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Recorded at the Chancellors Reading, Poets Forum 2015. NYU Skirball Center. New York City.
What if to taste and see, to notice things,
to stand each is up against emptiness
for a moment or an eternity—
images collected in consciousness
like a tree alone on the horizon—
is the main reason we’re on the planet.
The food’s here of the first crow to arrive,
Five daughters, in the slant light on the porch, are bickering. The eldest has come home with new truths she can hardly wait to teach. She lectures them: the younger daughters search the sky, elbow each others’ ribs, and groan. Five daughters, in the slant light on the porch and blue-sprigged dresses, like a stand of birch saplings whose leaves are going yellow-brown with new truths. They can hardly wait to teach, themselves, to be called “Ma’am,” to march high-heeled across the hanging bridge to town. Five daughters.
Thank you for these tiny
particles of ocean salt,
pearl-necklace viruses,
winged protozoans:
for the infinite,
intricate shapes
of submicroscopic
living things.