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POETRY READINGS / BOOKSIGNINGS
Little Patuxent Review Reading, Columbia, Maryland, June 20, 2010.
Pasadena Public Library (Santa Catalina Branch), May 15, 2010. Vroman's Bookstore (National Poetry Month Celebration), Pasadena,
California, April 10, 2010. AWP Conference Bookfair (Bear Star Press Table), Booksigning, Denver,
Colorado, April 9, 2010. American Society for Aesthetics, Rocky Mountain Division, Santa Fe,
July 2009. The Visiting Writers Program, SUNY-Farmingdale, February 2007. The Stephen Dunn Award Reading, Portland, Maine, April 2005. American Culture Association, San Diego, March 2005. Robert Frost Festival, Lawrence, Massachusetts, October 2004. American Culture Association, San Antonio, Texas, April 2004. Southwest Writers Series, Prescott, Arizona, February 2004. American Society for Aesthetics, Rocky Mountain Division, Sante Fe, July 2003. Poet’s Corner, Cable Access Channel, Prescott, Arizona, January 2003. Literature Fair Day, Yavapai College, Prescott, Arizona, December 2002. Professional Writers of Prescott, Arizona, August 2002. American Society for Aesthetics, Rocky Mountain Division, Sante Fe, July 2002. Poetry Live! Yavapai College Verde Valley Reading, April 2002. Yavapai County English Teachers Conference Keynote Panel, April 2002. KUSK Interview, The Tonya Mock Show, January 2002. Sharlot Hall Museum, Prescott, Arizona, December 2001.
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SELECTIONS
The Dog from Pompei —sculptural installation by Allan McCollum, 1991 Fate replicates. The chained dog of ancient Pompeii, caught on his back, writhing in his collar against the tile floor swept with ash, is now many dogs, all their fours in the air. It’s as if the one dog, the main attraction, turns in the dessert case of meringue pie, rotates his hindquarters, his open mouth, spinning all sides of himself past that August afternoon. He is back in motion, freeze-framed on long tables, back to the contortionist he became when the volcano blew, when the people of his house ran past him into the street, holding hands. He hated that collar, its thick leather rib such a nuisance when the need to run reawakens. Now body after body drains of color, ghost-meats that ask you what to do about such a thing as this—the domestic cast as the heavy, the sort of weight you might carry around in a bad year, like footed moons. When ash smothered the body / bodies, legs twisted upright in nursery beds, row after row of double helix.
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In Defense of Objects (I) An object…is what makes infinity private. —Joseph Brodsky, Watermark Unlikely winters: San Francisco and its trolley car stuck in snow, Bangkok blizzard white. Flakes shake to life, bright and insular. Cities fade in the blur of a handmade storm. Despite the dizzying effects, the eye rests there, at home in beauty’s small arcade. No sirens sound, no policemen sew their yellow threads to these streets. The past collects on souvenirs, turning kitsch to treasure. When the Wedgwood knife falls to the floor, shards of blue shed like tears. Yet the eye is safe here, even in pieces. The pink Christmas ball shatters to an inner life of mirrors. It’s what confounds the mendicant: the object’s pull, the need for pockets to keep stuff in. What amounts to wonder lurks in things, whole or broken, near, as distant as the gray gargoyle where the eye’s balloon comes to rest. Rusted keys, horseshoe, rust itself, color of burnt sienna. The word itself: burnt sienna. Petals pool beneath a tree. In morning light, the snow globe glows like a translucent papoose.
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Later, larkspur i. In the sweet midwinter of these slopes, when seeds still clasp blue buds like lockets, my father leans on ski poles without skiis or snow underfoot. His legs resemble numchucks unlaced, two stout scraps of wood, their threat dispersed. Stabbing the earth, he pulls first one leg, then the other, in line with some interior fold, the body’s diameter, a paper doll’s measure of even distance from point to point. Gone is his best guess of who he was, top to bottom. Later, larkspur, nettle, paintbrush, wool stars will poke the warming air. Fleabane bloom like mops. Each day will coax a new color from the empty earthwells he drags over now. Whatever fear he sees in stone and runnel surrenders to a lie: the lie he traffics in to please his daughter, the lie of him I harbor, a girl storing flowers in the pleats of her dress. When she runs to his outstretched arms, he gathers her up like stems. ii. In a good year of flowers, history stubbles the sides of rock: miner’s lettuce, bedstraw, soapberry garnish the native poultice, the hands of pioneers, who come from Wheeling and Omaha to stuff their mattresses with weeds. Settlers name the wild plants for what they do, like engineers name gears or witches, brews. Like all words, the names ferment: traveler’s joy, candlewick, wait-a-minute bush. We lose their sense. What’s left ripples across the stream of reason. Washed by time, my father travels the route I ask, gamely picking his way toward where wildflowers will be. Prophecy divides him out of the world, like conceived cells. Even in a good year, horehound no longer comes to candy, nor flax to cloth.
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