WEBVTT

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I have either one or
more from Ancient Light,

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or one from Ancient
Light and a new one.

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What do you think, both of them?

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OK, he's saying both of them.

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[LAUGHS]

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I feel so blessed here.

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So as Elizabeth said
that part of this book

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attends to what we
experienced in the pandemic.

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And towards the end,
I also think about how

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we needed to reenter the world.

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And weren't you just
a little bit afraid?

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Weren't you just afraid of
what you might encounter,

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or you might get sick.

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Or whatever, it
was just different.

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It was a different world.

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And this is a poem that attends
to many things, but partly that.

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And also, I think
right now, many of us

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are trying to find
our sea legs in what's

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happening in this country.

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And it speaks to that too,
like, how do we do that, right?

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So this is called Quiescence.

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One.

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Soft pampas grass.

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We bed down like deer,
rest after the dying.

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Spirits all walk toward horizon.

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Transform against the
evening chrysalis of sky.

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Two.

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You feed me your
dark-eyed loneliness,

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wisdom from Dr. Fauci.

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And sectors of tangerine, small
as my thumb, scent the air.

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Everything is shrunken
or overblown now.

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I am undressing,
blue jeans, flannel.

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My polished toes naked in
the damp, tickling fronds.

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The bottom of my
feet tender as story.

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Three.

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Soon we are turning
to black and white.

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100 years ago, just before
Betty White was born,

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just before that
other dying time,

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those epidemic faces framed
like myth in our eyes.

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Everyone sainted but us.

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Four.

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We tether ourselves.

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But things grow out of control.

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Network images on repeat.

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Guns and knees, shattered
windows, and black death.

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Plague upon plague.

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Five.

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I keep seeing the picture of
elk, its antlers turn to tree.

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Bare black branches silhouetted
against a stormy sky.

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In that tangle a singing bird.

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Six.

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Let us stand now where
the grass is tall.

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Settle our legs there
among the growing.

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Listen, like all forlorn,
for the least crackle of air

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until nocturnal
bats hum our names.

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Perhaps then we shall
feel edges splintering.

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How soon a bow, a
stem, a tributary.

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How soon we too shall
antler like Deer Woman.

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Seven.

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Yes, rise now, after the
dying, thick-necked and sturdy,

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russet with hope, await
the perch of bird.

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[APPLAUSE]

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