This next poem--
[APPLAUSE]
--this next poem features a state of matter
that you don't often experience here-- ice.
And the ice in here is, in fact, a state
of matter, not the other ICE.
So the title of this is an ice is a body.
It's a pandemic poem.
An ice is a body.
Like all things, it begins as water and ends as water.
As water, it may become vapor, steam droplets on a window,
a heaviness in the air we bring into our lungs.
It may become dew or dog piss in the grass, a body's
nourishment, or excreta, residue from the time when it once
had a body.
From a time when we too had bodies, embodiments of the air
we breathed, when we were ourselves
bodies, when we would breathe in one another's company,
could feel that warmth and take it within ourselves
as though it were ours to own.
As though we'd become the vapor ourselves and the world
as vaporous as this empty park fogged in November.
As the gray smoke of an animal at stride, which itself was
a body at the edge of shadow.
The body of smoke streaking the abandoned ballpark.
A creature of smoke.
Creature from creare: A thing created,
a residue of creation gliding the field, parting
reality as it went.
And we were also that smoke, my dog and me,
witnessing a promise dragged in the creature's wake.
It moved as though inevitable, as though a piece of one dark
had broken off to join another.
And somewhere along the tree line,
we joined the darkness with it.
Our consciousness, like a mist that trailed in its wake,
trailed from our minds as though outside of ourselves.
As though these fields slathered in dew and the piss of dogs
had condensed into a fog that we then breathed in,
the creature, my dog and myself.
This fog even the street lights struggled
to pierce, which joined with the heat in our lungs
as we exhaled and became a lonesomeness overtaking us all.
And the more alone we became, the more
we steamed outward, as this ice might steam in its tray
with the freezer door open.
And isn't the city in November an ice about to form?
Doesn't it all go back to 0 in the end, as all things must?
Born in the tray, the ice comes to rest in the glass.
This very glass.
Not this very glass.
This very glass with the gin and the lime wedge.
This glass that I held 20 years ago
when the future felt like a vow, motherless but possible, which
has become instead this year of pestilence
of the late night YouTube videos,
newly christened freighters sliding off their blocks,
crashing heavily off blocks into the shipbuilders canal,
which I'll always consider a kind of birth.
All that tremor and fulfillment, all that welded steel bobbing
in the channel, perfect gibbous of water breaking over
the banks, because even an ice cube once had a mother,
once cradled in the protection of the tray,
just as I twice unmothered was once a body grown in another's.
Immersed in the waters produced by a body, a little condensation
of cells and potential now drinking to forget
or drinking to encounter a version of the self
as a smoke drifting the tree line,
as a fleeting streak in the night, which
will come to stillness at some point,
either violently or in peace, either witnessed or unseen
and release its waters over the rippling pelt of the Earth.
[APPLAUSE]
It is important to hydrate.