--UA bookstore.
And I want to remind you that, thanks to a small grant
from the Arizona Humanities Council,
we're also running a series of talks by our visiting writers
this spring.
So, tomorrow at 11:00 in Student Union room 285,
Greg Pape will be giving a talk that we originally called
"Poetry and a Palpable Sense of Time."
And in true poetic fashion, it may wander
wonderfully from that title.
But please come to that as well.
We're starting this semester series
by inviting one of our graduates of the MFA program.
And we're trying to make a habit of bringing one person back,
at least one, each year.
Greg grew up, at least in part, in Tucson
and received his MFA here.
He also studied with Phil Levine at Cal State, in Fresno.
He's the author of Border Crossings,
Black Branches, Storm Pattern, all published by Pittsburgh,
and Sunflower Facing the Sun, which won the Edward Ford Piper
award from the University of Iowa Press.
He's won many awards and fellowships, among them,
fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center
in Provincetown, NEAs and Pushcart Prizes.
He's taught all over the country,
in public schools and Indian reservations in Arizona,
and I think he told me 11 colleges and universities
before he really found a home at the University of Montana,
where he now teaches in the creative writing program.
I've admired his work for a long time.
His poems have a strong narrative line,
a compelling sense of place, and the effect of place
on one's inner landscape.
The sense of place is very far-ranging in his poems.
They make readings of the lands and ruins
of the Southwest, of the birthing room where his son is
born, of Tucson's own No-Tel Motel,
of a peach orchard where a young man shakes free the harvest
with a hydraulic arm while imagining his lover
parting her lips for the deep kiss that leads to heaven.
And in each place, he seems to find,
in his words, things in life that happen only once
and make us who we are.
Please welcome Greg Pape.
[APPLAUSE]
It's really nice to be back in Tucson,
especially because I live in Montana.
And in January, everybody in Montana
would like to be in Tucson.
This morning, Alison and I took a walk.
I was really anxious to get out into the countryside here.
We went down to Madera Canyon and we walked up and around,
looking for birds and things like that.
And I thought I would read, for Alison, a poem about a bird.
It's a Florida bird called an ani.
Any of you ever seen an ani?
It's a big ugly bird.
"October, November, December, I've forgotten the month.
But I remember the moment I first
saw the ani, perched on the limb of a young tree, planted
in the divider strip of a parking lot in South Florida,
North Miami, Bay Vista, where they used
to dump toxic waste in the mangroves,
then paved it over and built a university.
I worked there two years.
The limb was so slight and the ani
so heavy it bobbed up and down in the breeze.
Clouds loomed above the sea.
Tar black and shining in the sun, its big grotesque beak
in profile, it looked straight at me
with one eye glinting like a black pearl.
I am the Lord God of this exact place, it said.
Who are you?"
Birdwatching turned around.
I'll read a few--
I've moved around so much that I tend
to associate my poems with the places I wrote them
and the places they live.
This one is an Arizona poem.
It's called "The Morning Horse, Canyon de Chelly."
"Standing on the slick rock, looking down
into the still-shaded canyon, the man and the woman
could see a mud-roofed hogan with the top half
of the east-facing door open, waiting for sunlight.
A horse walked over to the door and put its head in
as if to say good morning, or, it's about time, or, here I am,
your horse, just like yesterday.
Then, before the sun touched the horse's back,
before the sheep came bounding out of their pens,
adding their baas and bells to the quiet of the canyon,
they eased down the trail in the morning air
toward White House ruin.
Ravens rode the thermals and red lizards pulsed in red dust.
The trail ran out at the river, so they took off their shoes
and hung them on their shoulders and walked on
in the cold, shallow water.
Now, weeks later, as she sleeps beside him,
he thinks of the horse.
He thinks the mornings come to him like that.
That into the darkness of sleep, there comes a long, dark face
with large questioning eyes, whose light he feels in his own
before he opens them.
Before he turns to her or she turns to him,
the day is already moving in each of them like sun
into the canyon, to light the ruins and the river
and the horse that wants."
This poem is set in Chaco Canyon.
Some of you may have been to Chaco Canyon, the wonderful--
it's probably the most extensive ruins in the United States.
And they're fabulous, beautifully constructed.
And even seeing them a thousand years after they were abandoned,
they're quite impressive.
Stone masons today, people who work with stone,
look at this stuff and can't figure out
how it was done so well.
Wijiji is the name of one of the houses, one of the great houses
in Chaco Canyon.
And we're in the Southwest.
I probably don't have to explain all the stuff in here,
so I won't.
"Someone found the ochre clay, or ground soft stone
colored by iron oxide, and mixed it in a bowl.
Someone cut the hollow reed from the rushes along the arroyo
or fashioned the long bone of an eagle's wing.
Someone pressed a hand on the canyon wall
and blew the liquid ochre onto hand and stone.
Someone a thousand years ago made this image, a yellow glow
around an absent hand.
There must have been joy in the moment of making,
and joy touched with sadness in the moments afterward.
Just as there is now, in the way the glow
holds to the shape of the hand that's gone.
On my way to this place, I thought of you,
the one I ask so much of.
Storm clouds rose over Chacra Mesa.
Fajada Butte stood alone with its secret knowledge of the sun.
I walked up the path in the changing light of the canyon,
toward Wijiji, least of the great houses of Chaco, place
abandoned for a thousand years.
Word uttered by the body of a hummingbird,
no one knows what it means.
Wind came up through the siege and brought the smell of rain.
Somewhere in the rocks, Kokopelli,
with his burden of seeds and his flute,
bent over and blew his hopeful music down on the husks.
The seed of that music opened and rose, waved
and clattered like green corn.
Virga blew in tattered curtains above the mesa.
A hummingbird hovered at a red flower.
At the base of the canyon wall, when the wind stopped,
I knelt before water symbols, migration spirals,
the wolf pulling down the deer, the mother giving birth,
and the small, absent hand lit with a yellow glow.
I put my hand to the image and saw it disappear.
More than one or the other, more than all the regrets,
more than the hand that touches, it is the touching that lasts."
I just got back from a really fine fall semester down
in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
I had been down there 10 years ago,
and I had some good friends still down there.
And it was nice to get away from all the responsibilities of home
in Montana for a while.
And I had written a poem 10 years--
or I started a poem 10 years ago.
It sometimes takes me about five years to finish a poem.
And this is one.
It's dated, so I know that it took a long time.
It just came out in a book last year.
And the title of the poem is "Trains: Tuscaloosa, Alabama,
Spring, 1983."
That's when I started it.
And one of the things about living in Tuscaloosa,
it's kind of like Tucson.
If you live on this side of town,
you hear the trains coming through town
at night and at different times during the day and early
in the morning.
And you listen to them a lot, and you
get to where you can tell time by listening to these trains.
And when I lived in Tuscaloosa the first time,
I lived in a neighborhood right next
to a spur of the railroad track that went down
to the Black Warrior River.
And they loaded coal barges there.
The trains would bring the coal in, come down this little spur,
and load them onto the boats at night.
So I was perfectly aware of when a train came
by-- it'd just shake the house.
And I had to deal with it.
And I tried to make it into a positive thing.
Here's the poem.
"I know when a train is coming.
I can feel it in my feet.
My azaleas tremble.
My windows creak.
The people who live along the tracks
have learned to ignore trains in order to sleep,
learned long ago to include them, like bad weather,
in the ragged sequences of their dreams.
Dreams are nothing but the impure fuel
the world burns, the black coal that
fills the barges and trains that moves on the rivers and tracks
in the heavy commerce of night.
It's night now.
And rain falls soft as soot from the Goodrich stacks.
Men in black gloves breathe the oxides
and sweat at the presses and molds.
I listen for trains, imagining the cigarette burns
in each petal of dogwood that trembles by the tracks
or floats in the pines along the interstate,
where scum of yellow pine pollen gathers
at the edges of the streams.
I remember my first train ride, Fresno to LA, on my own,
10 years old.
I can still hear the singing as the train rocks
on the winding tracks and through the tunnels
of the Tehachapi Mountains, a group of Hawaiian boys
in flowered shirts touring the states,
singing in the observation car.
There's a hole at the bottom of the sea.
One boy strums a ukulele.
There's a log in the hole at the bottom of the sea.
A simple song sung faster as it's one verse grows longer.
There's a bump on the log in the hole at the bottom of the sea.
There's a frog on the bump on the log in the hole
at the bottom of the sea.
Until we were all laughing and singing and adding our words
to fill the hole in the green sunlight of the train heading
for LA.
I don't know what happened then, or who met me at the station,
or how I said goodbye to the Hawaiian boys and their ukulele.
The memory ends with the singing.
The memory ends with the singing and the train.
The memory ends with the singing and the train on the way to LA.
And I go on listening in Tuscaloosa,
with the open shells of my ears, each one with its hole
at the bottom of the sea, each one with its train and its black
gloves and its trembling petals."
Here's a poem called "Some Names."
And I know there's at least one person
in the audience to whom these names will mean something,
one person besides me.
"Some Names."
"Nooncaster, Colombini, Abrahms, Perez, Patigian, Doohan, Eliot,
Masterpolo, Roderick.
Some names come back tonight.
Nooncaster was a butcher who drove a red Corvette
with a fiberglass body that shattered like a toy.
He always carried cash, supplied every barbecue
with fresh red meat, and charmed the air
with his quick delivery, bright eyes,
and the odd music, part nasal, part gravel, of his voice.
Colombini had biceps like baseballs.
Abrahms was an unlit neon sign who
could turn it on when he wanted to
and sing like Sam Cook or Otis Redding,
long before they were ghosts, but spent most of his time
in a dark dream of some childhood road, listening.
Perez was cool.
No better word for the way he moved through the hot valley
nights, in spit-shined French toes or a lowered Chevy,
black as his eyes, his hair slicked back as if to say,
the wind, sun, moon, and stars all stop when I stop.
Patigian was part lion, part wren, but looked like a bear.
Doohan lit the barbecue with gas splashed from a baby moon
hubcap.
And just as we imagined it would happen,
his arm went up in flames.
Eliot drove his loaded Ford on country roads
and raced the trains to crossings.
And almost always won.
Masterpolo made a mess of things in the Y Knot Roadhouse
because he wouldn't let it ride.
He tore the antlered heads from the dumb walls, old friends,
acquaintances, role models in the badass arts of adolescence.
And Roderick, we called him Red.
He had a fine, nervous laugh and hands quick enough
to confuse even his own freckles.
Roderick, one of those names on the wall in Washington you can
find in your own face."
Thank you.
Before I moved to Montana--
I've been in Montana for seven years now.
And before my wife and I moved, we lived in Miami Beach.
You couldn't pick two more different places
in the world, Stevensville, Montana, and Miami
Beach, Florida, very different.
Miami is a wonderful, interesting place.
I think of it as what New York City must have been like
in the '20s and '30s, when there were these massive waves
of immigration.
I talked to a person down there.
And he said, well, Miami is not a city.
It's an urban experiment.
And in many ways, it's failing as an urban experiment,
but in many ways, it's successful.
But you have to make a lot of adjustments to live there.
One of the things, one of the simple things
that we take for granted, I think,
is go to the grocery store and you fill up your shopping cart.
And you get in line, you pay for your stuff, and you go home.
In Miami, it was kind of an adventure.
There were times that I waited in line for 45 minutes
just to check out at the checkout counter.
And when I got there, had additional troubles.
But I enjoyed it.
And I wrote a poem about it, so it was kind of all worthwhile.
If you can salvage shards of your experience
and put it into poetry, that's great.
OK, this is called, "In Line at the Supermarket."
"Here you've got time to think.
Between the breath mints and the Glamour magazines,
you can feel yourself growing old as you read the headlines
of the non-newspapers, 'Country Doctor Performs Head Transplant
on Alien,' or something homier, 'Passionate Groom Kills Bride
with First Kiss.'
You're growing old, all right, but you'll never
be as old as the woman who runs her shopping cart up
against your hip bone and keeps on pushing
until you have to say stop.
She stares at you through the faintest blue haze, her face
ancient, perverse.
And you wonder what she sees.
The couple in front of you have time to debate their selections.
We don't need a ham this big, he says,
as he holds it under her nose.
Yes, we do, as she places her fingertips on the ham
and pushes it back down lightly to the stalled conveyor.
They are younger than you are, but it's
hard to tell how much younger.
They too look worn and tired.
You stare at her spiked yellow hair and her bare shoulders,
just a breath away.
On her left shoulder, a tattoo, like a brand,
that says 'Mike' in shaky cursive.
You wonder if this man is Mike.
You think about slavery.
There was a man you worked with once, whose style was
cool, ironic, like dry ice.
He referred to his night shift job as a slave.
This is my second slave, he said,
meaning he had a day job too, meaning
we have to become caricatures of ourselves
in order to do these jobs, in order to live like this.
You wonder what Mike does for a living.
You stare at the tattoo on his arm, a skull with wings
where the ears were.
And under that, in case you don't get it,
written in ribbony script, all capitals, the word 'death.'
For some reason, you want to laugh
but don't, because Mike, if that's his name,
has just turned to you out of boredom.
And in a friendly voice you wouldn't have expected,
says, man, this place is slow.
But I'd rather shop here than that Pantry Pride
down the street.
My old lady went there last week for groceries,
and when she came out the car was stripped,
wheels and everything.
It's a bad neighborhood, man.
You never know who you're going to meet."
I think that, one thing about America
these days, is that it's become an awfully violent place.
I used to think I was a kind of a tough, hardened character,
in that I could take it.
But I started having children in middle age,
and it changed my perspective on everything.
And I, all of a sudden, got real sensitive to all this violence
that's around us.
I used to be part of the problem, but I'm not anymore.
But I think one of the effects that all this violence
has on us is it's very subtle, you know.
We watch it on TV.
We read about it in the news.
We experience it daily in our lives.
And we kind of internalize it.
We don't talk about it.
We don't worry about it.
We don't get too cynical.
But it has an effect on us.
And I think it takes some of our power away from us.
And, I don't know, this is a poem about a guy who's tired.
He's been at work all day.
He comes home.
He flips on the TV, and he sees another one of these things
that just, you know, turns his mind.
And, in the poem, I guess I'm vicariously
trying to take some power back away from all this stuff.
It's called, "Evening News."
"He comes home from work tired, his mind breaking
and accelerating, weaving through the day's traffic
of acts and images.
The slim hooker in yellow heels strolling the shoulder
of Biscayne Boulevard.
Tina Turner's voice sweating.
The astronauts flaming out like meteorites over the Atlantic.
A rusted shopping cart tipped over a curb, its burden lifted,
its ghost fled.
He puts the key in the door.
The small green lizard on the wall above the mailbox
cocks its head and holds still, as if listening.
I'm home, he says, and opens the door,
steps into the familiar room, into the quietest moment
of the day.
He turns on the news.
He sips his beer.
They're showing a poorly focused, unsteady video segment
taken by a bystander of a shirtless man
stabbing another man on a canal overpass in Miami Beach,
just blocks away.
Jesus, he says, what am I supposed to do?
The news anchor says it began, apparently,
as an argument over money.
The men were friends.
One owed the other $10.
He turns off the news.
He runs the video backwards in his mind.
The shirtless man rises from the railing.
His friend bursts up from the bloody water,
flips over the railing, lands on his feet,
grabs the bare shoulders of his friend, who
pulls the knife from his chest, steps back quickly,
swallowing his curses, hiding the knife,
moving back across the line into a life of debt and anger,
friendship and choice.
A life now his, he must invent the next move for.
He goes to the back window, stares at the uncut grass.
From somewhere, a bird, a painted bunting,
alights with a claim from the offices of air.
Chartreuse, flame red, indigo blue, the bird says,
this is for you."
My mother lives in Long Beach, and she got shaken out of bed
yesterday.
I spent an hour talking to her on the phone last night,
and she was really frightened.
And she's 77 years old, and she's got heart problems.
And I thought maybe she would die of a heart attack
just because she was so scared.
But she's all right.
And this is a poem about--
so dedicated to my mother.
Wrong book.
I get confused here.
It's called "Peace."
"I can see my mother and my wife sitting in a booth inside
the restaurant, eating breakfast as I stand in the parking lot
with my 19-month-old son in my arms.
We have stepped out into the morning sun because he refuses
to eat or sit in a high chair or stop shouting
'tractor, tractor!'
at the old man in a motorized wheelchair, trying
to read his paper in peace.
It's peace we want amid the angers and hungers of this city.
For my son, it's the peace that comes from the release
from confinement and restraint.
For myself, the release, temporarily,
from the role of confiner and restrainer.
And those two women we love sitting together,
unlike strangers, at breakfast.
we can only see their heads and shoulders through the window,
are remaking quietly the necessary bonds of family,
brushing off the crumbs of strangeness,
and sipping coffee in a kind of peace made possible by many
choices based on what we can see and what we can't."
Or the other way around.
"At the corner of Long Beach Boulevard and Ocean Avenue,
you can see neither ocean nor beach,
but the bow of the Queen Mary hulks
in the distance between high rises
from which older men and women have been evicted
so the buildings may be renovated
to further the economic goals of the republic.
My mother, still one of the lucky,
has found a low-rent room on the fourth floor of Baptist Gardens,
with a view of a parking lot where
her '67 Pontiac Catalina is parked
and still runs when she needs it.
There's a tree she loves to look down on, a Mexican market that
is usually open, an intersection with a constant surf of traffic,
and, morning and evening, the warm,
soft air that smells of exhaust and the Pacific."
I'll read another poem.
I'll read that little poem, "Church,"
which also comes out of taking my kids down to visit
their grandmother.
It's a dangerous place to have a grandmother live.
There's a lot of muggings and stuff that happen on the streets
down there.
And this is-- I'm standing outside with my little boy.
And I'm paranoid, and I'm holding my young son in my arms.
And this guy comes up.
And it's called "Church."
"Tarnished fake gold chains and cross,
dirty gold tangles of hair around a bruised sun-scabbed
face, in which the eyes sputter but burn like an arc welder
underwater.
One I-could-cut-your-throat hand in a pocket,
the other whispering, help me, please,
through the dead Los Angeles air.
He comes toward me.
Father, holding my son in my arms.
Son, for whose sake I feel a sudden ferocity pulse
through my heart.
As he steps quickly toward us, through still air soon to rise
from the oil-stained asphalt of this parking lot,
warming in morning sun.
This church, where I offer the coins and receive his blessing,
and we hold each other a moment only,
among the uncommitted murders in our eyes."
This is a poem that I associate with Montana.
And I don't know if it would have the same meaning
as it does up there.
But there are more cows in Montana than people.
And cows kind of run the country up there.
They have certain rights.
And I guess I'm sort of being hard on the cows here.
Although I love cows, I really do.
"Build a world of cows and see where it gets you.
My cows, really my neighbor's cows,
move through the day like worlds unto themselves.
Between the fences, they revolve.
Between night and day, they stand.
They stand for the ground they stand on.
They stand for the grass, green or burned.
Alive, or the sturdy husks of lives.
They stand for the air, the sky, the weather that shows no mercy.
Over the fields, down the hill to the gully,
up the hill to the hill, they drift like clouds.
They lie down in the sun, suggesting at a distance
the first rocks that came to rest.
These cows stand for the world we build.
And though we see daily the terror of where we're going,
we say, more!
More!
Like the cows, who are, like us, between the seeds
and the flames, a truce."
I'll read you a couple more Montana poems.
This one is called, "Turning Things Over."
I'm a meditative poet, but I can't sit still
and meditate very well.
So I like to walk.
And I do a lot of walking and hiking and stuff.
And I think that that's a form of meditation
that I really like.
And this is kind of about that.
It doesn't make sense otherwise.
"Turning Things Over, Rock Creek, Montana."
Rock Creek is this really beautiful trout streams.
It's one of the most beautiful trout streams in the country.
And I get over there as often as I
can and camp out and walk around, fish,
that sort of thing.
"One of many witnesses, he watches
the passage of the moon from ridge to ridge above the canyon.
He thinks, light on the water, wind in the trees,
river in the leaves, leaves in the river, rainbow in the river,
fish in the rainbow, fire in the fish, soul in the fire, this.
This air weighs more, he thinks, in the bottom of the canyon,
on the ridge of night.
Water in the creek coaxes stones toward the river.
Water in his thoughts goes around and around.
Before dawn, the wind stops.
A single bird tries a note.
And soon, the trees are full of persuasion.
He walks a dirt road as the light comes.
Night holds on in pockets in the pines.
He breathes, and something takes his breath and turns his gaze.
Light comes out of the pines, riding the big flanks of moose.
Three moose in procession, profound thoughts he wants
to hold but can't.
His breath drifts with the air, adrift
with moose gone into the trees, into the pockets of night
and the pines.
He's left with the light of one small idea.
Good morning.
He walks it down the road.
Good morning, good morning.
And morning bugles like a bull elk.
And trees begin to breathe and branch
with thought that stops above his head and points,
like antlers, up.
Crack of rock on rock comes down the canyon.
That light blush on the heart fades then fires.
Up the slope and over the scree, the bird of his gaze
goes and lights on a bear, digging
at the base of a boulder.
The bear rocks the boulder from side to side,
and gives it a shove from the top,
offers it up to gravity as the sun
rises and shines in the eyes of the bear,
who looks down on what?
A feast of larvae, ants, worms, exposed in the damp earth?
Or an empty hole that attests to hunger?
Along the creek, mist and shadow linger.
When he looks again, the bear is gone.
He goes on walking, turning things over in the early light."
Now I'll read you another moose poem.
I've become infatuated with moose since I moved to Montana.
We got a lot of moose up there.
And I used to think they were sort of the homeliest creatures
on Earth.
And now I think they're beautiful.
I just love them.
Also, I think one of the most beautiful poems in the English
language is Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Moose."
It's a beautiful long, lyrical, narrative poem about a bus ride
that she takes.
And she's driving along in this bus at night.
And all of a sudden, a moose comes out
of the woods and the bus stops.
And everybody in the bus kind of gets out and looks at the moose.
And it becomes this moment in the poem,
a sort of moment of transcendence where
everybody shares this image, mystical image of the moose,
and just a beautiful, beautiful poem.
So for years, I've been wanting to--
I had that in the back of my mind.
And now that I see a lot of moose,
I've started writing about them.
This is called, "Remember the Moose."
"She must have come down from high mountain meadows,
where beargrass blooms had dried and fallen,
paintbrush put away its colors, and mud wallows
begun to freeze and stay frozen past noon, down along the creek,
through aspen, alder, and willow thickets,
to high grass along a road leading to town.
Why she kept on coming, you can only guess.
Rich, green smell of cemetery grass,
muted bellow of a distant bull, old path imprinted in her genes,
deep doubts, simple curiosity.
Maybe she was lost, or came as a reminder of something lost.
A moose grazing among the graves on sunset hill
is an image one might hold for years, turning it over and over,
working it into a story or finding it strangely lit,
inverted in a dream.
Remember the moose outside the tent in Idaho, the moonlight
and mosquitoes, how she looked like a boulder in the creek,
until she lifted her great head from the water, big worldly
angel, and turned to look at you with ropes of weeds hanging
from her mouth.
By day, she strolled among the park's swing sets and jungle
gyms, stopping to sniff the dull shine of a slide, or stopping,
high as a house, in some child's eye.
Parents, sensing danger, tried to shoo her away.
But she followed her own calling.
Nearly blind after the sun went down, street lights and house
lights surrounded her, a confusion of moons.
She must have picked one to lead her on.
They found her on the Newsome's front porch,
snout pressed against the wall, back legs splayed.
Terrified, someone said, as neighbors gathered
to watch the wildlife officials load their darts
and end her urban visit in a sudden blur of drugs.
Think of Golden Gate Park half a life ago,
a day of dancing and chanting.
Thousands of hairy kids, men, women, dogs,
with beads and dirty bandannas.
A fog of breath and marijuana pulsing
around black banks of speakers blasting the twilight
with drum beat and guitar shrieks.
Someone smiling hands you a hit of something.
You walk off across a baseball diamond toward some tree
or siren or patch of grass, looking for your country.
A shock-eyed man marches barefoot,
mouthing a manic recitation, like a fuse burning.
You walk and walk into dark, and lie down and stare at the moon
until it comes down and covers your face
with its bowl of white light.
After the drugs took hold, the drugs wore off.
They loaded her on a truck gently as they could, drove her
out of town on dirt roads, lifted her down into high grass,
waited to see her waken.
Think of leaving and coming back.
Think what you have nurtured and betrayed.
Think of the towns and cities you changed with your absence.
Think of the country.
Remember the moose turning away, lowering her head
into the water, leaving you the afterimage.
Unspoken words, weeds hanging from your mouth.
Remember waking in a colder place,
glad to breathe and see your breath."
I guess I've got time for a couple more, about three more.
You want to hear three more?
Mm-hmm.
Three more, all right.
Promise, no more, just three.
All right.
All right, two poems about the birth of my first child.
One of them is an odd poem called,
"Among the Various Errors."
"I've gone down into the river to see
what it's like to be a fish.
Shadows of wings have passed over me,
and I've hidden in fear.
I've seen nymphs swim up from the rocks toward the light,
seeing the delicate ones move in the meniscus.
And I've risen to take them in my mouth.
I've felt the terror of the hook and the pull of the tight line.
I've broken free and lay stunned on the bottom,
pumping my red gills to live.
I've quivered in the hand and beheld the eyes of the man I am.
All this, among the various errors and insights
of the imagination.
I still know almost nothing about grief, except
that it has value and can't be thrown away.
And laughter is the kind of water
that riffles over the rocks and shines.
My friend told the story of a lonely man who
found a dead baby in the can and took it home
and washed it, carefully wrapped it in a clean towel,
held it gently, and wept all day,
until the police came and took it away.
When my son was born, he spent a long time in the birth canal.
His mother would push and the top of his head
would appear, crowning, then disappear.
It seemed like hours before he was all the way
born into the one good hand of the doctor
on duty, who held my son's head down a moment, wiped
clear the nostrils so the first breath swelled his small chest.
His eyes opened and he looked around the room in true wonder.
And in that slippery moment, he slid off between her legs
and fell through the close air, down
into the bottom of a plastic trash bag
placed there over a hamper to catch the placenta.
The doctor fished him quickly out by one tiny arm.
After that, the doctor wouldn't look at me.
I might have said something in anger,
but joy still held my tongue.
I cut the cord, shook the doctor's good hand.
I tell the story now and laugh, how my firstborn son slipped
from his mother into the trash."
"In the birthing room, you can say anything.
But there are things that can't be told.
They worked out a method of breathing to help you through,
to ease the pain.
But the pain is deeper than breath goes.
I'll never know.
Here, for me, things are as simplified as a traffic light,
the quickly passing yellow of choice between two commands.
Here's my hand.
Nothing can drive me away.
I am like a stud in the wall that makes this room possible.
You are like a sunflower facing the sun, for better or worse,
here for the duration.
Let the knees buckle, the hernia bulge,
the sweat swim along the lines of the skin.
Let the disks of the spine fuse with cold fire.
Let the feet flatten and the small vessels in the eyes burst
and redden.
Listen to the voice of the will, egged on by the heart.
Setting out on this journey through the mountains, deserts,
and swamps of the body, I'll hold your hand and fan and fan
for as many hours as it takes.
This is December 10th and January 28th.
This is the day within the days we've been moving toward.
Nurse says don't push.
Resist the urge to push.
Doctor says push.
I say breathe, breathe.
You open your mouth, release another mottled sparrow of pain.
You can say anything."
And the last poem I'll read is another Arizona poem.
Many of you have probably been up
to Wupatki National Monument, north of Flagstaff.
And there are these lovely Anasazi and Sinagua ruins
up there.
There's one called the Citadel.
How many of you have ever seen the Citadel?
It's that kind of round one.
Yeah, kind of falling apart.
It's misnamed, I think.
Archeologists of a certain era considered everything
in the Southwest a sort of fortification
against war and disaster.
But I'm convinced that the Citadel
was some kind of an observatory or a high place
to look out over the land.
I don't know.
But this takes place at the Citadel.
"By the time I had walked out of the canyon,
toward the end of a day of deep quiet and daydreams
among lizards and wrens, a day of clarity in the sun
and puzzles in the shadows, where
I found the petroglyph of a running animal pecked
into the rock at the base of the canyon a thousand years ago.
The animal, I thought at first, was a horse.
But after looking a while and thinking about it,
realized was a mountain lion.
I was ready, I thought, for anything.
I was feeling strong, light, open.
I was ready to sing for a stranger
or walk into the Cinder Hills with one
of the spirits of Lomaki.
Or put on a black satin cape, step out of my dusty shoes,
croak, and flap off to ride thermals with the ravens.
I was that happy, as if a new depth had entered my life.
When I came upon the tattooed family posing for pictures
among the walls and rubble of Box Canyon Pueblo,
and noticed their station wagon with Indiana plates
and the trailer with the words Skin Tattoos painted carefully
in big black letters, I considered
asking the smiling father, his tattooed belly bulging proudly
beneath his shirt, to make a portrait
of the lion on my chest.
I was that happy.
But asked, instead, how are you doing.
Pretty good so far, he smiled.
And I went on walking across the road,
past the battered pickup to Nalakihu and the Citadel,
home to the Hisatsinom, ancestors
of the Hopi, guardian spirits of the land nicknamed America.
I suppose I should keep this to myself.
But there are things in a life that happen only once
and make us who we are, like being born from one woman,
or the first true kiss that makes all the others possible.
I suppose I should hold my heart hostage to a regular beat.
And if it must go faster, they say, it should do so gradually,
so it isn't strained or damaged so the whole system starts
to break down, and the invisible bird
that flies back and forth between the extremities
bursts into a sudden scattering of individual feathers.
But there they were, three of them,
standing at the top of the Citadel in late afternoon light,
silhouettes among the rocks, rising
like gods and human figures from the ancient walls.
I stood quietly on the trail below until one of them
came down to me and put a hand on my shoulder,
lowered his head, opened my shirt, and spoke in the old way,
directly to my heart.
Don't go any further, heart, he said, until you are blessed.
He rubbed hooma over my chest and touched my forehead
with the white dust of cornmeal on his fingers.
He poured hooma in my left hand and placed a sprig of cedar
in my right.
Go pray, he said.
What for, I asked.
Pray for now, this place, all your relations,
pray for the hostages.
Then he walked off down the trail to join the others,
not gods, but poor, living men from Moenkopi,
here at the home of their ancestors,
to pray for the world and bless a stranger."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]