage is not.
He was not a country, but the material out of which countries
are made.
He was lying in long, loose waves of broken land.
I had never seen any blood so bright, so frozen, hard enough
not to smell.
The gash was torn from inside outward.
He felt his way through lilacs, trickling them
through his fingers as if he were separating hair,
its mere shadings in grass.
His features might have been cut out of a shell.
They were so transparent.
His chest, like a young blacksmith's,
arched his shoulders, now brown and in seed.
So the country seemed to lift itself up to me
and come near, with the dried stalks,
the dead stand of last year.
His hands burned red, looked calm,
but blazed with the things he could not say,
the other side of the pattern that is supposed not to count.
His Earth owl eyes warmed the guttered slope of my back
with our swift fires.
Such vivid pictures, they might have been his memories
but promised new things for living people.
A silence seemed to ooze out of the ground.
He coupled his mellow thunder to it, as a workhorse
to its yoke mate.
As if he knew it was to piece him out and make
a whole creature of him.
So with a pull that brought curling
muscles to the smooth sun warmed hips of the horses,
he cut his bodies from the pool of field dust
that's scarcely larger than the bed that held him.
A sleeve hanging empty, a good tight box that would turn water.
Yet never scattered his beads, nor raised his hands,
except to cross himself.
Till I was left alone with the older voice of a winter,
which lies too long, has overslept,
or early awakened enjoys the deepening gray."
This one is a strange poem about him.
As the mourning period continued,
I began to see him in all sorts of strange guises
and just wonder who he was, and where he was, and had he
been already reborn as a woman, and all this type of thing.
And my mind was sort of off at certain tangents.
And I was asked to write a poem for International Women's Day.
And I felt I should write about a woman,
but I still wanted to write about my father.
So I ended up thinking about all those possibilities.
And it's called "Black Virgin," because I was thinking
of the virgin, the black virgin, which is sacred in Spain
and probably around here as well.
So I've tried to visualize this new identity of him.
And probably again, totally crazy poem.
Anyways, it's called "Black Virgin."
"Sea black virgin-- being in love with you is a fine space.
I will never live in your searching wash, your grass
wallpaper, your bewildered, red gardens.
You desire your holy virginity to be admired by angels only.
Such dry self-knowledge, such sheer Englishness,
how could I have mistaken you for my father?
For the old days when there used to be people,
your days have a medieval structure.
Your brief Cistercian night with its night office
has fought sleep always.
For morning, you touch your lower eyelid, deep awake,
healthy and wise, and quiet.
With your eyes clear, what do you do with your eyes?
With your womb already primed with its fern like pattern,
chasteberry, chaste tree, monk's pepper?
If you are a woman, there's no question
of a word like me being able to comprehend the voice that
uttered it, or its sign language lordly
and off balance with the inwardness of war.
Perhaps I am a sound born with you and finished with you.
Your Lenten stomach, in a year when Easter was as late
as it could possibly be.
Or perhaps I am a military railway to you,
another city with transient miles of criminals.
But when rain arrives on the far side of emptiness,
like an identity scarcely dreamed,
and surrounds you with its unintelligible silence,
its enormously comforting speech,
even if it's talking to itself, as long as it talks,
I will listen."
Then it was a very, very difficult year last year.
And I'd been accused of all sorts of subterfuges
and by various people that I didn't take
account of the Troubles enough.
And believe me, I did, only too much.
But I began to write slightly more explicitly.
So it seemed as if it was becoming safer
to say what you meant about things.
So you will realize these are much more explicit as we go.
I wrote this poem.
It's called "The Radio Traitor," who was Lord Haw Haw in the last
war, who was Irish, and was hanged by the British for giving
information to the Germans.
But in Ireland, he was sort of considered a hero.
So he just seemed an image of the kind of complexity
of loyalties that you felt during that period,
during the whole thing that you were British,
and you were Irish, and you were European.
And you weren't sure where you belonged.
So it's about the notion of betrayal,
and the notion of country, and the notion of one lot being
murderers and the other lot being policemen.
So "The Radio Traitor."
"Last year's honey, ill preserved,
bitter beyond all sweetening, is set down
at another point in aridity but drawn here by your longing.
One of time's gables runs back to simplicity
in your jessamined window.
Because you offended the root of the law,
your halls, stairs, and passages are in perpetual dusk.
Because you rejoiced in the thought of the English dead,
lying under the West wall, you were always treated as British,
whether you were or not.
Men, and men, and men crowd at a stretch of water,
washing their clothes with vague faces,
with defined bodies of different phases of the same man.
You open and shut your breast, the rudiments
of musketry, bayonet fighting, squad drill.
Blood leaves your hands, your feet, your limbs and flows
back to your heart like a cold change in the room.
Waking opposite your neck fires, my pushed mind slept.
You stepped faster than spring, defeating that love
that swears itself undying.
Taking the skies and normal work with you,
being partly above where the rain falls."
And this was when the Declaration came out
in December.
And it was an absolute breakthrough
in psychological terms.
I mean it was the first thing that
happened that seemed to be any kind of move to stop.
It seemed to me that the politicians and everyone
else were just allowing people to be killed over,
and over, and over, and didn't care.
So the Declaration that came out was a wonderful day.
We all just sat glued to the television.
And it felt just like a total change,
even though it took another nine months to make any difference.
So I wrote this poem to celebrate that early moment.
The sky-- It's called "To Make Two Bridges Necessary."
They were rebuilding this new bridge over the Lagan
at the time.
So it's called "To Make Two Bridges Necessary."
"The sky is all fresh horses and unusual tidiness.
Jets of yellow and lavender marriages
with a twist of pink silk where its empire runs down,
all brilliance, all morality, all tarry-browns.
Now its flecked, beige vault holds
a seagull, ready to leave, like a hatchet beside a bed.
A pencil scratch folded from the day before,
open with the lean color of our sleeping last night.
I already wear all that you have imagined.
Your knee arched like a blizzard, anchoring my chest,
or a swollen river bridge conveniently looping
into its street clothes, out from music again.
The sand between tides will thank you
for fielding freedom with the quick of your hand
and the crux of your ear.
That memory plus moisture in the air, more unawakened,
fireless lips, unlevied hair."
This is called "Blue Doctrine."
Not quite sure, it's just again around the same time
when everything was very, very touch and go.
And everything could have gone in the direction
of havoc or harmony.
So it's called "Blue Doctrine."
"The boundary of the light will not
coincide with the edge of the window.
With me by his side, he's not compelled to think about me,
nor would he care whether my lips were more or less red.
I feel like breaking the enchantment with a fierce shout,
rendering needless the deception of color.
Or writing each sentence in a different color,
so it resembles a little flag, having
for background, a half sun.
For those who sit in the darkened doorways
of their dwellings devoid of doors, the adding sound of bells
can mean whatever you want it to.
Mobilization, a war like tempo, passive defense.
Over my head, a bat unfolds its wings
like hands that seem to seek each other's warmth,
or an eyelid opened in the pulse of a glove,
as in the coat of arms of my native city.
The air of the first night of summer, not a moment too early,
not a moment too late, leaps into my paper bed in the uniform
of sleep from the waist down.
First a long stretch, then mistakes,
then jumping by tens until his stomach is tight against
my thighs, ending in a row of knots as if he had been with
a woman."
And this was one about a flight to Canada
and coming home again, and how everything again
was still very uncertain.
And you didn't know whether to celebrate or stock up your tins.
So it's called-- again, they're rather strange titles and not
any stranger than any others.
But to me even, they even seem strange to me.
This one is an amazing title.
I love the title.
It's called "Shoulder-length, Caged Parrot Earrings,"
which were all the rage last summer,
especially among the men.
OK.
"Female eyes, male hand, head full of closed sky.
Your throat is still open though your blood is being dried.
The clock you started up in me, leaves the plainest roses
barely aged.
You play a secret set of muscles to a rifle to your cheek.
Your nights billow no more than truces swimming
towards daylight.
How lightly then your rich body weighed.
Tonight it weighs even less, low flying as meadow colored lead.
Overflying, the white ruin of waves.
Their feeble climaxes sucking spring from the ground.
A nude beach, whose skin rings out like an Angelus in foliage.
Instead of my communion watch, I read the hour
in the stubble of your beard.
And now begin to live like a too faithful people, whose
last conquered Hamlet has ceased signaling.
Bastille Day weather covers me like waltzing.
One horse towns caught in ice or seeds in mad acceleration,
Europe bound.
Your arms are a living robe of Earth
you halve with me so death is a quarantine--
only half a death.
You hold me like an unlit cigarette,
while you burn match after match and offer yourself in vain.
You run star splashed over the rust which would
have gushed through your hands.
6 months' obscure sap thrust halts the coastline
of your so-called "Sea Girt Isle," so habitable province,
serving up its ultimate smile.
The small green plant in the wound on your wrist
became the lens through which I saw
how air could pierce the ground: how black clouds fattening
were slave joys you rejected.
Flight cramped child, hollowed into airworthy place.
Your lingering future is less meditated necessary than to sail
this eve of battle, national holiday sky."
I know we paid a visit to Cyprus, away from it
all type of thing, and found we were right back in it.
And there was nothing but British soldiers
about the place.
So it was home from home.
And so this is a poem about Cyprus.
And again, they had a really terrible war there
and a lot of cemeteries just full of people
who died during their tragic war, which is much
worse than anything we had.
So fearing a separate experience as I wrote this.
It's called "Timed Chess."
And it's addressed to Cyprus.
"You break the darkness like an apple,
making fingers of lips and lips of fingers.
You twist lathered wrists into hands, full mortal messages
in the slow closing of both eyes till only the face counts.
Sometimes, like an old piece of the coast,
following in cloud pieces the shapes of Italian clouds,
you send a strange perfume in your stead, indubitably male.
A carnation passed through a buttonhole.
No journey is more safely beautiful than all the miles
of you.
Your many degrees of death lying almost a lifetime
in the distance.
When the sky turns frail over your many lobed harbor,
your sea quality opens fresh petals.
Your hedges hesitate to change, keeping
their beard like an overhanging war or a slightly
cowardly peace.
Your sun hungry, end of winter colors
incompletely shed the enemy world.
The denier of my sleep, woman or a ghost, is a full river.
Looted wines in large throatfuls flavor the tight air.
All the land is behind, the unworked nowhere,
repeating the her and the her."
And I wrote these sort of love poems, which
are meant to really be about the Catholics and the Protestants.
Which it always amazes me that we're
interpreted as being enemies.
We're crazy about each other.
We even marry each other.
And it's ludicrous to think that it's
anything to do with not getting on because we get on fine.
So this is a poem about how fine we get on.
We even apologize when we kill each other--
"The Colony Room."
"If you are touching, you are also being touched.
If I place my hands in prayer, palm to palm,
I give your hands new meaning.
Your left hand calm.
You define my body, center of your hand.
I hear, through the shingled roof of your skin,
your ear shaped body enter the curved floor line of my skin.
My hands just skim the cushioned opening,
the glitter of your mouth.
All woods, roots, and flowers scent and stretch
the map that covers your body.
Less touchable than the birth or continuation of Ireland,
in its railed enclosure, your root note in its sexual climate,
your kingdom come eyes,
year long, inactive lover, durable as paradise.
Like small shocks in the winter, neck to neck,
the mirrors reflected the colored ray the evenings needed
most, when the day asked for night in that mistletoe way."
And just a couple more of these, and then I'm
going to finish with a love poem.
So I'm surprised that I can read a love poem,
but I feel like reading a love for some reason.
This is called "The Sickness of the Cloth."
"Summer is your worst hour.
When everything has turned completely golden,
you will recover your blue transparent sky.
When the gardens of evening begin to suffer,
your olive clothed hillsides will taste of honey and dawn.
Now it rains even though God doesn't want it to.
A phantom river feeds the cowed impoverished city.
We see in looking from squares, the souls of all
who used to cross them.
Crosses look like missiles, the rose
colored blotches of feeble Republican bombings
embroider a Liberal flag.
Where the unsurfaced road loops sharply,
a sea of fruit and dark flesh made for the moon is born.
Its silence deadens contrary musics,
but its tongue is luminous.
From November to November, the nights of reeds and shadow
exchange sunflowers.
The moons of that place are beautiful as Joseph.
And thousands of winged insects spread myrtle there.
Each living cell thawed by the last, still bearing warmth."
This is a poem I wrote about all the political prisoners.
And it also relates to poets as well who
are outside of the normal.
So I felt in a way, at least they were hopefully getting out
of prison, and I was always going to be in one as a poet.
So it's really about poets and about political prisoners.
So it's called "The Spirit Dolls."
"They subtract us as matter from their lives.
Spice merchants, tanners, coopers, weavers, wine
merchants, innkeepers, florists, casual mercenaries--
they made themselves up as they went along.
[AUDIO OUT] outsiders as a new us and an old them.
In the scoured pot of our acid, indigestible, please and thank
you army.
And now, from their eerie inland sea,
from water house or drowning cell,
a species of antiworkers, antibodies,
professional loiters, ne'er do wells,
emerge corrected by clandestine trusts.
Like the reputed male, Semper Augustus, red flames on white,
to avoid turning out as a nation, turning into a state."
And this is the last one on this,
and then I'll read the love poem.
Hopefully it is a love poem, not always sure if it is or not.
So this is a war poem.
It's called "Condition Three," which it was the last poem I
wrote before the ceasefire.
And it was about that state that I'm in all the time.
But the rest of the country were also in,
where you feel people are sitting with their hands
on buttons and everything.
You just blow up any minute.
OK, "Condition Three."
"Dawn that I always thought of as fixed, the most closed
country, embers more often.
Loquacious womb mosaics the breadth
of dusk, an overnight autumn.
Some deep unsweetened, sour smelling ingredient elbows
out the time related twittering of birds.
Night crusts walking against pillows,
so that I miss their never denied noise,
like the largely unheard sounds of war, the color of war,
and find myself wishing I were a weather whipped rocket walking
into news of any kind.
An unreal warship sculpts the coast with its watchful eloquent
English.
Its cool, watered path, from a mid-century midwinter
to a clock-less marriage summer has frozen old time but its own.
It has probably hurt someone I knew.
There is some heart beginning to happen.
Its slow bleed bringing eyes down into pages,
mouths down to the onion thin sheets of paper, butterflied,
ebonied by the bombs.
Its aloneness corners onto mine, is quilted on like land.
It spreads open my warm days by the dayful,
all its seamless miles.
I'm listening in black and white to what speaks to me in blue.
In that peacock power of voice, whose vistas furnish the house
till the night, and enchanted day overwhelms
any man made light.
When there is a distance to it or a fast
from the incense of talk, its wound in other voices,
in mouths sewn in protest, in arms crossed behind necks,
and eyes which are almost too calm.
A sudden set of mid-sentence years will be served like home
hours or the last time your bare lips on certain shrines were
used."
And this one is called "The Keeper Ring."
And a keeper ring is a ring that keeps other rings on
and sometimes very necessary item in your wardrobe.
So if you look at Irish short stories, a lot of the males
write these very sentimental stories
about women losing their rings.
And this is my effort in that direction.
So it's about domestic love, which
is probably the nicest kind.
Maybe it's the only kind.
OK, so it's called "The Keeper Ring."
"My eyes change in the direction of the gentlest brown.
Yours are all the shapes that the blackbird's egg shows.
The rain is an open display on the emptiness of my lips.
Sweet, because odorless, it muzzles into everything.
The roads between us are ill lit.
The traffic islands, our phone kiosks, the cruising areas
have less reality than the equator,
like a face suggesting movement no less than a bird's wings.
Yours is a side of life I have not lain on.
Though once I leaned out of bed and stretched to my arm to
within an inch of the base of your sleeping throat,
as if willing you to wake.
This dark house we had planned to leave
carries a single letter on its back.
The floor rang out in lozenge greens and two pairs of leaves,
as though in its world, there were no autumn.
The hollyhocks, decapitated, swim in a basin
chased with four birds.
Each tress on the mantelpiece fringe
is plaited into four strands.
At the end of each, a little golden ball.
You fold your napkin into the packed muscles
of a millfeuilles.
I stir mine into the French gray lining of my cup
till it is reborn in the blue embroidered saucer of its nest.
The house dreams in the skip of my sentence, flame colored now
Italian world.
Though the snow fed light passes, one tree only."
OK, thank you.
[APPLAUSE]