 Welcome, welcome. It's wonderful to see you all tonight. Third annual, Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading. I see a lot of familiar faces in the crowd, but for those of you who are new to this event, this reading series has been organized to bring imminent poets to our community annually. Our inaugural poet was Robert Hass. Last year's reader was Kay Ryan. And tonight we are very excited to add Arthur Z to this illustrious list. Every year the Morton Marcus Memorial Reading Series honors one of the country's premier poets, but more pertinent to us, it honors a man who left an indelible mark on the cultural life of our community. A reading series is a very fit memorial for Mort. The poetry series that Morton organized at Zachary's back in the early 70s was instrumental in galvanizing our nascent literary community here in Santa Cruz and in forging our local literary identity. Morton was a masterful poet, but he was also a well-respected novelist, memoirist, movie and literary critic. You can take a walk in Santa Cruz County and not, you cannot take a walk in Santa Cruz County without meeting someone who adored him as a teacher during his 30 years here at Cabrillo College or listened to among KUSPs the poetry show, the longest poetry show in the nation, or delighted in his talks at the Nickelodeon or his reviews on cinema scene. Mort received a Gail Rich Award and was honored as a Santa Cruz County artist of the year, and he is still very much of presence here and is still much missed. Tonight's reading would not have been possible without the hard work of many people and the support of several institutions and I would like to thank our many sponsors, the Owl Family Properties, Cabrillo College English Department and Cabrillo College, UC Santa Cruz, Bookshop Santa Cruz, Poetry Santa Cruz and the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County. I hope that all of you are familiar with Frenzy, which is the new online literary magazine dedicated to showcasing the work of Santa Cruz writers. It's a marvelous site and if you haven't visited yet and bookmarked the site, I encourage you to do so as quickly as possible. Frenzy has established a national poetry contest to honor Morton, the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize. And tonight we'll hear the winner of the first contest which was judged by a past Poet Laureate of California, Al Young. Dear friend Jory Post, whose generosity and energies are behind so many literary and educational endeavors in our community, including Santa Cruz writes, and Frenzy will do the honors. Thank you, Gary. As Gary said, I'm here tonight representing Santa Cruz writes and the Frenzy Online Literary Magazine. Last year when we founded Frenzy, one of the first topics that came up for co-founder Julia Keopella and myself was the influence that Morton Marcus had over our lives and the memories that we had of Morton. Julia remembers that she and Sarah Willborn worked with Morton on a multimedia project. And I remember that in 1969, when I left Soquel High School and went to Cabrillo, my first writing class was with Morton as a teacher. Which was thrilling for me and has caused me to continue to write throughout my life. One of the things that we decided when we launched the first issue of Frenzy in February was to dedicate two projects to Mort. The first was a floodlight feature that ended up being an 80-page website dedicated to Mort's live and work. It's still up there on Frenzy. If you haven't seen it yet, go check it out. And as Gary said, the second project that we launched was the Morton Marcus Poetry Contest. As we started figuring out how to produce that, we had the great good fortune of working with Morton Marcus Memorial Committee. And if that wasn't enough good fortune, we also got lucky enough to have found a great judge for the contest. Renowned poet, teacher, friend of Mort, and the California Poet Laureate from 2005 to 2008, Al Young. Al, are you here? Is he not here yet? We'll introduce him later. David's here a little early, but that's okay. We're going to leave him here to be a good presence on the stage. In addition to having Al as a great judge, I'd also like to thank another key contributor. Contributor Gary mentioned him earlier, but George Al Jr. and Al Family Properties helped made this event successful this year by donating free copies of Mort's memoirs striking through the masks to every entrant of the Poetry Contest. We also learned in the last couple of days that George and Al Family Properties will expand their support of the contest by making an annual contribution toward the first prize. So George, thank you. When the submission deadline passed on September 1, I bundled together about 200 pages worth of poems and shipped them off to Al. It was a blind competition. He had numbers and letters and had no idea who had written the poems. After about six weeks of deliberation, he got back to us with three runners-up and one winner. And you'll actually be able to read the three runners-up and David's winning poem on Frenzy in the fall, 2012 issue, which comes out next Thursday, November 15th, online at Frenzy, friend-z.org. I know that hyphen gets a lot of people. I guess we might change it. And now I'd like to introduce the winner of the first annual Morton Marcus Memorial Prize, David Allen Sullivan. I know David's bio is in your program, but you probably haven't had a chance to read it yet, so I'm just going to tell you a little bit about David. His first book, Strong Armed Angels, was published by Hummingbird Press, and two of its poems were read by Garrison Keeler on the writer's almanac. Every seed of the pomegranate, a multi-voice series of poems about the war in Iraq, was published by Talbot Bach. David teaches here at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter Girls Review with his students and lives in Santa Cruz with his love, the historian Sherry Barkey and their two children, Jules and Amina Berevon. Now to check. David, on behalf of Frenzy, Santa Cruz Rites, Al Young, and the Morton Marcus Memorial Committee, I'd like to congratulate you for your winning poem, Takeaway, and to present you with this $1,000 check. A little miscue in the back room. Did they say his name? They sent me out. Thank you so much. It's really wonderful to be honored with this. When I threw my hat in the ring, I figured there'd be many hats with a $1,000 prize. I had no idea that I would actually get this award, but as Donna sent me an email quickly afterwards when it was announced, she said it does seem appropriate since I now have taken over Mort Marcus' office, a very prestigious kind of corner office in one of the buildings, and I also teach the History of Film class, which Mort really brought to the fore in Cabrillo and made famous. Wonderful to get to know Mort a little bit, and he was a wonderful supporter of other writers. Sometimes I thought Mort would only talk about himself, but as soon as he found something that he really believed in, he had me on the poetry show near the end of his life, and just wonderful the way he would attend to the words I'd put on paper. So I feel really honored to read some sections from this prize-winning poem called Take Wing, and I wrote this. My partner's mother was dying of cancer, and I got to know her the last eight years of her life, and she was just a wonderful presence, a kind of complex, interesting woman, and so this poem in the series is my attempt to kind of try to look in on this other life that I just got to know a little bit of. And one of the things that I really remember about Mary Barkey, she was a wonderful singer, and she sang in the church all her life. She had sisters that she would sing with, and these amazing wonderful harmonies, and when her daughters got together with her, they would sing. And she taught my children various songs. So hopefully, though I can't sing, hopefully the words sing a little bit on the page. So these are some sections from Take Wing, and I'll read the numbers so you can kind of imagine what happens in between, and then go online and read it later. Take Wing. For my mother-in-law, Mary Elizabeth Bradley Barkey, 1936, 2008. One. Seed Time. Blackberries with one grandmother aware the others dying. Pluck as first hits the pale, softer rustling as they rise higher. My kids smeared purple, tongues taking in the nearest fist of juice they snatch. How do we hold such contradictions in our hands, cut of thorns' sweetness? Nothing stops for death. Blackberries we strain between fingers in streams cold pop into others' mouths. Tongue soft nodules break open as we close our eyes. The cold water runs purplish for a moment. Then it clears again. Three. The girls sing at the reunion at San Luis Obispo, 1999. Mary mouth the count. Then faces with shared features broke open in song as they rode the rounds' repetitions. Boar words aloft like a yeast-filled bowl, too large for one pair of hands to hold. Together they lifted it higher. Their grinning almost upended what was contained, what warbled the edge, that close to tipping. But they brought it home again, and the packed rooms sang in the after-hum of song what heaven must hold. Leavening, non-stop. Six, last prayer. Angels, lay your hands on her head. Press her backwards into a sea of arms. Her closed eyes can't see. Her body can no longer feel. But she knows they're there. Her three daughters who have returned from their worlds to tender hers here. I hope her last breath comes soon. That the upper room she once sang about opens its locked doors for doubting Mary so she can touch those wounds like burbling lips until nothing remains but their song opening. All hands. Don't fight what's coming, Mary. Cristen it goodbye seed time when it tastes the sea. Decorate railings with multi-colored streamers, then burn it with all hands on deck, waving at those left ashore. The collected dead going down together, their non-waving hands entwined. No longer alone in their dying shrouds, those catch fire too, but there's no suffering as wicks of bodies ignite. Their raised hands become torches, vision turns blurry. The pressure we feel in our chests as the ship sinks artificial sunset is the pressure life exerts, rushing to hollows, driving the blood on so that when we turn back home, ashes on the waves sink down to their source. Fourteen all day rain. Come down with the rain, fill hollows, overflow drains, let it pool until it falls into itself, changing timber as it deepens. Let sadness rule me. Nothing left to do that will erase her dying. Even this singing hurts. Even if it were beautiful, I'd long for what I've lost. Though it can't be true, I can't imagine a place where it's not raining. Don't ever want to. This drenched song is around each of us owns part of. Needle and thread stitch green tinge sky to ground until nothing's divided. If only I believed Karate Metaphors could make it rain all day. If only I could believe that this overflowing cup held something of her. Seventeen, no finish line. Life is not a race, but a relay. You're handed a rod to carry a little further on, place in a back-stretching palm, and for that second it's not clear who holds what you're holding. Then they're gone and you fall away. The hollow baton makes a whistle. You just hear above your panting. The rhythm is what matters. Not the receding footfalls, the crowd calls, or even the race, but that thin sound disappearing. Travel on that song. And the last poem, and the last section of this poem, is number 18, Go On, Go In. The beautiful house of the spirit sets up camp wherever there's air and water and song. The beautiful house is made between third and fourth ribs when anyone weds themselves to another, costs next to nothing. In the beautiful house of the spirit, the dog barks, relents, licks hands. The beautiful house is painted with shreds of cloud, bells build fugues. In the beautiful house of the spirit, the men come in without clothes. The women take turns washing their bodies, drying them with scented hair. They switch positions and the men dip in a hand, anoint the anointer. The beautiful house of the spirit is cardamom, roses, wild thyme, sap and syrup, birds nest in portabellas, blue notes and a mason jar of mint tea. Drink it. You're not going anywhere you haven't been before. Thank you. Now that we are enjoying our third Morton Marcus Memorial poetry reading, I suppose that I can safely say that it has become a tradition to read Morton's poems before the featured reader. It's something that I really look forward to because I really loved Mort and I love his poems. Morton's Moments Without Names, his new and selected poems, was published by the Marie Alexander poetry series and I was on the phone a couple of days ago with Robert Alexander, the editor of that series book that Robert put out of Modernist prose poems. And we hadn't been talking for a minute before each of us interrupt the other one saying that Morton would have loved this book. So I think I will begin by reading a couple of prose poems by Mort. This first one is called In Autumn and it's from his book Pursuing the Dream Bone. In Autumn, on late afternoons, I stand at the window watching the yellow city's collapse in the sun. Prayers go unanswered in the corn's cathedral and in the hallways of flowers, bees are browsing with heavy heads. Somewhere at the end of the house, a door closes, a room is dark. And for those of you who ever had the pleasure of visiting Morton and Donna at their house on Walnut Street, you remember the great oak tree. I can't resist reading the tree. It's one of my favorite poems of Mort's. It's in four parts. Tonight I said goodbye to the tree whose branches cover half my roof and half my neighbors. A blue jay must have dropped an acorn in the path between both homes before I bought the place, even before I was born. And now it's a 40-foot oak you can see for blocks around, all the way to the sea, rising like the antlers of some giant prehistoric beast buried beneath the house. Some nights I think I can hear it snuffle, but this is earthquake country and the landscape can fool you, slipping and shifting overnight and waking you up in the dark to sounds that aren't quite right. There's a beast beneath the house, though I'm sure of it, a gentle one, who's allowed the house to rest on its back and birds to twitter and build nests in its antlers for almost a hundred years. But the antlers have grown brittle, some have snapped in the wind and others are pushing up through the house, so there's nothing to do but bring the tree down and dig out its roofs for the safety of everyone who lives above ground. I talk to myself a lot these days and maybe that's what I was doing last night when I stood out and stood with my hand on the trunk as on a friend's shoulder. What I said wasn't no worthy or memorable in any way was between the tree and me, but I can tell you I used words like thank you and sorry a lot. Words I find myself saying more and more these days to the land and neighbors and to people I hear about on the news reports in countries far away. They're out there now with their chainsaws, ropes, gaffes and slings finishing up. I guess the worst part was when they went after the taproot beneath the house with the grinding machine and scoured out the stump like a rotten tooth. The machine sounded like a high-speed drill screeching inside my head like the one the dentists use when he looms above me and I slide beneath the anesthetic shroud. It's gone. It. Whatever it was. Look at what's left, not scars, just a pit. An archaeologist may squat and reach out one day, even pat this depression long after the house and neighborhood have gone back to fields once more or as some have predicted to hillsides beneath the sea. For me, it's another loss, a nothingness where something used to be. For you, it's empty sky that was always here if you had never passed this way before. I'll read one more poem from Mort's last book, The Dark Figure in the Doorway, Last Poems. Ladybug, today as in none came visiting. Actually she had lost her way and wandered into my yard carrying on her back a lacquered orange begging bowl large as a shield. Had she hauled that bowl all the way from Japan on a pilgrimage neither she nor I could understand? I couldn't ask her that. I asked myself, and now you. She and I were in separate worlds surrounded by carapaces of ignorant intentions. I lifted my pin like a hobo's stick and with this bundle of words set out toward you as lost as she was. It's spring again. No, it's that moment when I'm reminded and set out to remind you that we're on a pilgrimage neither our words nor intentions can comprehend. It is now my very great pleasure to introduce tonight's reader Arthur Z. There are many things and many virtues that I look for in poetry but chief among them is clarity. At a moment when literary tastes tend toward obfuscation, obscurantism, and the dismal pleasures of ironic hocus pocus Arthur Z's poems are unambiguously open, clear, and generous. Marked by a range that is almost dizzying his lyricism is matched by a probing, compassionate intellect that brings great depth to poems that simultaneously challenge and soothe. Arthur Z has been honored with a litany of words too daunting to read in its entirety but which include the Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and a grant from the Witterbender Foundation in poetry. Z is the author of several books of poetry including The Ginko Light, Kipu, The Red Shifting Web, Holmes 1970 to 1998, and Archipelago. Some earlier collections include River River, Dazzled, Two Ravens, and The Willow Wind. Arthur Z is also a celebrated translator from the Chinese. His The Silk Dragon translations from the Chinese has been widely praised and his work is one of Western State's Book Award for translation. He was recently named as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. When I try to characterize Arthur Z's poems, words come to mind that might more readily be used to describe a young woman. I think of them as shapely, calmly, beguiling in their beauty and in their mystery. Please join me in welcoming Arthur Z. Thank you. It's such a great pleasure to be here this evening. And I just want to begin by thanking Gary for that wonderful introduction and Joe Stroud and the selection committee for inviting me and Jana Marcus and Donna Meckis for making everything possible. It's just such a great pleasure to be here. As I told one of the reporters who interviewed me before I came, I was, years ago when I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley, I used to just look forward to every issue of Kayak magazine and that was the journal in which I discovered Mort Marcus' work and I had his early book from Kayak as well and so it's really just such a great joy and honor to be here. And I thought of him then as such a force for poetry, just someone who cared so deeply about poetry and literature. So again, it's really a great pleasure to be here. I'm going to read this evening across books including some new poems and I'm also going to read across cultures and time so I'm going to be braiding in translations from ancient Chinese and weave them back and forth. I'd like to start with this first poem. It's called The Shapes of Leaves. Ginko, Cottonwood, Pinoc, Sweet Gum, Tulip Tree. Our emotions resemble leaves and alive to their shapes we are nourished. Have you felt the expanse and contours of grief along the edges of a big Norway maple? Have you winced at the orange flare searing the curves of a curling dogwood? I have seen from the air log islands each with a network of branching gravel roads and felt a moment of pure anger, aspen gold. I have seen sand hill cranes moving in an open field, a single white whooping crane in the flock and I've traveled along the contours of leaves that have no name. Here where the air is wet and the light is cool I feel what others are thinking and do not speak. I know pleasure in the veins of a sugar maple. I am living at the edge of a new leaf. In 1980, New Mexico had the worst prison riot in its history and I was scheduled to start a poetry workshop for incarcerated men that following week but as I listened to the radio the news just got worse and worse and of course most of the institution was totaled and I ended up working with women in prison and then men in prison about a year later and the impulse came out of that poetry workshop with men one morning, you'll see. This is called horse face. A man in prison is called horse face but does nothing when everyone in the tailor shop has sharp, cold scissors. He remembers the insult but laughs it off even as he laughs a cataraugus Indian welding a steel girder, turns at a yell which coincides with a laugh and slips to his death. I open a beer. A car approaches a garage. The door opens. A light comes on. Inside rakes gleam. A child with dysentery washes his hands in cow piss. I find a trail of sawdust walking a dead killer's hardened old shoes and feel how difficult it is to sense the entire danger of a moment. A horse gives birth to a foal. Power goes out in the city. A dancer stops in the dark and listening for the noise that was scored in the performance. Here's only sudden, panicked yells. Here. Here a snail on a wet leaf shivers and dreams of spring. Here a green iris in December. Here the topaz light of the sky. Here one stops hearing a twig break and listens for dear. Here the art of the ventriloquist. Here the obsession of a kleptomaniac to steal red pushpins. Here the art of the alibi. Here one walks into abandoned farmhouse and hears a tarantella. Here one dreamed a bear claw and died. Here a humpback whale leaped out of the ocean. Here the outboard motor stopped but a man mated to this island with one oar. Here the actor forgot his lines and wept. Here the art of prayer. Here marbles, buttons, thimbles, dice, pins, stamps, beads. Here one becomes terrified. Here one wants to see as a god sees and becomes clear amber. Here one is clear pine. One of my obsessions has to do with what I like to call cultural parallax, looking at things from different points of view or different angles and I find it endlessly fascinating how in one culture or something can be done that can honor someone but someone outside of that culture could see it as intensely cruel or vice versa you could be outside that culture and see something as intensely cruel but it could be a form of honoring too. The setting here though it's not mentioned is Tokyo in Japan. It's called In Your Honor. In Your Honor a man presents a sea bass tied to a black lacquered dish by green spun seaweed. Ah is heard throughout the room. You are unsure what is about to happen. You might look through a telescope at the full bright moon against deep black space. Sea from the Bay of Dew to the Sea of Nectar but no, this beauty of naming is a subterfuge. What are the thoughts of hunters driving home on a Sunday afternoon empty handed? Their conception of honor may coincide with your conception of cruelty. The slant of light as sun declines is a knife separating will and act into infinitely thin and lucid slices. You look at the sea bass's eye clear and luminous. The gills appear to move ever so slightly. The sea bass smells of dream but this is no dream. Ah such delicacy is heard throughout the room and the sea bass suddenly flaps. It bleeds and flaps, bleeds and flaps as the host slices, slice after slice of glistening sashimi. I'm going to jump to ancient China. One of my favorite poets is Tao Chen. He's a dropout in the tradition. Woke up one day and quit his job. He bought some land in the mountains. He built his own house. He planted chrysanthemums, drank wine and wrote poetry. It amazes me that these poems are written in 417 Common Era. In my introduction to the silk track and I said translation's an impossible task and yet we need translation more than ever, it seems to me. These two poems that I'm going to read to you just in English are from a series of 17 drinking wine poems. Tao Chen. A green pine is in the east garden but the many grasses obscure it. A frost wipes out all the other species and then I see its magnificent tall branches. In a forest men do not notice it but standing alone it is a miracle. I hang a jug of wine on a cold branch then stand back and look again and again. My life spins with dreams and illusions why then be fastened to the world and one other from that sequence. I built my house near what others live and yet without noise of horse or carriage you ask how can this be? A distant mind leaves the earth around it. I pick chrysanthemums below the eastern fence then gaze at mountains to the south. The mountain air is fine at sunset, flying birds go back in flocks. In this there is a truth I wish to tell you but lose the words. And here's my poem that connects to classical Chinese aesthetics. One day I opened up a calligraphy manual and it was a found poem I looked and I saw this list of all of the mistakes you can do as a calligrapher and I'm a terrible calligrapher and I looked at this list and I said this is a poem right here. It's called Ox Head Dot. Ox Head Dot, Wasp, Waste, Mouse, Tail, Bamboo Section, Water, Caltrop, Broken Branch, Stork Leg, A Pole for Caring Fuel. These are the eight defects when a beginning calligrapher has no bone to a stroke. I have no names for what can go wrong. Peeling carrots, a woman collapses when a tumor in her kidney ruptures. Bronze slivers from a gimbal nut. Jam the horizontal stabilizer to a jet. Make it plunge into the Pacific Ocean. Hyena! A man shouts into the darkness and slams shut the door. Stunned I hear a scratching. Know that I must fumble, blunder, mistake, fail. Yet sometimes in the darkest space is a white fleck. Ox Head Dot. And when I pass through, it's a spur of match into flame. Glowing moths loosed into air. Air rippling, roiling the surface of the world. I talked for 22 years at a college for American Indian students in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It's called the Institute of American Indian Arts. And I wrote this after leaving the institute, looking back at some of the Native students and some of their experiences. And it's called Looking Back on the Muckleshoot Reservation from Gallisteo Street, Santa Fe. The bow of a Muckleshoot canoe blessed with eagle feather and sprig of yellow cedar is launched into a bay. A girl watches her mother fry venison slabs in a skillet. Drops of blood, sizzle, evaporate. Because a neighbor feeds them, they eat wordlessly. The silence breaks when she occasionally gags, reaches into her throat, pulls out hair. Gone is the father riled, arguing with his boss who drove to the shooting range after work. Gone, the accountant who embezzled funds displayed a pickup and proclaimed the winning flush at the casino. You donate chicken soup and clothes, but never learn if they arrive at the south end of the city. Your small acts are sand piper tracks in wet sand. Newspapers, plastic containers, beer bottles fill the bins along this sloping one-way street. I do a lot of divination practice with the each-ing, and I experimented with writing or trying to find a structure for a longer poem, and I wanted a kind of poem that unfolded with a continual motion. I was thinking of almost like gamelan music, the way that those blocks of sound, you can sort of hear them transitioning and changing, and they have a kind of continuous motion, but they also kind of suspend time. So some of those ideas and thoughts were in the background, and this poem is called Chrysalis. Corpses push up through thawing permafrost as I scrape salmon skin off a pan at the sink. On the porch, motes in slanting yellow light undulate in air. Is Venus at dusk as luminous as Venus at dawn? Yesterday, I was about to seal a borax capsule angled up from the bottom of a decaying exterior jam when I glimpsed jagged ice floating in a bay. Navel sonar slices through whales even as a portion of male dorsal fin is served to the captain of an umiak. Stopped in traffic, he swings from a chairlift, gazes down at scarlet paintbrush. Moistening an envelope before sealing it, I recall the slight noise you made when I grazed your shoulder. When a frost wiped out the chalk blue flowering plant by the door, I watered until it revived from the roots. The song of a knife sharpener in an alley passes through the mind of a microbiologist before he undergoes anesthesia for surgery. The first night of autumn has singed bell peppers by the fence while budding chimesa stalks in the courtyard bend to ground. Observing people conversing at a nearby table, he visualizes the momentary convergence and divergence of lines passing through a point. The wisteria along the porch never blooms. A praying mantis on the wood floor sips water from a dog bowl. Laughter from upstairs echoes downstairs as teenage girls compare bra sizes. An ex-army officer turned critic frets over the composition of a search committee, snickers and disparages rival candidates. A welder who turns away for a few seconds to gaze at the sangria de cristos detects a line of trucks backed up on an international overpass where exhaust spews onto houses below. The day may be called one tooth road or sixth thunder pain, but the naming of a day will not transform it nor will the mathematics of time halt. An imprint of ginkgo leaf, fan-shaped, slightly thickened, slightly wavy on broad edge, two lobed with forking parallel veins but no mid-vane. In a slab of coal is momentary beauty. While ginkgos along a street dropping gold leaves are mindless beauty of the quotidian, one's thought extinct, the ginkgo is discovered in Himalayan monasteries and propagated back into the world. Although I cannot save a grasshopper singed by frost, trying to warm itself on a sunlit walkway, I ponder shadows of budding pink and orange bougainvillas on a wall. As masons level sand, lay bricks in horizontal and vertical pairs, we construct the ground to render a space or own. As light from a partial lunar eclipse diffuses down skylight walls, we rock and sluice, rock and sluice. Fingertips fan, the fan fingertips debush into plentitude. Venus vanishes in a brightening sky. The diamond ring of a solar eclipse persists. You did not have to fly to Zimbabwe in June 2001 to experience it. The day recalls 13 death and one deer when an end slips into a beginning. I recall mating butterflies with red dots on wings, the bow of a long liner thudding on waves, crescendo of water beginning to boil in a kettle, echoes of humpback whales. In silence, dancers concentrate on movements on stage, lilacs bud by a gate. As bits of consciousness constolate, I rouse to a 3 a.m. December rain on the skylight. A woman sweeps glass shards in a driveway, oblivious to elm branches reflected on windshields of passing cars. Juniper crackles in the fireplace, flukes break the water as a whale dives. The path of totality is not marked by a shadow hurtling across the earth's surface at 3,000 kilometers per hour or eyelashes attuned to each other. At the mouth of an arroyo, a lamb skull and ribcage bleach in the sand. Tufts of fleece caught on barbed wire vanish. The shun carved characters in the skulls of their enemies, but what transpired here? You do not need to steep turtle shells in blood to prognosticate clouds. Someone dumps a refrigerator upstream in the riverbed while you admire the yellow blossoms of a golden rain tree. A woman weeds, sniffs fragrance from a line of onions in her garden. You scramble an egg, sip oolong tea. The continuous bifurcates into the segmented as the broken extends. Someone steals a newspaper while we doze. A tiger swallowtail lands on a patio columbine. A single agaric breaks soil by a hollyhock. Pushing aside branches of Russian olives to approach the Pauaki River, we spot a splatter of flicker feathers in the dirt. Hear chants and fate in mesh. Here I hold a black bowl rinsed with tea, savor the warmth at my fingertips. Aroma of emptiness. We rock back and forth, back and forth on water. Finns of spinner dolphins break the waves. A whale spouts to the north-northwest. What is not impelled? Yellow hibiscus, zodiac, hairbrush. Barbed wire, smog, snowflake. When I still my eyes, the moments dilate. Rain darkens gravel in the courtyard. Shriveled apples on branches are weightless against dawn. I'm moving back to Tang Dynasty, China and in 753 Common Era there was a period of civil war and Dufu was separated. The great Tang poet Dufu was separated from his family and was eventually reunited with them and he wrote this poem when he comes back and I need to say just that the word Li is a Chinese mile. It's about a third of a Western mile and the poem's called Return to Zhang Village. Shaggy red clouds in the west. The sun's foot is down to level earth. By the wicker gate, sparrows are chirping. The traveler returns from over a thousand li. Wife and children panic at my presence. Quieted, they still wipe tears. In this age of turmoil I floated and meandered a miracle of chance to return alive. Neighbors crowd the fence tops and also sigh and sob. In the deep night we are again holding candles facing each other as in a dream. And this is another quatrain written at this period of civil war and the kind of compression that Wang Wei can do is just startling. And here in contrast to Dufu instead of asking about how the friends of his village are you'll see what he does and he even chooses deliberately to call the poem untitled. Sir, you come from my native home and should know the affairs there. The day you left beside the silk-pained window did the cold plum sprout flowers or not? I want to read from a new manuscript, Compass Rose and this next poem is inspired by travel in India and it's called Sarangi Music and the Sarangi is an East Indian instrument and it's been said that the way the strings are strung and the kinds of melodies that you create with it most resemble the human voice. And what I did was traveling in India I just each day wrote down an image that came to me and then eventually the poem became this collage or this music, Sarangi Music. Black kites without stretched wings circle overhead sticking out of yellow tongue flames on a left foot. Near a stop bus one kid performs acrobatics while another drums. Begging near a car window a girl with a missing arm. Mine a bird sipping water out of a bronze bowl sprinkled with jasmine petals. Twitching before he plays a Sarangi near the temple entrance a blind man. In relief a naked woman arches and pulls a thorn out of her raised heel. Men carry white-wrapped corpses on bamboo stretchers down the steps. She undresses a scorpion on her right thigh. A boy displays a monkey on a leash then smacks it with a stick. She rings her hair after stepping out of a bath. A portion of a leograph visible amid rubble. A woman avert her gaze from the procession of war elephants. Two boys at a car window receive red apples sipping masala tea in an inner courtyard with blue-washed walls. An aura reader jots down the colors of his seven chakras. A bus hits a motorcycle from behind and runs over the driver and his passenger discussing the price of a miniature elephant on wheels. Green papayas on a tree by a gate. Lit candles bobbing downstream into the sinuous darkness. A naked woman applies coal to her right eyelid. The limp tassels of new Ashoka leaves in a tomb courtyard. A cobra rises out of a straw basket before a man plays a bulbous instrument. Corpses consumed by flames and in all stages of burning. The elongated tip of a bodhi leaf arranged in a star pattern on a white plate five dates. On a balcony in the darkness, smokers staring at a neem tree. His head golden and his sex red. A naked woman gazing at herself in a small circular mirror. At sunrise a girl rummages through ashes with tongs. Along the river men and women scrub clothes on stones. I think the three last poems, this one is called at the equinox. The tide ebbs and reveals orange and purple sea stars. I have no special theory of radiance, but after rain evaporates off pine needles, the needles glisten. In the courtyard we spot the rising shell of a moon and at the equinox bathed in its gleam. Using all the tides of starlight we find vicissitude is our charm. On the mud flats off Homer I catch the tremor when waves start to slide back in. And from Roanoke you carry the leafing jade smoke of willows. Looping out into the world we thread and return. The lapping waves cover an expanse of muscles clustered on rocks and giving shape to what is unspoken for scythe of buds and blooms in our arms. I was talking earlier this afternoon with Joe Stroud about mushroom hunting and this one is called Mushroom Hunting in the Hamas Mountains, something I love to do each summer in New Mexico. Walking in a mountain meadow toward the north slope, I see red-cap amanitas with white warts and know they signal seps. I see a few colonies of puffballs, red ruchelas with chalk-white stripes, brown gild, poison pie. In the shade under spruce are two red-poured boletes, sliced them in half and the flesh turns blue in seconds. Under fur is a single amanita with basil cup, flaring annulus, white cap. Is it the Rocky Mountain form of amanita pantherina? I'm aware of danger in naming, in misidentification, in imposing the distinctions of a taxonomic language onto the things themselves. I know I have only a few hours to hunt mushrooms before early afternoon rain. I know it is a mistake to think I am moving and that a garrix are still. They are more transient than we acknowledge, more susceptible to full moon, to a single rain, to night air, to a moment of sunshine. I know in this meadow my passions are my carousel with nature. I may shout out ecstasies, aches, griefs, and hear them vanish in the white, poured silence. And I'd like to close with this poem that I wrote after the poetry festival in China. It's called Pig's Heaven Inn. And I need to say there's one Chinese word, a shun, which is an ancient ceramic instrument. It's just a small vessel with holes in it, and you put your lips to it and then you open and close the holes. And that's the shun, and they're in different sizes. Pig's Heaven Inn. Red chilies and a tilted basket catch sunlight. We walk past a pile of burning mulberry leaves into Shidi village. Enter a courtyard, notice an inkstone engraved with calligraphy, filled with water and cassia petals. Smelming dynasty redwood panels. As the musician lifts a small shun to his mouth and blows, I see kiwis hanging from branches above a moon doorway. A grandmother, once the youngest concubine, propped in a chair with bandages around her knees, complains of incessant pain. Someone spits in the street. As a second musician plucks strings on a zither, pomelos blacken on branches. A woman peels chestnuts. Two men in a flat-bottomed boat gather duckweed out of a river. The notes splash silvery onto cobblestone, and my fingers suddenly ache. During the cultural revolution, my aunt's husband leapt out of a third-story window. At dawn, I mistook the cries of birds for rain. When the musicians pause, yellow mountain pines sway near bright summit peak. A pig scuffles behind an enclosure. Someone blows his nose. Traces of the past are wisps of mulberry smoke rising above roof tiles. And before we, too, vanish, we hike to where three trails converge. Hundreds of people are stopped ahead of us. Hundreds come up behind. We form a rivulet of people funneling down through a chasm in the granite. Thank you. And I look forward to seeing you next year. Good night.