I just got back from doing my first readings in Taos, New Mexico. Read at the SOMOS in town, and at my cousin Seamus's art studio, where we did a joint Painting/Poetry event on Saturday to celebrate What Just Happened and Seamus being back in Taos to stay. Taos is a rich community of artists, writers, and musicians. Everyone I met was welcoming and inclusive. "Come and live here!" they exclaimed when I told them how much I loved the place, its pace, adobe tones, and spectacular surrounding landscape of mountain, sage desert, and the Rio Grande gorge.
Every book has a poem I like to read last at a reading. A 'chewy' one with an air of finality. In this book, it's Coyotes.
Coyotes
“Gravity
cannot account for falling in love.”
-
Albert Einstein
2a.m. and the coyotes start
with their howls of victory and despair.
I’m seeing it everywhere: the keys in their jar,
the bird that flew up unhurt this morning
from beneath the car, an insect’s gauzy wings
against the lamp – we live as though these things
and how the day went
constitute the only way things are.
When I make these journeys
back to the country of my birth
it feels like flying into the old
territory of my roadless self, my history;
days before I board the plane
I start to shed the layers of it all
like parchment wrappings, then I step
into empty time in the departures hall.
They board the infants, then first class,
then the rest of us. Rush of takeoff,
the brilliant sky and the clouds;
because of the uncertainty principle
space is never empty; because of supergravity
and supersymmetry we have unified theories
of everything, including the seven unplanned
curled up other dimensions I can’t fully understand.
But I have formed my own slender theory
of quantum uncertainty, cradled up here
in the stratosphere by the laws of nature
and the four forces: if all of existence
is just patterns of vibrations without width or height,
end or start, then what connects us
must be the wildness that runs riot
in the clamorous chambers of the heart.
In the big past, it’s understood
that stars burned through their hydrogen till they
collapsed,
beryllium fused with helium before it could decay
to form a stable carbon isotope
which is how I’m sitting here today,
unruly conduit from heart to page
for all the sudden joy, the human hurt
and sorrow, laughter, love, and rage
that makes us undertake
these solo expeditions into the territory.
There isn’t any map.
You have to be the architect of your life,
the poet of it, hunger for what the future holds,
face the inevitable, the unknown, and like the coyotes,
pound down the double doors of the night and come out
fires blazing, eyes wide open, heart alight.
