The next one is the last travel poem I'll read.
It's called the "Tattooed Desert,"
and it is the title poem in my book, The Tattooed Desert.
So you can judge by that, that I like it.
This is another poem that people have accused me
of messing around with when I wrote it.
And there again I didn't.
In biblical times, you had to be accused of adultery
in order to get stoned.
And we have made enormous social progress since and now
you don't fool with the adultery anymore.
However, that is not the case.
I deny it again in this case.
This is just a surrealistic poem,
and perhaps the element of surrealism
might be a little confusing.
This could be interpreted in many ways.
It has been interpreted as a flight from organized
religion, which I think is fine if you see it that way.
I see it more nearly as a struggle
in the creative process.
This was written at a time when I was kind of at a crossroads
and had two roads to follow.
I could choose between the two, and neither one was very easy.
So I chose one, and I've been happy with it.
I've never regretted it.
But I think it reflects that struggle more than anything.
The "Tattooed Desert."
At whatever page the book fell open,
I read it and knelt beside every bed.
They could have baptized me in any tub
and fitted me with second hand wings at the auction,
I wouldn't have minded.
But the gods turned out to be grotesques.
They paraded before me as if for inspection
with dirty gauze over their eyes.
When the road forked, they took both ways.
They disguised themselves as places I couldn't find.
Their feathers turned into ferns.
And when I reached out to them, they
were distant landscapes moving through my fingers
and leaving a strange smell on my hands.
While the old hat under the tower
was telling the same story and a toothless mouth
was getting ready to grin, the one with a face like a pig
began to eat his own fingers and I ran away.
They initialed the space I left, but they found me
again upstairs in the back bedroom of another house
with whiskey hitting my tongue like a hammer,
and again, I climbed out the window
and slid down the tree and the Gothic reign.
I must have been almost crazy to start out alone like that.
On my bicycle pedaling into the tropics,
carrying a medicine for which no one had found the disease
and hoping I would make it in time.
[LAUGHTER]
I passed through a paper village under glass
where the explorers first found silence and taught it to speak,
where old men were sitting in front of their houses
killing sand without mercy.
Brothers, I shouted to them, tell me who moved the river,
where can I find a good place to drown?
Slowly, they raised their heads.
This is the tattooed desert, they
told me, all that will survive of it
will be what you remember.
Then they went into their flaming houses
and closed the doors.
And I rode on through the disappointed night
with my pulse beating like a ticket about
to be torn while the mountains tried every possible position
and finally slept with their backs to one another.
When I found the river, it was what I expected,
just an old wall lying down covered with pictures.
Dead mystics were buried on its banks, each with his telephone
beside him.
I recognized the place.
I knew all the secret passages it must
have been where I was born.
The gentle eyes of the river looked up at me
without reproach and those floating past spoke,
this is cremation by water, they said.
We who are burned here rise up without ashes.
We are repeated in the sound of wax bells
ringing and the testimony of mouthless trees.
While they spoke, the sky arrived,
and I saw the perfect complexion of light.
The wind was blowing the mountains away
at an incredible speed.
And suddenly, it was the morning after nothing.
My faithful servant, Payne, who had followed me
all this way approached holding out a gift and I took it--
a sleeping bat gorged with blood.
All day I will carry it with me as a reminder to those
who would take me back.
See, I will say holding it up to them,
we have survived another night.
[APPLAUSE]
I think you think every time I take a drink of water,
you have to applaud, is that it?
I think there's some relationship here to me.