I'll start by reading the longest poem first
on the principle that one's powers of concentration
are greatest at the beginning.
It's terrible getting a long poem at the end of a reading
when your concentration is beginning to flag,
and you just want short little jokes or something.
Haiku-- funny haiku.
[LAUGHTER]
This is about a friend of mine who had AIDS.
This was written about two years ago.
At the time of his illness, I was reading The Jesuits
in North America by Francis Parkman,
a very good 19th-century history of the Jesuit ministry--
Jesuit missionaries in Canada and the hardships
that they suffered.
And it's in a weird way, anything
that you read, if it means anything to you,
becomes a part of your experience, gets mixed in.
It became part of this poem really without my meaning
to be at all.
So there's one or two references.
And they're not difficult references,
but I think it makes it all clear if I say that.
"Lament."
Your dying was a difficult enterprise.
First, petty things took up your energies--
the small but clustering duties of the sick, as
irritant as the cough's dry rhetoric, those
hours of waiting for pills, shot, X-ray, or test
while you read novels two a day, already
with a kind of clumsy stealth distanced you
from the habits of your health.
In hope still, courteous still, but tired and thin,
you tried to stay the man that you had been,
treating each symptom as a mere mishap without import.
But then the spinal tap.
It brought a hard headache.
And when night came, I heard you wake up from the same bad dream
every half hour with the same short cry of mild outrage
before immediately slipping into the nightmare once again,
empty of content but the drip of pain.
No respite followed.
Though the nightmare ceased, your cough grew thick and rich.
Its strength increased.
Four nights, and on the fifth, we drove you down
to the emergency room.
That frown, that frown, I'd never seen such rage on you
before as when they wheeled you through the swinging door
for you knew rightly they conveyed you
from those normal pleasures of the sun's kingdom
the hedonistic body basks within and takes for granted:
summer on the skin, sleep without break,
the moderate taste of tea in a dry mouth.
You had gone on from me as if your body sought out
martyrdom in the far Canada of a hospital room.
Once there, you entered fully the distress and long pale
rigors of the wilderness.
A gust of morphine hid you.
Back in sight, you breathed through a segmented tube--
fat, white-- jammed down your throat
so that you could not speak.
How thin the distance made you.
In your cheek one day appeared the true shape
of your bone no longer padded.
Still, your mind alone explored this emptying,
intermediate state for what holds and rests
were hidden in it.
You wrote us messages on a pad, amused
at one time that you had your nurse confused,
who, seeing you reconciled after four years
with your gray father, both of you in tears,
asked if this was at last your special friend,
the one you waited for until the end.
She sings, you wrote, a Philippine folk song
to wake me in the morning.
It is long and very pretty.
Grabbing at detail to furnish this bare ledge toured
by the gale in which you lay, bed restful as a knife,
you tried, tried hard to make of it
a life thick with the complicating circumstance
your thoughts might fasten on.
It had been chance always till now
that had filled up the moment with live specifics,
your hilarious comment discovered
as it went along and fed laconic, quick,
wherever it was led.
You improvised upon your own delight.
I can remember when, one summer night,
we talked between our sleeping bags
below a molten field of stars five years ago.
I was so tickled by your mind's light touch, I couldn't sleep.
You made me laugh too much, though I was tired
and begged you to leave off.
Now you were tired and yet not tired enough, still hungry
for the great world you were losing steadily
in no season of your choosing.
And when at last the whole death was assured,
drugs having failed, and when you
had endured two weeks of an abominable constraint,
you faced it equably without complaint and whimpering,
but not at peace with it.
You'd lived as if your time was infinite.
You were not ready and not reconciled,
feeling as incompleted as a child
till you had shown the world what
you could do in some ambitious role
to be worked through, a role your need for it
had half defined, but never wholly even in your mind.
You lacked the necessary ruthlessness,
the soaring meanness that pinpoints success.
We loved that lack of self-love and your smile,
rueful at your own silliness.
Meanwhile, your lungs collapsed, and the machine, unstrained,
did all your breathing now.
Nothing remained but death by drowning
on an inland sea of your own fluids, which it seemed
could be kindly forestalled by drugs.
Both could and would.
Nothing was said, everything understood, at least by us.
Your own concerns were not long term
precisely when they gave the shot.
You made local arrangements to the bed
and pulled a pillow round beside your head.
And so you slept and died, your skin gone gray, achieving
your completeness in a way.
Outdoors next day, I was dizzy from a sense
of being ejected with some violence from vigil
in a white and distant spot where
I was numb into this garden plot,
too warm, too close, and not enough like pain.
I was delivered into time again.
The variations that I live among where your long body too
used to belong and where the still bush is minutely active.
You never thought your body was attractive, though others did,
and yet you trusted it and must have loved its fickleness a bit
since it was yours and gave you what
it could till, near the end, it let you down for good,
its blood hospitable to those guests who took over
by betraying it into the greatest of its inconsistencies
this difficult, tedious, painful enterprise.
[APPLAUSE]