So I'll give you the two-poem warning so that--
you have to give you all that.
We're getting that towards the end of that--
one, thank you all for bearing with me and bearing this coat.
Like y'all, because I heard it was 9 degrees.
Wasn't it 9 degrees recently?
We've had this similar thing happen in Texas.
It was hot through October.
And all of a sudden, it decided not to be hot.
So I want to-- yeah.
In this book, I was really trying to--
this book, being Best Barbarian, I
was really trying to think about love poems
and writing poems that really, really directly
grapple with love and ecstasy very, very overtly.
And so because my partner, she's always like,
you don't write me love poems.
I'd be like, girl, come on, I'm an elegiac poet.
We don't do love poems.
But I was like, you know what?
That's a good challenge.
It's so funny because I wrote this poem, and I'm like,
I think this might be a love poem.
So if y'all don't mind, I'm going to read y'all.
My version of a love poem.
I hope it is one.
Y'all tell me if it is.
"Into the West."
It seemed clear that no one can call
upon thee without knowing thee.
Though Augustine writes of God here, notorious for his absence,
He could also be speaking of desire, pleasure.
The tick of snow against the dry leaves,
Which sends my daughter spinning on her heel.
The sound of it, that, daddy, that.
Sometimes the world, its loitering joy is just a that,
An absence that calls, demonstrates its over thereness.
Its being but without a proper name, so a silence sounded
As when I enter the clearing
I once begged for, you, at an instant,
Absolute and looking back at me
As if witnessing a calendar or
A road you've already passed through.
So my face now in whatever wolf, vulture,
Or golden horn of pleasure a that,
A ticking of snow against the wet road, nameless,
Thee, where you've been and left the body of that being.
So I hurry and press into your leaving
Like a leaf scuttling after the dream of itself
Into the sharp wet of snow against the skin
on into the west,
Where desire and sometimes pleasure is a type of faith,
What you call me to in this spilling, this motion of night.
Your hair loose in the water of your back.
Your spine has become the eye you wish for me to see through.
But I must close my two good eyes,
Which is the beginning of any apocalypse or rapture.
Our daughter or the day,
Us touching the north and south of each other
Without compass or rose.
This stumbling, a type of faith, too.
A seeing, but without the dependence on sight
Or some heavenly ruin as signal of an end.
It was like the deer outside gathering at the window,
Licking the cold glass to smoke.
[APPLAUSE]