There's a little--
This is for anybody here who comes from Pennsylvania.
In Pennsylvania in the central Eastern
part in the German areas there are towns with strange names,
and you may have heard about them, Bird In Hand,
Blue Ball, Intercourse, Paradise.
You know these, this tradition?
These are the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Amish.
And I was on Route 30 near Lancaster, PA,
and there's a place called the Dutch castle.
It was made of real stone.
Cost a fortune.
But it looked like it was made of cardboard.
And we would come to that kind of [INAUDIBLE]..
There was a book by [INAUDIBLE] called Out
Of [INAUDIBLE] where real flowers were
made to look like synthetic flowers and so on and so on.
So this poem is about that.
And it's about-- what is it called?
Transmigration of souls?
That's what the poem is about, I think.
But it's called No Wind, which is a literal translation
of nirvana.
No wind, no movement.
Of course, God probably thinks wind [INAUDIBLE]
person's of something.
Troubling the hairs of your back.
Today I'm sitting outside the Dutch castle on Route 30
near Bird In Hand and Blue Ball watching the Amish snap
their suspenders at the sunglasses.
I'm dreaming of my black suit again
and the store in Paradise, where I will be fitted out for life.
A small girl and I recognize each other from her former life
together in Cordoba.
We weep over the plastic tote bags, the apple combs,
and the laughing harmonicas.
We fall down on the hot carpet remembering
the marble forest of the Great Mosque
and the milky walls of the Jewish quarter.
I will see her again in 800 years
but all this is sorted out.
I give it that much time based on the slack mind
of dirty drinking water of the slow decay.
I give it at least that much time
before we lie down again in the tiny lilacs and paper love
houses of the next age.