 So, I first heard of Dean Rader because people kept asking me if we knew each other, or assuming we did, because there are a lot of reasons we should have met before we did. And when we finally met, we were both like, this is overdue. And we had a great breakfast over my kitchen table and a fantastic conversation and dreamed up this little notion here. We are both big-time native poetry nerds in a couple of different ways. And we have both brought some stuff, and we're going to read some of our own stuff. And I'm just going to kick this over to Dean right now. Am I starting? Yeah. All right. Thank you all for coming. You could be watching the Warriors right now, which maybe it's where everyone else is. Yeah, you're here and you've made a commitment to the world of poetry, so I think I'll read a poem near the beginning of my recent book, which is called Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry. And it sort of addresses issues of what is true, what is not true, what is verifiable, what is not. And this poem, it has its roots in San Francisco, and it's an epigraph from Mark Twain. And you will know the epigraph. The coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent in San Francisco, right? You know this. Well, it's attributed to Mark Twain, but he never actually said it. We actually don't know who said it. So it's apocryphally attributed to Mark Twain, and this poem is called Apocryphal Self-Portrait. And there's a word in here of sidereal, which means starry or of the stars. The darkest night of my life was that morning in your car. My heart would not stop raining. You said it was climate change. I may not be able to prove you wrong, but that doesn't mean the end is near. The end is always near. I read somewhere that the sum of the earth's water will never change. Nothing is taken away. Nothing added. Every drop is the same age. Every age died in the same drop. The cut-up clouds stretched and strung out have had about enough. Each day is a boat on a lake that we row ourselves into. We try to pick at the scab of sunlight itching overhead, but we can't take our eye off the little crack in the hull we know keeps growing. The Buddha says, every place we've been, we stay. Right now, he's in my dream, sitting alone at an empty table, my tiny chair about to collapse beneath him. Mark Twain walks into the room looking exactly like Colonel Sanders. In one hand, he cradles a bucket of chicken. In the other, he carries an axe. The heaviest weight is the lightness of the soul, he says to the Buddha. Give in to the dark, the Buddha replies, and you won't feel the darkness. The longest drive we ever took was that evening we parked next to the cliff, the sidereal dashboard, the cracked windshield of the body. I want you to know that it is never the darkest right before the dawn. I want you to know the truth about everything. I want you to know that when those memories drop down, my umbrella opens. Oh. Are you reading now? No. Can I read more? You're reading more. All right. I'm going to read a part because this won't kick out a poem yet. Okay. All right. I'm going to read a poem for you. Since Kim and I are both originally from Oklahoma, this is a poem about Oklahoma. I grew up in a small farm town in Oklahoma, and this poem makes references to the Tulsa race riots and also to the Trail of Tears, just FYI. The form of this poem is called a huzzle, which is an ancient Middle Eastern form, and it's written in two-line stanzas. The last word of every stanza is the same, so you hear the same word repeated throughout. Then the other characteristic of a huzzle is that the poet usually inserts his or her name in the last stanza. When you hear me say, Dean Rader, you will know, blessedly, that we're about to the end. All right. This is called cartography or American allegory one. Once upon a time in Oklahoma, there was no such thing as Oklahoma. When I look out off the coast of California, I'm standing on our farm in Hinton, Oklahoma. I'm standing on the water because Texas sucks and Kansas blows. Question, why is it so windy in Oklahoma? All roads, you know that one, right? Yes. Yeah, it's classic. All roads might lead to Rome, but all trails take you to Oklahoma. The stars dragged along in their wagons of dust, the moon on its cot, the last long light of Oklahoma. Pahuska, Nayuka, Wawoka, Tologa, Ulaga, Okima, Ufala, oh, the missing maps of Oklahoma. Knife wind, ice wind, blind wind, hatchet wind, stone wind, skin wind, dust wind, and must wind, all whisper Oklahoma. I think of Bruce Snyder floating above the corn of Indiana. Is he waving at Jesus, rising above the wheat of Oklahoma? I have often wondered if there is more oil or blood beneath the soil of Tulsa, Oklahoma. My second baptism was in the first Baptist church. My first was in the summer rains of Oklahoma. State amphibian, bullfrog. State beverage, milk. State soil, port silt loam. State mammal, bison. State song, Oklahoma. The first dead body I saw was my friend Kevin Reitz. I was six years old in a funeral home in Weatherford, Oklahoma. Where are you, Rhonda Harder, first girl to kiss me? I'm sorry your name became a joke for the boys of Oklahoma. Put down your pen, Lord Death. The names of my parents are not yet on your list for Oklahoma. If you ask me what one is to do with this world, I will tell you that the answer is not to be found in Oklahoma. Poem of the open prairie couplet of the spread out sky, metaphor of mistletoe and milkweed. Who will write Oklahoma? God has bequeathed himself to the grape leaves of Sonoma and the fog of San Francisco. Is his next gift to Oklahoma? My grandfather and my son share the name Dean Rader. This morning my son sinks into our bright bed. My grandfather into the dark dirt of Oklahoma. So I was born here, home is constructed in a lot of different ways and I definitely consider what one of my homes to be, Pitcher, Oklahoma, which is condemned now and as my partner said as we drove through empty buildings two summers ago, it's ruins and it is. This is from a moment when it wasn't ruins, but it's actually set in Grove. This is a book of prose poems, which means that I wanted to write a whole story but couldn't muster the energy to actually write an entire story. So it's in pieces. Rabbit Food Stairs at Bell Star's Piano. Harbor Village is in Grove, they're on Grand Lake and is a giant antique museum. She's exploring the music building, finds this piano, wonders what May liked to play. If she enjoyed finger exercises and her own fingers twitch, part of her would love to coax sound from this instrument, stroking the keys, time travel. The woman had been family. Rabbit Food couldn't remember how except that it was through the star man May had married. She had an overwhelming sensation of nearness. They had close birthdays, had both been taught to play piano, shared locations. She wondered if she could find out what sheet music had been in the bench. Wondered if Myra May Bell had been distracted by bunnies and bunny energy. Wondered who had shot her. Some relative would know, Frank probably. Maybe she could have him take her to Robber's Cave and tell her tales there. No crimes are ever unsolved. Someone always knows. There's an underlying silence for rabbit food in Oklahoma, both related and unrelated to the general lack of city sounds. Cicadas bagpipe constantly, maddeningly, pecans, berries, the patchwork of family stories, all voices chanting at what is almost a map of that red earth place. Still, there is a silence to all of it, a fisherman's waiting, cotton and otts, Christmas tree, fish crash along, swing, strokes of alligator snappers, the size of wash tubs and bells, quiet piano. Come early to water, use the correct bait, and every story there will take the hook. You know this book? Kind of fun. Yeah, that's great. Most people haven't read it, but it's kind of fun. So it's always a privilege to read in a lony territory, since I made you read too. The thing about chairs, when you're really short, he's got the opposite problem. If I sit back, I look like a doll at a doll's tea party. I have another book that people may or may not be familiar with. This is by Stephen Meadows, who is an aloney poet, to continue the sense of place thing. In the water over stones for Isabel Meadows, your voice, Isabel, is a quail's voice as the sun song ticks in the brush. It's a hawk's voice and the heart's heat of the rabbit in the parched summer grass. Nearby in the river, in the water over stones, it is a willow voice. It is a crayfish voice. In the hollows, in the darkening places, at first light, it is the wind's voice, the mouth of the river, tully voice, the voice of a hundred breezes. The sun marks out the red madrone, and in the canyons, it is a redwood voice, a sycamore voice, sweet-scented. In the spring, it's a lupin voice, a blue-white and purple coverlet voice all over the hills and in the meadows. On the river banks, as the set fires burn and the steelhead run, it is the hunter's voice, flinging the gleamer's silver on the sand. Through the houses of rich men now cover these hills, it is your spirit voice, your evening voice, your voice of the western waters. The stars hang out over the point of wolves on the edge of the world. The sea lions call, the otters break open, abalone. It is the voice of the land, the voice of bright shells. It is the voice of the valley and the mountain, Isabel. She used to always bring MJ so that she'd make the correct noises at the right moment. That's good. It's good to plant the audience. Absolutely. You've got to sort of salt the audience a bit. All right, since you mentioned the Ohlone, I'll read a poem. It's actually one of the only times I've been commissioned to write a poem. Almost four years ago to the day, John McMurtry, who used to be the book editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, sent me an email and asked me if I would write a poem for the Warriors historic run in NBA finals against the Cleveland Cavaliers. And I said, sure, I'll do that. He said, great, you have 48 hours. So I did it. And this is the poem, and it ran in the Chronicle, June 3, 2015, which now seems doesn't seem that long ago, but it was. And we went on to win the championship that year. So a few things about the poem. If you don't know the Warriors stadium out in the center court is the Bay Bridge. That's important. And the coach of the Warriors, I don't know how much everyone knows about basketball, Steve Kerr, and there are two most interesting players. I think are Steph Curry and Clay Thompson. I think that's all you need to know. And the Warriors used to be in Philadelphia. So this is called Sphere of Influence or Praise Song for the Warriors. There's an epigraph from the great African-American fiction writer John Edgar Wideman, who wrote this great book on basketball called Hoop Roots. And this is the quote, Good Hoop alerts you to what's already there. In a gym somewhere in Oakland, a girl makes a no-look pass. Oh, by the way, in case you don't know, the Warriors are playing tonight in game six of the NBA Finals. And so we need a win. So this is good karma. In a gym somewhere in Oakland, a girl makes a no-look pass. And the ball lands on the bow of a ship anchored off the banks of a city. The Cayuga call, big town lying there. The ball coming to rest at the feet of Henry Hudson, who is wearing Air Jordans and waving a sword. He is already looking west, which is where an entire country will go, either in body or screen, to find their best selves, which they have placed once more in a team, despite the fact there is no I in team. Only an Am, like the first letters of America, where basketball, the most democratic of sports, was born. It's court, a continent of movement in which everyone does everything, both offense and defense. Like two sides of the sword swung by Henry Hudson, who, as it happens, came to this world with the sole purpose of founding Philadelphia, so that 353 years later, the Warriors could arrive, like some great down court pass in the Golden State of California, land of Oloni, Oracle, and Oak, land of the Beats and the Bay, Kerr, Curry, and Clay. Land where America discovers its dreams, even though there is no I in dreams, only an Am, as in, I am going to shoot a three ball into history. That place America is always trying to lift itself out of, like an alley-oop over time and tragedy, which is to say, I love this team, I love these Warriors, battling not merely for victory, but for joy, and perhaps even for beauty, as though teamwork is not work at all, but a kind of art, an invitation or celebration, which may sound cavalier, but not to the girl in the gym who's got next in the new warrior America, and she wants you on her team. In fact, she's waving you in from the sidelines, so it's time for you to lace up and get in the game. And if you're not sure where to go or what connects you, just look to the court and you'll see the bridge. Well, as long as we're talking about ceremonies, we wait for the first star to appear because ceremonies have requirements. I want to leave you a poem like a first star. I want to leave you a poem like water, like water enough, enough to walk yourself out of danger. Being human takes work, being made of water and mystery. Today, we will celebrate generosity, we'll leave water in the desert by the dry creek bed. We wait, not knowing which one it will be, but we all trust that night we'll bring a first star. I'll show you another one. Yeah, I do read short. Yeah, mine was so long. All right. The keys that I carry in my blood, spill out his words, come up as raised welts between my fingers. When they're not keys, they're lockpicks. I write lockpicks. Each one is a separate violation of the law because we are not to open doors closed in fear because we are not to return to our sacred spaces as they prepare to level the top of the mountain, how deep will they go to get rid of a fingerprint, to cut us from places we are linked to in prayer, in breath? I've been writing poems lately about the artist Saitwambli, and I don't know if you know his work, but he's famous really for these kind of scribbles and these markings that look a lot like letters, but maybe aren't really letters and they're kind of illegible, but maybe they're legible. I'm really interested in what the relation, the differences between drawing and writing. What if I am drawing poems and he's writing art? That kind of inversion really interests me. He also works a lot of quotes from poets into his paintings. He's really obsessed with Rilke, as am I. And not long after my father died, I went to this great Tawambli retrospective in New York. And this is a poem that came out of, it's a newish poem. I may not have read this in front of human beings before, but this is a poem that came out of that. And this has got one of these long, kind of Chinese Tang dynasty titles. Once again, in thought about Rilke, Tawambli's Orpheus paintings and fatherhood, I consider the inevitability of creation and loss. Skard sky, the last beams bruised beneath the surface of stars. The whole world a contusion slowly transforming from one thing to the next. The one cell, the one life, always becoming two. What if it is the sun that follows the moon? How do we know we're not the bridle hard against the teeth of this life? Just because something has a saddle, it doesn't mean we should write it. What would it take to be inside the music the cello did not know how to play? What would it take to say to the strings, make me silent? What would it take for the skin to sing its own song of blood and blooming? To know one truth is to know nothing. To wear your nothingness, well, now we're getting somewhere. I once believed I could be lifted by language out of language. I once believed the horse hooves in the distance was the ocean telling the rocks about water. I once believed loss would thread my mind's needle like a blind seamstress, but that was a long time ago. Now I understand that time is nothing more than pure duration and that the mind is a field of herons who have lost their way. Even so, I will let the entire lie down in my body's blue light in hope that something will start to heal. I just had this thought, like, as I hear you read a couple of lines that I could have easily written, you know, it starts making more sense why everybody thought we knew each other already. But I was just having this thought, like, is there a connection between words that are not written or painted words that are spoken or the connection between Oklahoma and California and, anyway, if poets are roads. During the general strike, grandpa knew he was at war. The dining room table was a field hospital. Here we poet, among the rack of the Pacific polish, landings, boundaries, we haul our insubstantial to the foundations, press unprotected hands onto the fires. We are seaglass. We're unexplained. We are soap bubbles. Our bodies are paving. Roads are just horizontal walls in this place. Walls too tired to stand upright, secret walls. You tell me what is separated from what other? We haul our poems to the outbreak, to the firefight. Our hearts are each a small field hospital. Pages each, lifelines each, front each and each. It's not a war if the street lights change, if the line for coffee is short. It's not a war if poets or roads are verb-wet cheeks. Grandpa knew he knew a wall when he saw one. You're waiting for me to read another poem. Yeah, I think I think I should do another one. I see you doing that out of the corner of my eye. My lure, my leer. It's okay. It's a teacher thing, right? Yeah. It's like, I'll just wait. Last year, I wrote a bunch of poems about a statue I didn't like. And then I wrote a bunch of poems about murder and missing indigenous women. And it will make you cranky if you do that for days on end. So I'm looking at this stuff thinking, wow, I'm a cranky poet. But here we go. Maybe I will get my heart back when they've measured it. Our nationalized prayers, our women, our blood, a colonized space, a more direct way through this redacted west, a smoother ride. The supervisor who's declared us inconsequential wears a belt of our hair collected from our murdered cousins. A curio that suggests connection that carries no empathy. A suggestion that we rebuild, become body-shaped factories providing whatever can be harvested best. And cousins who want the authority without the work. On a field trip to city hall, I saw my own heart taken for study these years past, nested in paper on a scale in the office of a self-declared ally. Cranky. Yeah. I'll also read a somewhat cranky poem. All right, so this is kind of a true story poem. This really, the scene I talk about with my son really, really happened. I wrote this in response, speaking of statues, you don't like sculptures. I wrote this in response to the riots in Charlottesville a few years ago. And it, if you've never been to Charlottesville, Virginia, it was kind of founded by Thomas Jefferson, University of Virginia's there, Monticello is not far, and Jefferson is sort of identified with Charleston. In fact, they refer to Thomas Jefferson as Mr. Jefferson, just everywhere you go around campus. This is a poem called History, and it also has an epigraph from Jefferson's, I don't know if you've ever read Jefferson's notes on the state of Virginia. He published them in 1784. And in one of the notes, he lays out his theory for why African-Americans recently freed slaves. Or would be freed slaves under his plan, would be moved to their own island somewhere. And he really lays out this unbelievably racist definition for the distinction between the races. And he closes one of the notes, near closes with this sentence. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. History, the dead are done with their declarations. They have put down their pens and called for our attention. They want to teach us a lesson about remembering and how it is a test for living. History is neither a reprieve of the future nor the past. And perhaps this is why, when my son walked into the room where my wife and I watched our country on the streets of Charlottesville, we asked him to sit with us. I do not know if I am a good father or a good American, but I tell him sometimes we learn through despair. He nods like someone in a dream. Sometimes I wonder if our legacy is nothing more than chains, bayonets, flags, guns, statues, stockades, fields, uniforms, irons, and auctions. Sometimes I imagine the ghosts in my bones are ropes that have turned to smoke. We all wear burns on the inside. Even you, Mr. Jefferson, author of America. Sometimes I imagine it is 1619 and you and I are together on the banks of the James River. It is late August. The first ship arrives. It is called the White Lion. You do not miss the irony. I tell you, I'm going to write a poem about Charlottesville, 397 years from now, almost to the day. You not at me like someone in a dream. History is never what it is. It's more. In your lap is a book in my hand, a knife. You propose a trade. I believe you know something about the future that I don't. I'm thinking of my son, not yet born, who is suddenly between us. I'm thinking now is our chance. Our country has been dying for such a long time. Sometimes I think we should move beyond monuments of body or mind. It's time to start living forward into the history you did not write. Thank you. Just flashed on something Mary Jean said to me one time, the fourth time we were through a metal detector that day. She looked at me and said no matter how many times I watch you walk through a metal detector, I don't ever assume you're unarmed. So don't trust it if I trade you my knife for your book. It's called these songs and others. Shoes are usually overrated. We've sung some dust shoes, some stone shoes, some shoes that drift away in the water near the dam and leave our feet surrounded by flashing fish and the dimple shadow of water striders. Then we learn to walk through the archaic of seeing a snake swim close. We could see it. We've sung some of our own skin shoes, some make-do shoes, some balance better with nun shoes, because shoes can be overrated. We've learned songs about our grandma's shoes, her sister's shoes, the Dilashilo toes pounded smooth by stones, pounded smooth. And those other generation boys who made shoes of their own dancing, didn't they know how to dance? We've sung some songs about shoes that take us out of those small houses, take us where we can help more. Shoes that we wear under our these days shoes, there are some shoes that cannot be taken off. These shoes that teach us the language beyond language, the belonging that we know. Those are some good shoes too. And some days we still wear them, but we know some things we didn't then and we can't go without for it, because you have to leave soon. I do, I have to dash off to- So you finish out the time you can stay. My good friend at the University of San Francisco, the physicist Brandon Brown, has written this fascinating book on the engineers behind the Apollo mission. And tonight is his book release party. And the bookstore and he asked me if I would introduce him. So I have to leave you, good people, and go talk about science, which is gonna be fun, I know. All right, I think I will read a short poem. It's called Political Poem. And this is for W.S. Merwin, the poet who died recently. It was really important to me, political poem. And in fact, the first two lines I steal from a Merwin poem. One day when the war is over, something will rise to bear the new weight we have been asked to carry up the path to that place we have come to think of as this life. In a small field, a young girl races a shovel and sets it down. She imagines a small bird lifting into the air, like some sort of prayer that knows its way. All right, maybe I'll close. So my publisher is Copper Canyon. And actually the main reason I wanted to be on, to publish with a Copper Canyon was because W.S. Merwin does. And I thought if I can be on the same list as Merwin, that's about as awesome as it gets. And one of the things I love about my press is we're just talking about blurbs, right? Is they don't ask their authors to get blurbs. They just put a photo, describe the book, and then they run a poem from the book on the back. And so when I got my copy of my book, the poem that they put on the back is this poem and it's in this very fancy French form called a Villanelle. And a Villanelle, it's a 19 line poem with this really strict rhyming scheme. And the first line is repeated throughout and then the third line is repeated throughout. You have to have the same rhyme. And I've written one Villanelle my entire life. Bam, it's right here. And so when I saw this, I was like, well, fuck. People are gonna see this book and think, oh, Villanelle guy. But then I was telling my friend this and he said, well, maybe they'll say, oh, Villanelle guy. And pick up the book and either way, they're gonna be disappointed. This is it. But I like this poem. Anyway, I'm so sorry I have to leave, but you're in great hands and maybe we'll do this again. I think we will. In some other life or venue. Different context. So this is called relational self-portrait. The universe has not been built to scale. Everything is bigger or smaller than it seems. The sea, the hole, a ship, a sail, your line, the hook, your heart. That's where the nail of desire drives deep. Sorrow can span a universe that is not built to scale, even though rungs are strung from star to shell and back. We end, of course, where we began, that ship, that hole, that sea. And so we sail full speed toward the iceberg. Too fast to tell if size or scale or course is plot or plan. The universe will not be built to scale. The dead in heaven, the living in hell blaze and burn in the blue of all that can rise and fall. The ship of this life will sail until its stern snaps beneath the stretched swell at the end of the end. We find out then the universe has not been built to scale and that our want expands like wind, not sail. Thank you all for coming. It's so good to see you. Thank you, I'll tell him you say hello. Yeah, please do. I am moving on to some other. By the way, before he leaves, I have to say this one thing. Dean has recently won an enormous, very impressive award and he's an enormous, very impressive professor and there's all kinds of massively impressive things about Dean, so be impressed. Yeah, I generally leave that stuff out and I do it because it always makes me a little uncomfortable but it's probably worth knowing when somebody's national class impressive. That was apparently so compelling he had to stuff in the doorway for it. It's terrible, I hate introductions so I figured maybe an outro, right? In the walnut grove, that year, the wind took the topsoil and the children. The maps all changed and not everyone found a pair of magical shoes or good company. I wonder if she paused every time she introduced herself. If it was a question between her teeth as well that the tap roots, they go somewhere unknown and we understand that every family has stories that are painted over. There are always things hidden in the walls but when all you know is that blank wall and the hints and suggestions of what might be in there and you know that all of the expected family portraits are in an ink, only visible under a certain moon. It was about, they're now doing a lot of reporting on this. My grandmother was adopted out and we know that she was native but when Oklahoma became a state and kids had land allotments, a lot of parents were killed in order to adopt native kids who then would vanish somehow and end up enriching the people who'd adopted them. That didn't happen to my grandmother, she survived to adulthood but she never did know who she was. Unfortunately, pretty close after her death, a niece of hers showed up at the front door looking for her because the whole family got scattered and they were all looking for each other forever and never really found each other. So that happened. This is called Bridges and Crossroads. WPA Bridge over the Niosho. I stood on it in full flood with my dad. The water just kissing the underside of the boards, the river bones shivering up my legs. It stood until a flood licked out the footings. They replaced it. When I dreamed the Niosho, the old bridge is there. They took zinc out until they hit the daylight of Third Street. You could see the crack in the pavement, looked like another pothole and there was sunlight in the mine, sunlight just there with a dull ache of lead and the grim scowl of Jack. Those cotton mouths know some songs too. They know some fish songs. And once crossing Tar Creek Bridge, a grandma snake got hit by a pickup and in her last breaths, we drove up on her there like a burning library. Her songs falling away in curls, taken by updrafts like smoke prayers near the water. She looked me in the heart and whispered just the one secret. I'm looking through these poems for something cheerful. This is kind of not, yeah. Okay, Doug wants to hear the intro to Rabbit Stories. He did ask me earlier. So Rabbit is kind of a trickster god in the southeast. I think most people know about coyote. Rabbit is goofier, a little smarter but a little goofier. Every culture has a trickster god and a lot of cultures think that rabbits are them. So Loki has a black rabbit form. We're not the only ones who thought rabbits had something suspicious up their sleeves. I was asked at one point to write a chapter for a book about science and Native American philosophy. And this is what I came up with. And then I led a friend of mine who had been a reporter for years, read it. And he said, gosh, it's a shame you can't keep that tone for a whole book. One of my nicknames back home is Don't Dare Her. But this is the beginning. If you put a quantum scientist in a box and never open again, will anyone ever understand more about the uncertainty principle? What does that have to do with Native American philosophy? If I don't set foot on the scale between mid-November and mid-January, did my weight actually spike in December? Why does anything care if I measure it? I see Rabbit. He's weighing and measuring leaves so that they can exist so that he can affect their existence with his regard. We are all in community, the subatomic particles wait for Rabbit's gaze so that they can dance in the music he makes by looking. He takes his responsibilities very seriously, making sure to watch them during auspicious and ceremonial times. Rabbit is careful with the subatomic particles. The ground doesn't have the ability, after all, to support his weight unless he takes the next step. He's careful not to think about the okaten while he's looking at the particles. Instead, he whispers beautiful, happy, and cradles them in his sight, and they dance. It's difficult to find either the scientist willing to be boxed for the sake of theory or the box that would contain her. She is busy, after all, measuring her own corner of the cosmos. Not, I hasten to reassure you, putting mustard seeds into stolen skulls. She's watching them dance. Well, that and doing laundry. Every quantum scientist, or even quantum scientists, can't avoid the laundry. That experiment insists on being measured. It's like the old-time water clocks. Time will stop if there is no laundry to drip from drawer to bin and a brief moment on the skin in between. She knows she has a variety of measuring tools available. Pleasure in the field of clean cotton on skin, though difficult to get funded, is certainly one of those tools. Rabbit spends his weekend being a rabbit. He munches contraband cilantro intended for the family quesadillas and contemplates overlaps between theoretical physics and green-corn ceremony. It is important to take responsibilities seriously. He munches in a rabidly way and later he will sprawl floppyly has chosen to be aloft this weekend, enjoys the softness of this body, its acuity of taste, things like to be thanked. So he plans an experiment of thanks, decides to conduct it in the spring rather than the fall because there is too much silliness about thankfulness in the fall already, says Rabbit. At the pow-wow people dance, circle the arena as men and women look at each other in all combinations. They dance to the music of looking, to the music of being looked at. This weekend, no one drops any feathers. Rabbit makes sure to measure himself in the mirror every day, quantum self-definition. Pinching an inch of extra waistline he smiles to himself, evidence of good stew past, exposes his teeth, sucks thoughtfully considering what to chew. Soon, he will go back to the pow-wow to look and look and whisper things to the people as he looks, beautiful, happy. He cradles them all in his sight and they dance. The quantum physicist, her grandma, and a collection of aunties sit at the kitchen table. A large rabbit has claimed space under the table where the physicist used to sit with her crayons, magnets, and her collection of small empty bottles. A suspicious smell of cilantro wafts up towards her. She listens to the aunties as they talk of stew, the making of stew, the dishing of stew, and the relative merits of various root vegetables. The physicist ponders all possible meanings of the word relative. A munching sound from below provides counterpoint. She has been promoted to the space above the table, wonders if this means she's becoming an auntie. Maybe rabbit has the right idea remaining below. There is a wild rose that the people call rabbit food. Rabbit licks his lips at the thought. Beauty, thy name is rabbit food. He imagines a vine trailing up a paw paw. The tree is heavy with fruit. He has thought about every leaf, every blossom, and naturally every bit of that fruit. Rabbit sighs and looks at the legs of beautiful women, of women who discuss food. He knows their names, these women, and one is named for that rose. Rabbit food is talking about stew, about potatoes, about Spice Bush, and particularly about bean bread. She is more beautiful than he remembers her, even though he thinks of each of her cells singing happily every day. He thinks about the beautiful lines he's putting around her eyes. They're not finished yet, but they're a song about smiling. She has been plagued by rabbit all of her life. How could she not have been? What had they been thinking with that name? Now there's no cilantro in the fridge, and she thinks that a certain tubby lot might be able to blame. It's time to gather clothes in from the line. She feels that small closed boxes are suspect, even those that dry the laundry. Besides, there's a riot of plant life to cradle the wash and happy thoughts. She doesn't know all of them, but they smell like happy thoughts, such song and dance, for the creek underground at the foot of the garden. This is so good for the subatomic particles in the laundry. No telling what the effect might be on that experiment. It will have to run its course. There's a certain wellness to this garden. Rabbit finds a damp shady spot and greedily eyes the berries to be. He makes promises of undying love to the berry canes. Truly, what could be more undying than being together forever? And he intends to eat them up and add their songs to his to become the box and the contained and to sing them in his cells for all time. She spreads sheets crisp with the songs of the plum tree, of the apple blossom, of the milkweed and of rabbit. With so many military folk in the family, she knows the right way to tuck in sheets. You could bounce a quarter off of a bed that she makes, no mistake. Rabbit becomes both softer and more clever in this garden. He watches the striped spider weave. She rarely has time for him. He learned long ago not to disturb her weavings. He blinks warily at the memory. Spider, serious as she is, enjoys Rabbit's company. But the only clue is her slightly more formal posture. She weaves intently, measuring everything carefully and creates her web, her blanket. The physicist has saved the quilt for last. The sheets are for the military men in the family. The quilt, the quilt she learned about from the grandmas. She spreads it gently, it's soft from love and use, from thoughts and experiments. Every piece of this quilt is its own thing. The quantum physicist settles her inheritance onto the bed and goes off to make stew. That one's hard to sit through. Thank you for doing so. Mary Jean, do you have a request? Do you like grumpy palms? How do other people feel grumpy palm, cheerful palm? I'm gonna do one more. The weird thing about reading to people that you know is that you can pull that one off. All right, Ritz 66 was the river we all lived with knowing its habits and fauna, the sacred diners and cafes on its shores and the seasonal overflow, overflow. There's a mythology there that blurs between cultures. No, Fred Harvey, but it replaced the railroad, next food, second boiler, the big teepee and sometimes a hawk, not quite dead on the black top. The one that marked me with a clenching foot, a reflex between french toast, scrambled eggs and cubed ham and that tangy overcooked coffee. When I still smoked cigarettes and grandpa had a bronze American Leviathan, the whorehound drops jerky moccasins gas and incandescent constellations of those towns at night, telling their very own stories, unknown to us, so many ghosts along this river that we share these print picks of similarity, these hauntings, this long man, such crime, such home place. Here's your cranky poem, Miss Jay. Pull your socks up. We who steal ourselves back from the songs and laws and habits that claim us and everything about us. The long man, the wide-hipped and generous bays, protective as any mother. We who can still hear Lovejoy's press can hear it from under the water, the supervisory singing wolves. We who sing to other songs, we steal ourselves back, the kidnapped, the hostage, the unransomed and unransmobile. We learn songs to pick locks, to absorb your laws and habits. We're coming for ourselves. We're on our way. Thank you so much, guys, for being here today. Thank you.