 Hi, I'm Geoffrey G. O'Brien, the Director of Lunch Poems, and I'm thrilled to welcome you to the first event of Lunch Poems, 2122, still confined to these little boxes while various apocalypses rage and unfold outside, but really happy to have poetry be happening in this faceless space. I'm really thrilled to have our own Noah Warren reading from his second collection of poems, The Complete Stories, came out in May, I believe, but given how unevenly time has been progressing, I want to say it's newly launchable tonight, today. And that's what we'll hear from him part of though I believe that Noah will also be reading some new work. I'm excited to hear that. Noah's first collection, The Destroyer in the Glass, marked out in its title, a pretty good figure for a model of lyric attention that has dominated most of that mode's history, the self-transposed, considerable, self-conscious, considerable in both senses, large and able to be or suffer consideration. And that private circuit of the self-consideration and the speech it generates, however traversed by the social, has altered in this second collection The Complete Stories, with its perhaps cheeky title, how complete is any story, why do we need a plural? But I think it's also a way of saying that certain other kinds of pressures are being put on Noah's version of the lyric. Narrative is being invited to the party and changing what can be said, how it can be said for how long saying will continue. And names, the proper names of persons are studied throughout the pages of this book. And names are crucial, not merely here as markers of narrative, but as refusals to narrate too. The name, as it does in Proust, is glowing with possibility, but not necessarily a possibility the poems will excavate. These are poems that are humble about their subjective angle onto what they briefly consider and mention and bring into view. They know they do not speak for those they speak about and they would rather just indicate their presences often rather than attempt to capture them in any significant and perhaps violent way. There's a really brief poem in this book on page 30 called Village, I'll show it to you. It's just that one long line. Is it prose? Is it just a nearly unaccommodatable line? The poem's called Village and it reads in its entirety cedar smoke wanders between the yards past the linen hung out overnight. Is this a complete story or nearly the opposite of completion? Is it a lyric moment of attention or the beginning of a short story? It risks almost nothing in being so brief and banal and being free of valuation, free of judgment. But that is exactly the huge risk that it takes in saying almost nothing. In saying almost nothing, it puts the burden on us to decide all these questions about genre and mode or to refuse to decide. Is the smoke wandering between yards a figure for a socially responsible lyric or is it simply a moment of description that refuses to prescribe? In one of the longest poems in the book in terms of what it does to page as opposed to number of pages it covers, we have the same thing happening. The first line doesn't make it to the right margin even relating it, Sophia Shivered with the weirdness of it but all the other ones are barely accommodatable. They look like lines from Ashbury's flowchart and it's an intensely narrative although intensely brief and episodic in its narration poem that mentions John Ashbury by name among many others insisting on the co-presence of narrative and deliric tradition again and again and again and probably producing incompleteness after incompleteness despite its nearly complete occupation of the page in order again to produce both silence and something beyond the doomed subjective space of speech and thought that the poet understands himself to be restricted to no matter how much he wants to affiliate out into this world of saying and being with others. And I think that those silences whether they happen in one line poems or in poems that occupy so much page space are there precisely to make us bear the burden and the gift of semi-completion or at least the matching of one subjectivity to another the possibility of intimacy to paraphrase the end of the first poem in the collection you can feel the jewel that these poems are falling into you and without further ado, I give you no reward. Thank you, Jeffrey. That is without doubt the most generous and smartest introduction I've ever got. Thank you. I think I'm gonna read poems mostly from the book but I'm gonna braid in some new work and also some older work to kind of explore these changes who I was and where the work's going now. Talk sound of the traffic forming itself into dark blocks that take time to come together and fall apart expressing loss. Panic rising around the top of the heart on a winter afternoon. I put you down in the poem as a dark block expressing loss a year passes badly than another while the moon moves through my head like a desert. I asked a friend for a painting. She painted me a black square with dark gray branches and seven star-like blotches which I understand are flowers. People try to get ahold of you. They succeed. Night again, I could be nowhere. Bearing myself with a certain bleak dignity, loving intensely. The dark blocks fall quicker, closer. They build a dark castle expressing time taken and loss. I have journals that tell me I once felt like air when I ran. I saw both oceans and to what end. I saw plum colors falling from the banded cloud. One talks for pages about how this or that felt. Not what it was, buildings. I see their streaked faces and recessed entryways. Their windows washed white by the rain. How cheerful, how brave. Your voice was as you asked if I wanted anything from Whole Foods where you had to go and then all the other Wednesday clutter. Turning back, you paused in the door back lit by the morning gray. Between a slave, five years of love. What you talked about as a quantity that accumulates. And that morning was the beginning of that night, morning, day and night. Those 36 hours, 10 months ago now when you convulsed with a new raging sorrow which I surprised you by returning. But more viciously finding as I broke from the self I'd made charring ecstasy, hours of weeping and reasoning, of fucking drinking and take out hours of storming back and creeping back, storming out and creeping back and kissing dead lips once more to be sure hours I refuse to remember that hardened into the low city. That hardened into the low city I walked out into already retreating from me. Cut lilies, more than $100 of them. It was pure folly. I had to find more glass things to stuff them in. Now a white and purple cloud is breathing in each corner of the room I love. Now a mass of flowers spills down my dining table. Each fresh faced, extending delicate leaves into the crush. Didn't I watch children shuffle strictly in line? Cradle candles that dribbled hot white on their fingers, chanting Latin, just to fashion Sevilla's Easter. Wasn't I sad? Didn't I used to go mucking through stream beds with the skunk cabbage raising, bursting violet spheres? Look, the afternoon dies as night begins in the heart of the lilies and smokes up their fluted throats until it fills the room and my lights have to be not switched on. And in close darkness, the aroma grows so sweet, so strong that it could slice me open. It does. I know I'm not the only one whose life is a conditional clause hanging on something to do with spring and one tall room and the tremble of my phone. I'm not the only one that love makes feel like a dozen flapping bed sheets being ripped to prayer flags by the wind. When I stand in full sun, I feel I have been falling head first for decades. God, I'm so transparent, so light, passion play. The bed filled the room, a large rumbled square. Light fell in through the windows for a number of hours every day. Then streetlight shadows did. You climbed over each other to get out. A fugue quality like a dark blue gas lingered in the corner of even the most memorable scenes. You watched your body do pleasant imaginable things and you noted the fog and accepted it as you had learned to accept much that once would have made you sad. Are you proud to have escaped from the dark mind you inherited? The air circulation weak so the room gets damper. January 15th, her birthday, happy birthday. A curl stuck to her cheek. Two things are certain. The sorrow in their chests like smoke and the frenzied activity that doesn't pretend to hide it. The time is pale light along the windowsill like rice. The time is a kind of greatest hits room in which the somewhat faded actors impersonate the actors who once dazzled in those difficult roles impromptu. For an hour maybe. For there are certain biological limits which are difficult to exceed. Also the relevant parties had taken sleeping pills explaining some of their logic. The thick blue curtains hung very still. They fell asleep like cousins head to toe. This next one is called notes on the mystery. Younger, I could go to my friend when her heart had been pierced and she was gasping for breath. And I could tell her nothing is lost entirely. All experience and time becomes a window. She was twisting the wheel of a wooden toy. I'd said more than I believed. Two blocks down, fine pins of ice slurred the brackish water, slowed the small waves until on a last heave one froze a sheer shell in the dark between the reeds. When I searched my journals for her who melted from my life, I'm searching for you. And for this special faithlessness, I apologize. There are so few people in those soft covers so many descriptions of our four rooms and they remain the same, tall and old, quietly beautiful, and yet changed utterly as the sunlight fills and abandons them on a clear afternoon. Today was clearer. A high film of cloud calmed me. A letter and an offer came. Though I was tired, I brushed varnish on the floors, buffed it until it glowed, with a cloth cut from the green flannel shirt. My father sometimes wore. This next poem is, you'll hear some of that prose that Jeffrey mentioned, not quite prose. I just, I became a little haunted by the sentence as a rhythm calendar. Some waves came up overnight, though in Norderney there was no weather. At the commercial wharf, a thin stream of white exhaust rose vertically from the ferry. The first service would depart soon. The puddles light dark in the stone streets and in the garden and on the narrow walk. A bank of haze hung 100 meters offshore, perfectly still. While at the end of the long pier, the shallow bottomed chalk that Tomas had restored, good at hauling, bad at sailing, knocked against the pylons. It was regular enough that you began to expect the next knock, but then there was none. Or two came quickly together and the effect broke. Marta had been up before us and made coffee and laid out the table for breakfast. A blue cloth, mugs, plates and silverware, three zinnias and a thin white porcelain vase. We helped ourselves to brown bread and cheese and the least strange looking of the meats she had rolled neatly on the tray. We ate quickly, looking out the small window at the blue and purple sky, the path down to the water, the long pier. This next poem is called Allegiances. Like so many fine twigs snapped by the rainstorm that's sweeping the city today, heavy. It lashes the pastel houses and the people walk by clutching their jackets to their necks. It looks like everyone is crying. And I felt so bored and sad. That I dropped two threads of saffron into the bowl of Cheerios I had for lunch. And that was a failure, obviously, as I had been almost certain it would be. The threads unable to blush the milk, the oat flour turned soupy, the taste just sharp enough to disgust me. I stood at the window, I pressed the puff cactus to see if its flesh was still stiff beneath the palate fur. When I picked my fingernails, the thin crescents fell and were lost among the pebbles in the pot and all the other curled up pairings. Outside, the no parking sign and the bare school flagpole hummed together in the gusts, pitched low, a harp almost. They were safe, historical, rooted in the concrete. Once the great struggle was between books and life, between pattern and that terror, that unfinishedness. Someone I grew to love rested a hand on my shoulder and said, voice careful with emotion. Your first allegiance must be to life. It must have been winter then too. Outside, trees cobalt in the evening. That room was too warm, small as a closet and every wall was lined with books of poems. What a detail I would think to myself later, walking home through the ugly snow. Was that irony? I would wonder. And this next poem is the title poem, The Complete Stories. Even relating it, Sophia shivered with the weirdness of it. He'd read all my stuff online. I mean all of it. And he was like glistening with the effort of being nice to everyone, but especially me. How he knew I'd be there, I don't know. What I hate is that I bought it. I thought it was lonely, sure, but changed, mature. It was only after walking home that Jen told me. And I yelled at her for letting me interact with that, which I regret, but she fucked up. I don't care if he's sober. I hate his words, hate his poison. I'd been murmuring sympathetic words in my face, mirroring her revulsion. Now I filled my eyes with the care I felt for her and feel. However, what I could find to say ended before the love did. So a small silence came. Sam squeezed her hand, her head tilted toward his shoulder. And as it did, my eyes slipped over her other shoulder to Miriam, who was putting down her seltzer because I could tell she was preparing to speak. And as Mark was finishing, as everyone, Jasper and Rob, Mark himself and me, was still chuckling at his fulsome street fair a bit. The leather grannies and the librettist who played bemused, but two hours later was getting fisted on the sidewalk. She launched, drawingly. That reminds me of the last time I saw John Ashbury. The National Book Award Afterparty was at an apartment on Central Park West. The elevator opened in the living room, and there he was, pouting under the chandelier in his wheelchair alone. He'd lost his handler to the bathroom and no one was noticing him. So he just began waving his empty hand, yelling, gin and tonic, gin and tonic. And I tried, but there was only champagne and elderflower. And can you imagine telling that to John Ashbury? Lord, it can ice your heart to rediscover people you admired or wanted to fuck and find they're just the same. Across the room, I found Molly's eyes and smiled. She didn't, she had opinions about Miriam. And so I made my face grave, like hers. And turning back to the circle to slip from it, saw Jasper's fingers on Mark's lower back, which I was glad for. There are so few people. And it's uncanny how the death starts so slow. A few a year, even the terrible ones somehow logical. Until gradually the shock grows constant or the unsurprise does, I don't know. It depends I think on whether you read life as a comedy, the sustainable way or as a tragedy, which according to Yates is when we really begin to live. I was saying to rumor, post bump, he was nodding, humoring me. When Lily broke in. Well, I don't think how you read matters have so much as how you write, excuse me, for screwing up your metaphor. I mean, how you live toward others. And I think some dissonance between those is necessary for art, sure, but also for intimacy, if that's gonna mean anything. I thought this was beautiful. And I said so. Her personal life for four years had consisted of flying most weekends to Florida, going to hospitals, cooking and helping raise her niece as her sister died of ALS. She smiled thinly and I knew I'd misspoken. I mean, this helps me, I said. That gap has always haunted me, the silent self judging always out of pain, the self in the world fickle, working to understand what it's done, trying to forgive itself. Maybe, she said. And it's true, vulnerability often doesn't work nor is it often true. Excuse me, I said, I'm getting signals from Molly. And I went to her because suddenly I felt small and I loved her. And in each instant, our problems still felt repairable at work. I found her hand and she let me. She was talking to someone shortage with cropped hair and a memorable face. She was saying that it's possible to recognize our limits for what they are with bravery, even as we fail, hearing ourselves repeat the things we don't believe and don't comfort us. And I think now for this kind of final leg, I'm going to read some of the new work. A lot of it's called talk and it came to be because when time got strange, it felt like there wasn't enough talk, there wasn't enough intimacy. And so I began these poems that I think aspired to be intimate conversations, but instead became conversations with the silence of the page, talk. Love of the world is so clearly come and go. The way we talk sounds beautiful and sad. You have to say these three words before you can say the harder thing. The air at evening crumbles into rose flakes, the wind like a child's breath. This is cement. It's almost hard now, but when it's new, it's soft. If we step in it then, it'll be there forever to describe as to praise. I've always felt that two crows fly up and disappear into the depths of the redwood. Talking with Sarah in bed, I touch her hair. How often do we use the word safe each day? Thanks, a walk sounds nice. Writing this winter, I trace lines of motion. I conclude I've lived. My mentor tells me I am more than a series of inclinations. Twilight knotted with dislikes. A line of gold light above the water just before night. Persimmons dimming like embers in the still air. Three branches of two trees interweave to frame. Someone walking, wine, dawn, coffee, other things, nothing lasting, night descending like a forest with crushing elegance. Leaves and petals float on a dark puddle. The heart is dense and soft as earth. And suddenly rain appears in the air. Falling from just above my head. Wetting the little dime of scalp where the soul escapes. All night I sit in my chair revising what could be my life. In a poetry of nouns, you are a cold wind. A comma. Years pass like bands of rain in the woods where I grew up. Dark green moss grows. The word fate appears in drafts and is plowed back under. I'm a grad student. I live in California. A long blue cloud. A wind chime. But I could live anywhere like several of these bones. This next poem, you may hear you and I switching back and forth. And I think one thing writing does well is to find and then to work to heal the to work to heal the little the little rifts and fishers that develop in us as we move through time. Yeah, I think poems are good at kind of gathering the past, who you are in the past into who you think you are in the present and asking you questions about that talk, which reveals God help you the late 2000s, a seaside restaurant channeling the eighties and Longworth. The wrong season looms outside the huge windows, ropes of snow coil on the sand as you wait for wine, trying to figure out if you're being stood up. What did I say? If you can have the thought it's too late. Of late, my heart feels burnt and heavy, like an ox heart blackened in the coals. I run until a pebble of bone in my foot cracks, then necrosis. Youth isn't over, I whisper, just changed into a mood. I sometimes recover that bears sometimes no resemblance to youth. Coincidentally, I'm returning to my earliest themes. Winter. Sex like vivisection. Beauty like beauty. Walking through gold air with a pyre behind each eye as loneliness tightens its long roots around your lungs. Three days of rain, a respite from clarity. You should hide. I smile at the earth in the depths of the sink. I cannot speak for anger. I wrote before I could think clearly. Writing powder falls heavily through the branches. Writing my body grows tired. I lean against it. Writing as the party ebbs, he's left with the mountains of flowers. Writing a small bell peels. The forest is cased in ice. And I think I will read just one more. This is the last poem. Thank you. The poem is called Noah. I see a picture of my face. It was taken by one of my past lovers. The mountains are very green. It's spring there. Streams run swiftly and along their scoured banks. Blue snow lingers. It absorbed the winter sky. Now it pays it out slowly in the shadows. The lovers have their entire lives. I return to four or five cities. About that many mountain parks. I observe. I write statements that trouble me. Like questions of theology. I often feel bitter after thinking for a while. I feel like I'm lost. I'm lost. Knowledge of something terrible. Something that happened a long time ago. Is in my heart like snow. In the cities that is full. Everyone is memorizing poems. As they walk at dusk beneath the trees. Their lips are fluttering a little. Like leaves. They shake their heads Riley. When they miss a line. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for those patterns against terror. Of line and sentence. And for catalyzing our series year in poetry. We really hope to see you back for the remainder of this year's events. Starting next month and the poems. The poets come on the first Thursday of each month. Philip B. Williams will be next reading from his new book, Mutiny. Hope to see you there. Thank you for running the event so smoothly. Be well and safe. Bye.