News for the next newsletter--
so that we can compile a newsletter before the semester
ends.
The spring contest has been moved up this year.
And the deadline for entries will be December 7th,
the last day of classes.
And I have a few thousand contest entry blanks
with me tonight, and I'll put them out
on the reception table.
Reception table's right out in the hall,
and I hope you can all stay and have some punch and cookies,
meet Myra Sklarew.
Our next reading will be one week from tonight
in this auditorium.
And the reader will be Carolyn Forché.
We have three more readings for the semester.
Carolyn Forché next week, student reading the following
week, and John Logan will be reading for us on November 6th.
Mr Logan's reading was not announced
in the semester brochure.
We'll be sending out a special notice on--
Myra Sklarew comes to us from the American University
in Washington, DC.
Her books of poetry are, In the Basket of the Blind,
From the Backyard of the Diaspora.
Blessed Art Thou, No One, and most recently,
from the University of Georgia Press, The Science of Goodbyes.
It's a great pleasure to introduce her
to you, Myra Sklarew.
It's very nice to be in Arizona.
And it's very nice to be in the backyard of Lois and Richard
Shelton.
I hope Richard will forgive me if I start with a poem of his
that I have loved for a long time.
I can't see too well at a distance,
so I can't tell if he's grimacing or nodding
approvingly.
It's particularly wonderful when you love someone's poetry
before you meet them.
You have no obligation therefore to like them or their poetry.
And when you discover that you find a poem in a magazine
that you really love.
And then long afterwards, you meet the person who wrote it.
And you find that you like that person.
And then you meet his wife and you
find that you, which happened today,
that you feel as though you've known her most of your life.
That's a very special thing.
And I also want to say, having been
taken for granted by my students for 100 years.
That you have a real treasure here
in Richard and Lois Shelton, and so I'll
start with Richard's poem.
"The Princes of Exile" I won't read it
the way he would read it.
I hope I'll be forgiven for that.
"The princes of exile stand near the gates
of the desert and watch for travelers who pass by.
When they see a familiar face they turn aside
and remain at a distance.
Instead of the music of home, they
hear a foreign wind singing to trees, which bear no leaves.
The princes of exile move through languages
and are refracted dragging their crippled shadows
beneath an alien sun.
They wear masks of greeting.
When they close their eyes, no one can see them.
The princes of exile pray for sleep and that each day
will be shorter than the last.
They go with the passionate daughters of strangers
and are unsatisfied.
They lie awake trying to name stars they do not recognize.
When a traveler crosses the border
between foreign countries, he shifts a burden
from one hand to the other.
When he crosses the border into his own land,
he removes a pebble from his shoe.
The princes of sacrifice return as rain in a drought year.
The princes of war return as sores
on the faces of politicians.
The princes of betrayal return impaled
on the swords of their friends.
But the princes of exile never return."
It's a beautiful poem.
[APPLAUSE]
I feel tonight a little bit, and I
don't intend any comparison, like Dylan Thomas when he
came to read at Hopkins once.
He refused to read any of his own poems
and he only would read Yates, and I
want to read one or two more things by other people.
I don't intend to be like Dylan Thomas, no one could be.
This is by a Polish poet named Tadeusz Różewicz or something
like that.
And it's called "Transformations" can you hear?
Yeah.
"My little son enters the room and says, you are a vulture.
I am a mouse.
I put away my book.
Wings and claws grow out of me.
Their ominous shadows race on the walls.
I am a vulture.
He is a mouse.
You are a wolf.
I am a goat.
I walked around the table and am a wolf.
Window panes gleam like fangs in the dark,
while he runs to his mother safe his head hidden
in the warmth of her dress."
And a small couple of poems by one of my favorite Greek poets,
who you also won't have heard of,
named Takis Sinopoulos He was a physician, a pathologist, who
died about a year ago.
I always meant to go and see him, and I waited too long.
I always lost courage when I got anywhere near his house,
and I found out when I was last in Greece that it was too late,
which is probably just as well.
"There was a poem, and it was full of holes.
So you could see the poet eating, falling in love,
taking off his shoes, and going to sleep."
"Speaking so often about hunger we forgot to protect our bread.
Now, in the cupboard the mice are reveling
in their astonishing freedom."
"Poet, my friend, you speak a language
that fills the room with so I am opening the window
to let in water and fish.
When I was in Greece, a couple of years ago.
In a small village, the children in that village
figured out that they could teach me
the wrong words, the wrong Greek words for things.
And that got to be a kind of game that was fun in a way.
I went back a few years after that,
and they by then had grown up some
and weren't quite as silly with me as we had been before.
But they remembered the game and they improved on it
the second time.
This is a poem written after the first time.
It's called "Exchange for a [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE]""
"In the morning, the children teased me giving me
the word melon for shoe.
Corpuzi they laugh pointing to my foot.
I imagine a great ripe cantaloupe.
In the evening, they take both my hands
and pull me into the sky.
Tell us, they whisper in Greek, what you call that they say.
Pointing to a firmament so alive with stars you cannot see
the dark places.
And tell us, they say, pointing to the slice of moon golden
as the cheese ripening on the stone porches
under silken mulberry trees.
What it is named.
And I think to tell them straight away,
opening my language to them like a gift brightly wrapped
though it is fair to say here.
I was tempted to teach them eyebrow in place of star,
button for moon, scribble for sky.
But I was leaving and I wouldn't see them again,
so I unwrapped the words and took them
and opened their hands and placed the words inside.
So they could feel them the way children [AUDIO OUT]
feel the quivering body of a lightning bug
after it is caught.
Going off and on that way in the warm small cave of the poem."
And another poem that's set in that landscape
called Somnambulist.
And it's in three parts.
I talk at first to an old man who's called Uncle George.
In Greek, that's Barba Geórgios.
"This morning while I slept, Barba Geórgios,
you left one brown egg and a saucepan of goat's milk
on the kitchen table.
Between the hen and her egg on my table
there is only the small distance between your house and mine.
But what shall I bring for you, Barba Geórgios?
The almonds on my tree are also on yours.
Mulberries are on both our trees.
In the evening, you tell Nikos that the great sea
of your passion has turned to yogurt.
And all the small spoons have departed.
Two.
When you are alone in the mountain,
you may wear time on your finger as you would a ring
or you may call it, and it will walk along your arm
like a pet bird.
Or you may strike time as you would the tongue of a bell
against its hollow, and there will be more of it.
In the morning, when you see small gatherings of dust,
it will only be time that the hands of the clocks
have pushed to the surface during the night.
In this way have the seconds passed through our dreams.
The first blue light of morning descends to Earth
in great crystalline chunks also carved by tools held in hands.
5 o'clock measured in the language of bells, even
the rain is molded by that spirit
which filled with the dark.
Large tears of the Pieta falling to the red tiles.
Three.
Perhaps I am only dreaming this town at the edge of a crater.
Splinters of my love broken into the hearts of many others.
Silence divided by the bells marking the places of goats
here and there in the mountain.
The sense that you are there hovering in the doorway
or there in the field below.
Or that it was you in the dark this morning.
The sound of the hoofs of your mare
on the stone of the mountain.
What shall I look for among the groves and dim
fences in the door yards and spring places.
When you left, afterward I went on alone deeper
into my life full of the years, which had accumulated in me.
When you left, I went on along these nets of silence.
Like one who starts out at the beginning when the way is
narrow and the road opening."
[APPLAUSE]
When Ann Beattie, the prose writer,
came to read at our school.
She came and read in a church across the street.
And she began by saying, lock the doors.
I have a lot to tell you.
The terrible position of being the audience.
Yes.
A student of mine was talking to me one day
on the phone about how hard it was
to live because everything you do
is governed by so many things that others have done.
In other words, in your relationships
there are always the echoes of all the other relationships
and of all of your early relationships.
And I said, yes it's like the groaning table,
except it's the groaning bed to bed
and all your relatives are there with you.
And she said, that sounds like a poem.
And I said, well you write it.
And then we both wrote it.
So I don't know quite what to do with it
except that it always makes me think of her.
It owes its end to Rilke, so it owes itself
to two people not just one.
"The Groaning Bed."
"When I lay me down to love, what small band of mothers
comes crowding here What realm of fathers?
This bed is filled with them.
Each time I turn reptile bird and fish they turn with me.
This full table bears on steadily its rich meal.
My love such is the nature of this lying down together
upon the groaning bed.
Those who have been sleeping for centuries
raise their drowsy heads and climb dreamily
into bed with us.
All our fathers resting like mountain [AUDIO OUT]
within our depths.
And the ancient riverbeds who were
our mothers all this soundless landscape rises with us
each time we go to love."
That's Rilke the best of that's Rilke.
Map.
"I made a map from the parts of your life,
and I carry it around like an idiot child.
It clings to my side pointing dumbly at the world.
Poor scholar it has forgotten so much.
Who goes before Abraham and which brother killed which.
Who dressed in the skin of a goat.
I tell my map to make a line through all points above sea
level.
I tell it blue for oceans green for lowlands.
But it only shows which territories were lost
and which sons.
My map doesn't know how many years
between this night and the one where we said goodbye.
There are so many things I wanted to ask you.
So many things I have tried to tell you."
I was in the Middle East this summer.
And we were one day walking between fields of landmines.
And this poem is from that experience.
"At the Syrian border, walking between two Syrian minefields,
I pretend I am a tourist here.
What trees, I say, what mountains.
I mouthed slogans bitter as the salt sea.
The wind feeds on the basalt rock.
Under every eucalyptus there is the yawning shadow
of a bunker."
I'm sorry, I'm reading the wrong version.
"Under every eucalyptus there is the yawning shadow of a bunker.
My people is an armed camp.
I remember a boy who made a bridge of his body
for the others to climb across.
They turned him into air and fire and earth.
And here is the place where a father
let his child down a knotted sheet like Jacob,
only not going up.
One child by one child down the ladder of knots,
and when he himself climbed down for the last time
he found each one murdered.
Oh, Jacob, let us put away our strange gods.
My people is an armed camp.
Her sons wear old face."
[APPLAUSE]
This is one something like that one.
It was one of those conversations
you have after the fact.
You know we always think of the best things
to say two years after the conversation.
And I was having an argument with a good friend who's
a Greek about the Israeli invasion into Lebanon.
"Letter for Nikos Lebanon, June, 1982."
"Be reasonable, Nikos.
Let us talk of particulars.
The skull of a girl smashed against stone.
Or a man dismembered between [AUDIO OUT]..
We have found a new use for our machines.
My friend has gone to five wars.
Now he contributes his two sons.
And hoping to escape like the rest of us,
he puts on his uniform again.
I've got my old job back, he writes.
Who will win, Nikos?
Not you, shouting at me from your sad vision of the past.
And not my neighbor from Tripoli.
Palestinian and Jew, we stand in the airport at Athens.
I've just offered him my seat.
There is good feeling between us though he goes back to Libya
to check on his stock of sub machine guns
and I go back to America, where it is easier to be innocent.
Who will win, Nikos?
Not I.
And if the drums are silent after all,
surely we will have to invent this whole scenario
from scratch, eh, Nikos?
The mountains will once again be melted with blood Owl
and Raven the inheritors of this place.
Here in America, I opened three tubes of paint and set
the primary colors down on canvas,
as though I could create the world from the beginning.
With all that we know, we are required to begin again.
Like the poor man who dreamed of a fine new suit.
Yet when he took the suit home, it didn't fit.
But first, the tailor admonished him.
You must take off your old clothes."
[APPLAUSE]
It gets complicated in our age to write poems, personal poems.
For a long time, Americans I think
did write very personal poems.
I think maybe because of a sense of being thrown back
into themselves.
But it gets harder and harder to stay in that because of the way
the world impinges on everyone.
But this is a personal one.
At school we're required, like everyone I guess,
to document our lives so that we can keep our jobs.
And I think everyone is required to document his life one
way or the other.
And one day, I turned in my document,
and someone typing it again, changed
a few things by mistake.
And it occurred to me that my life was exchangeable
or interchangeable with that of anyone else's.
You could take all the facts and sort of throw them into a pot
and pull out a couple of people.
"Hieroglyphic."
"Once, a girl innocently typing, put the wrong word on the page.
And in a flash changed my career from physiology to psychology.
I thought, what if the same girl types the place Earth
after I die.
Baltic for Baltimore?
Or writes Black forests for White Mountain
as my family name.
Or instead of repose, puts down poseur.
I thought, what if the cause of death
were a broken heart instead of a broken down heart?
My last street on earth Wormwood instead of Merry Wood.
Who would argue my case for me?
Surely, some good professor would come and read down
the tome of my life from top to bottom
like Hatshepsut's hieroglyphs, making up
a wonderful story from wavy lines and birds
and small unexpected footprints erased by the sea."
I brought a story along.
Anybody prefer a story instead of more poems?
No.
Let's see how we are.
I call this "Niels Bohr and the Elephant."
You know who Niels Bohr was?
Who was he?
Bill Stafford tells a story about Niels Bohr
that he could never finish a sentence or a paragraph.
He'd get done and when he was in school
he'd get done a certain essay.
And he didn't seem to know that you brought it to a close.
He'd always sort of start up again
at the end of the paragraph.
And the teacher always chided him
for not being able to write the way we're
supposed to write in school.
And there's a little booklet that Bill published
which tells this story.
And it's called, I think something like this,
"I Would Like to Mention Aluminum."
Yeah.
My story is sort of uses Niels Bohr's--
one year I spent reading quantum mechanics and things
about Niels Bohr.
I don't know exactly why.
And it's the way poets and writers graze in books.
You sort of don't learn anything you just kind of graze around.
And it has no well enough--
but I tried to match up the formulae with life experiences
which I thought the formula represented.
So there is a relationship between the formulae
and the story.
You may not notice it but--
"Niels Bohr and the Elephant."
"It wasn't until I looked up, really looked up,
that I saw the snow coming down over what had fallen
three days before.
And in the far corner of the garden,
something like a dark wing fluttered periodically.
A bird caught in a drift or Niels Bohr's small leather
notebook in which he was always noting down significance
as he roamed out of doors.
For instance, in the second downward plunge
of minuteness from a scale of 10 to the minus 8 to one of 10
to the minus 13 centimeters, a contrast does not exist.
In any case, if it was a bird, it couldn't survive for long.
I watch carefully but did not make a move to help.
Just as the night before standing by the door of a bar,
I did not move while Albert E went up
behind Petronius's chair, whispered something in his ear,
and then flattened him.
Petronius they called him Rocky."
I wrote this before the Rocky one, two, three,
four, and five movies.
"Petronius, they called him Rocky, had his hand on me
for no reason I could figure.
Something resolute and dangerous in his face.
He wasn't going to let go.
Funny thing the way the other six of them, his buddies,
never tried to warn him or slow him down.
He put his empty plate on top of mind.
He butt into our conversation.
Why were we so serious he wanted to know.
Didn't we have any fun he kept on, wedging himself back
in every few minutes.
Or holding up a candle inviting me
to observe the landslide taking place
inside the green-dotted glass.
I never could resist looking at something I hadn't seen before.
As I stared at the white, molten wax.
I felt his hand on my waist again.
Felt his finger slide down along my hip and stay put.
I had to remind myself that I'd never laid eyes on him before.
That what he was doing was provocative.
Listen, Rocky, Albert E's voice came from far away.
I listened for the way he addressed Rocky.
The sound of that voice a challenge to Rocky's manhood.
The rule of this game.
The other one would be obliged to pick it up
to return the challenge.
Return the challenge, said Niels Bohr,
that's like throwing an elephant in slow motion through the air.
I think I'll compose a hunting story.
This elephant has come to a watering spot
on a river, when he encounters a large poster.
In one short sentence the antiparticle is explained.
Reading it, the elephant is enchanted.
The hunters hiding in the bush slip out, tie his legs securely
with heavy ropes, and ship him to the Hagenbeck
Zoo in Hamburg.
The hand, the same hand that a moment ago had rested securely
on my thigh, was rising threateningly
upward toward the table.
It was making the finger, friends.
Yes, the finger.
Albert E caught it and came quickly to the boil.
This was, after all, a first order challenge.
One any man would rise to.
How'd you like to be my roommate, baby?
Petronius is working both fronts at once this time.
You've got the right image.
Which image is that, I say.
Well, he begins thoughtfully, not the second wife image,
not the first wife image, not the girlfriend image.
Something else, he says.
The anti-image I think to myself.
Like antiparticles.
Antiparticles, hums Niels Bohr, picking up on it right away.
That's a good one.
The electron into the bed of the proton, and the hydrogen atom
is annihilated instantaneously in a burst
of high-frequency radiation.
A new principle, he said, his eye gleaming.
According to which any theory suggested by
a theoretician would become immediately
applicable to his body.
Thus you would be turned into gamma rays
before you could tell anybody about your idea.
Albert E is a big guy.
The story is the big men have to guard
against the full use of their strength
because they could kill their opponent without intending to.
At least that's what Albert E told me.
I look at his large body which is
about to be belted across the table by his smaller opponent,
and wonder just where the extra strength is coming from.
Is it in the haunches?
The broad flat chest the arms?
Next, I look the tables over.
Albert E is flying through the air.
The owners come out of the kitchen.
This is serious business.
By this time the place has quieted down.
All attention is on the boxers.
What's the big guy pissed about.
Who's the little fella.
I toward the door.
The cause of it all making the grand escape.
But Albert E is not my responsibility
I say in my own defense to no one in particular.
If I went up to stop them, I'd likely
get belted in the crossfire.
Soon, I see six guys holding Albert E. Six holding
Petronius, their arms pinned back like wings behind them.
The cautionary words rising like a hiss
going out in layers across the room.
This is some kind of a ritual which men
understand better than I do.
Half smile as the two men pass each other at the end hands
out timidly to, shake to beat up on each other again?
It isn't exactly clear.
Albert E comes out into the freezing air dusting off
his hands.
I needed some exercise, he says.
The blue veins visible under the skin of his fingers.
The knuckles starting to swell up.
No, nothing wrong, he says quietly,
walking along beside me.
Meanwhile, Niels Bohr is taking notes again.
Jotting stuff down in his little leather notebook.
When is excited, he begins.
To the mth energy state em it can return to some lower energy
state em times nm by liberating the balance of energy
in the form of a light quantum.
Thus he concludes, glancing happily at Albert E and me,
we can write hvm times n equals em minus en
or vmn equals em minus en over h."
[APPLAUSE]
A few more from the books.
In the world of literary criticism,
some things have happened in recent years that
are mostly mysterious to me.
But I also feel a need to be rebellious about those things
that have happened deconstruction,
and hermeneutics, and semiotics, and all of that.
So I'm making up my own linguistic system.
And I've got one so far I call it speech warts.
I have this feeling that there's a whole list out there,
and I can instead of phonemes and all those things
I can have all sorts of mushrooms and slimy slime molds
and things that to do with speech.
"Speech Warts. "
"Fetch me a red flower from that meadow, says Ludwig.
I look at him.
Which shade of red?
What species of flower?
And on what green stalk?
He stares back at me.
And above all, I say to him, which meadow?
He is silent.
How shall I get there without losing the flower the one
he has imagined.
I take a sheet from my left pocket
which contains the shapes of all English and American flowers.
I take a glass prism from my right pocket.
Now, I March up to the nearest meadow and compare real flowers
with my chart of flower shapes.
I pass a ray of sunlight through my prism,
and produce a color band which I compare
with the colors of flowers.
But the flowers in the meadow are in foreign languages
Sprechenvorts!
Gehimmelhymen optera!
they shout at me.
[SPEAKING GREEK] they continued to berate me.
This time in Greek.
Mocking My shape grilles.
My color bands.
What next, I ask him.
Fetch me the meadow, he says.
Be quick about it.
I come back my arms full.
I can barely walk under the weight of sumac, wild barley,
their names heavy in Russian Serbo-Croatian,
various Indo-European tongues.
My face is a sheath of red flowers.
Not the one I had imagined, he tells me.
Not that one, he repeats.
Nowhere to be found in the vast you have brought me.
I set down the meadow before him.
I take a sheet of paper from my hip pocket.
I write on it, a red flower from that meadow.
And I attach it to a stick, which I set upright waving
in the center of the meadow.
That one, Ludwig whispers gratefully, that is the one."
It also was something about how we transfer information, which
I think is very mysterious.
"How Metaphor Can Save Your Life."
"You are drowning.
Someone throws you an inflatable sunset,
which momentarily distracts you from the sinking
ship, the cramp in your left leg, the Barracuda who was just
sidled up next to you.
You forget that you do not know how to swim.
You're thrashing about.
Your simulated swimming strokes bring out the Coast Guard.
Find a small tumor behind your left ear lobe.
The dark cloud of cancer descends
just as the doctor tells you you have Dutch Elm disease,
and need to wash more frequently behind your ears.
You have lost your job.
You have no money in the bank.
Eat love, someone has written on the bulletin board
at the unemployment office.
A man proposes on the hard bench.
You accept and live happily ever afterward.
You are on an airplane.
Suddenly, it hits an air pocket and drops 1,000 feet
into a cloud bank.
You climb out of the window.
You have always wanted to touch a cloud.
You hold yourself aloft by doing yoga.
Soon your parachute opens.
You sail safely through a grove of Redwood trees,
your arms full of cumulonimbus towers from the cloud bank.
You learn that the Dow Jones is up.
[APPLAUSE]
I'm not sure what to do.
I have some poems that I wrote and maybe I'll end with those.
There was a tradition of medieval wanderers somewhat
like Marco Polo.
And the tradition sort of comes up
to the present getting less adventuresome or the travelers
and the explorers take less risks
as it gets closer to our time in this tradition.
And in the 19th century, this kind of wanderer
would head out of his house and end up going in a circle
and come back into his house again.
I decided there had never been a woman in this tradition
so I decided to make a woman.
But she never actually leaves her house at all.
So her entire wanderings take place in her own rooms.
Maybe I'll just read you a few of those.
"Introduction, thus she explains.
In these entries I take my place among the wanderers
of the Middle Ages.
Those who like Marco Polo sought to know for themselves
the diversity of kingdoms and provinces of Persian
and Tartar.
Her travels.
I was never able to leave the town of my birth
though I set out on various occasions wearing disguises.
At first I could not overcome a certain inertia,
which had traveled with me from childhood.
Later it seemed a genuine fear.
Often I would trace out the perimeter
of the new country on the palm of my hand
as though I could test beforehand
the dangers I would encounter.
I thought it would ease the way.
To this day, I navigate these familiar rooms
whose exposed objects rise dangerous as shoals."
"Freida and the Novel."
"For years, Freida had been very dutiful.
She would open a novel to the first page
and read through to the last.
Then one day, she gave herself permission
not to finish a book.
After that, she would open a book in the middle,
read a line here, a line there.
Sometimes she would find one word
she liked, and just write it down in a little book she kept.
Words only, the book said.
She became confused when someone would ask her
what she was reading, or who the author was,
or how she liked a certain book.
Antigone, she would utter.
Or in the midst of his preparatory
caresses was seized by, or enveloped by her in a web,
or a diminutive race of males, or compatible with the exercise
of their generative functions.
After a while, it was hard for Freida
to finish a whole thought.
That was when she decided to be a poet."
[APPLAUSE]
A couple of more of these.
"Freida considers her navel.
It's not a bad navel sitting here
on the center of my belly like an inner tube on a lake,
Freida thought to herself.
Sometimes it got clogged and Freida
would give it a swirl with the feather duster.
She considered exploring the metaphysics of the omphalos
for she had never understood why some
equated the center of the belly with the center of the Earth.
She wondered if you could tell a person's fortune by reading
the configuration of his navel.
Send me an imprint of your belly button,
she would advertise, and get your fortune
read by return mail.
Send a stamped, self-addressed envelope,
or we won't be able to consider your navel."
"Freida sharpens the pencils.
Freida has a blister on the inside of her right index
finger.
She has been sharpening pencils since morning in preparation
for the writing of her epic poem tentatively entitled,
concerning the capture and death of the Caliph of Baldach
and the miraculous will of a mountain.
Now she is caught up in the art of sharpening the pencil having
just discovered that if you push the end of the pencil
as you turn the handle of the sharpener
the pencil gets sharper faster."
"Freida and the Telephone."
"This is the world speaking, Freida,
we've been trying to reach you since Sunday.
I know, she whispers hoarsely into the receiver,
But I couldn't answer.
I've been trying to think of the right word
to go between goalie and cacciatore.
This is the gross national product speaking, Freida.
This is corruption in government.
This is leukemia speaking to you from Utah, Freida.
This is the health plan principle,
the vote on Rhodesia.
This is your car dealer dealer, Freida,
your car is beyond repair.
I know, says Freida, goodbye world,
says Freida shaking the abandoned
houses of her childhood, all the deserted towns
as she moves her head from side to side
as she places the receiver back in its cradle."
Maybe two more of these.
"Freida becomes her own [INAUDIBLE]..
Freida was her own censor.
She didn't need any help from her critics.
She was one step ahead of them.
On her long work on the city of Gonglu,
whose inhabitants worship idols and burn
the bodies of their dead, there are
profound and frequent craters gouged
into the pages in some cases obliterating years of work.
Some say it is to her great credit sparing
the public unnecessary reading.
Others strain to discover what she might have been thinking.
Still others make of the gouge marks
a new language, which they believe
can be deciphered if dropped to minus 487 degrees Fahrenheit
and broadcast on the radio telescopes."
It ends with Frieda taking a shower.
"Freida and the Ritual Bath."
"Freida loved water.
But the river Sambatien was too far away
and there was no ritual bath within the walls of her house.
So she settled for the shower, spending longer and longer
periods observing the sprays of water
as they left the star shapes of the showerhead.
She considered the nature of water
as the hours went by, as the water cooled and finally grew
icy.
Somehow, she failed to notice, so absorbed
was she in the way the droplets grew on the metal handles
and knobs in the stall.
It was always with the deepest regret
that she pulled the curtain open,
turned the faucets clockwise, and saw
the last of water descend into that nether region
beneath the house.
Perhaps, Freida thought to herself,
it travels [AUDIO OUT].
Perhaps the cells of my body sloughed off
in this rain of water have begun a journey from this house.
In this way, Freida commenced her entry into the world."
I think I'll stop there.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]