Yeah, there's that.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks, Tyler.
Thanks, y'all.
Well, I'll just tell you, if I cry, it's OK.
[LAUGHTER]
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today for a wedding.
I know you think you're here for a poetry reading,
but we're actually here to witness a promise,
the fulfillment of a promise.
We are here to participate in making a promise.
Wow, that really changes things.
[LAUGHTER]
And even something of a wager, a beautiful risk,
and a love-filled dare.
In order to get us ready for this moment,
I've brought flowers, and plants, and pieces
from the desert.
And Tyler is going to get a crew of people
to help pass these out.
So help Tyler.
[LAUGHTER]
And you've brought yourselves your bodies, which includes
your hearts and your minds.
So as they are passing out these bits of our living
powerful planet around, I ask that you take a piece of this.
However much you need, enough to hold and cherish,
and also enough to be sure that everyone has a share.
So you all start working that out.
And I'll keep going.
Over 15 years ago, in "(Soma)tic Midge," CA wrote,
I cannot stress enough how much this mechanistic world,
as it becomes more and more efficient,
resulting in ever-increasing brutality,
has required me to find my body, to find my planet in order
to find my poetry.
And in their latest book, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return,
CA says, a potato born by shovel.
I am a bride of poetry in my orange and purple gown.
So here we have the bride.
[LAUGHTER]
The beautiful bride.
And I want to address you directly, CA.
And this is where I might cry.
And say thank you for your poems, for every draft,
for every ritual, every scribble, full notebook page.
I thank you for these poems because I
know that with each one of them, they shape
the poem you make of your life.
Thank you for the generosity of attention
you bring to the experience of living and writing,
for wedding the two together, for looking war, and genocide,
and political fuckery, and shame right in the face,
for the witness of your war hair,
for writing into and with all that it means to be human,
which is to say suffering, and joy,
and protection, and softness, and absurdity
because we are so goddamn absurd as humans
and so goddamn responsible for everything.
Thank you for loving.
Thank you for showing us how to love anyway.
For your rituals, your sharing, your process,
bringing your body into the poem, which
invites our bodies into the poem for saying,
as you said in a chapbook that I have,
I want you to write your poems.
And that's what you say to so many people.
When they ask you about your poems,
you say, what about your poems?
[LAUGHTER]
And your co-creation of tens of thousands
of poems with poets at every stage, which
is to say tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands
of lives.
I don't think it's any exaggeration
at all to say that your way of getting this garden planted
and giving our fruit away to one another
has been life-sustaining for queers, and trans,
and non-binary folks, myself included.
For the sun storm of wonder you share with anyone lucky enough
to share time with you on the planet,
be it in person or on the page.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
This person is a miracle.
[LAUGHTER]
It's unbelievable, really.
And so now, I want to address you, Dearly Beloved,
and the pieces of the planet you are holding.
Because the invitation now and always with
CA's work is for two weddings.
One we witness between CA and their poems,
and the other we are asked to co-create
to be wed to this moment, to what can unfold here,
to wed our lives to quote, learning how to live so
wilderness never becomes a mythology.
In that spirit, I want to invite you
to remember that you are simply 30 trillion cells configured
and reconfigured continually.
In the next hour, your heart will squeeze blood from its
chambers and relax to refill between 4 and 5,000 times.
Your lungs, too, will gloriously,
without any direction on your part, fill--
excuse me.
Fill and release 8--
excuse me.
A lot of times.
[LAUGHTER]
1,000 times, in fact.
[LAUGHTER]
And 8 billion red blood cells will die and another 8 billion
will be produced.
You yourself are constantly in process,
being revised right in front of each other's eyes.
But it's easy to forget this or look away.
As CA says, everyone paying attention, enjoy your visit.
Everyone else?
Good luck.
[LAUGHTER]
So I'd like for you to take a moment
and turn your attention to the something alive just outside
of you in your hand.
This piece of our incredible planet.
Take notice of its contours, its textures,
its way of holding and reflecting the light.
So often in our writing and in our living,
we carry an unacknowledged obligation
to the past that does not serve us.
And so I want to take this moment
to remind you as CA does in their work, that none of us
are beholden to who we have been up until this moment.
15 years ago, only a few years into my personal physical gender
transition and still struggling with my own personal precipice,
I read CAConrad's The Book of Frank.
It was part tender, queer, mystical rager and part riot
girl surrealist relief.
That would be the first full-length collections
of collection of poems that would
lift me and shake me and bind me to my brother
sister of the page.
I'm just going to read a quick poem.
Frank ate clear around the sleeping worm of the apple.
Any life saved in this place is magic.
Frank said, it's life coming back to you.
So let's look at the worm in the apple.
Let's let it sleep.
Let's enjoy the apple while the worm sleeps close to our face.
And let's remember Frank saying, any life saved in this place
is magic.
So let's save our lives together by paying attention to them,
by wetting our lives to living.
And let's repeat after CAConrad, never tire of demanding love
for the world.
I'm going to need to hear that again.
[LAUGHTER]
Ready?
1, 2, 3.
Never tire of demanding love for the world.
Thank you, universe.
And thank you poetry for CAConrad.
[APPLAUSE]