WEBVTT

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I'm going to read a few
poems from Some Say the Lark.

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just for a change of pace.

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And one is a desert poem.

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It is a desert poem.

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It's in the first line.

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"Patsy Cline.

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She's in the desert, releasing
the ashes of her father,

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the ashes of her child,
or the ashes of the world.

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She is not what she observes--

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the rare spiny star.

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It does not belong to her--

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bright needle threading
a cloud through the sky.

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There's sun enough.

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There's afterlife.

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Her own body, a pillar of ash.

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I fall to pieces, she says.

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Faithless nimbus.

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Faithless thought.

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In my life, I have
lost two men--

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one by death, inevitable,
one by error, a waste.

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He wept from a Northern
state, hunger too cold

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for human knowledge.

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Once I was a woman
with nothing to say.

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Never did I say ash to ash.

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Never has a desert woken me up.

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I said, who releases whom?

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Inevitably, all have known
what the desert knows.

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No one will count the
lupine when I'm gone.

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No one looks to the
sun for meaning.

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For meat, I've
done so much less.

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Cattle in the far
basin, sagebrush, sage.

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I live in the city
where I loved that man--

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the ash of him, the
self's argument.

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Now and then, I think of his
weeping, how my body betrays me.

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I am not done with releasing."

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After I published
that poem, I got--

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and it was in a
Poem-a-Day series

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through the Academy
of American Poets.

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I got all this
angry email saying

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like, that's not Patsy Cline.

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You got it all wrong.

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Whatever.

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