I wanted to read a prose poem to you called, "On Meeting
Robert Desnos in My Sleep."
Robert Desnos is a kind of mysterious force for me.
In the early '70s, when I was very influenced
by surrealist writing, his poems were very important to me.
He was one of the original French Surrealists
with Andre Breton, Paul Eluard.
He was thrown out of the Surrealist movement
because, as Breton said, he had too much talent.
And if you're writing unconsciously,
you're not supposed to have talent.
But he was an incredibly forceful man.
He held seances.
He defied the Nazis openly.
And, ultimately, he died in a concentration camp
in 1945 of leukemia.
He was a body mystic, a kind of Swedenborgian tradition.
And some of his poems are very forceful to me.
And this is the only time, really,
that I was able to use a dream as source material for a poem.
"On Meeting Robert Desnos in my Sleep."
We meet in a concentration camp.
It is late 1944, and the war is almost over.
He takes me by the hand, and reads the future in my palm.
He says, "I will never live to see 48.
That I have no will left in my thumb
that my fame line is very faint.
He does not believe my wife has been faithful to me,
but he says, it does not really matter.
When he speaks, his voice is so low it is almost inaudible.
It is almost as though there were someone else speaking
to me, someone else who is locked inside his body.
When he speaks to me, the concentration
camp, our fellow prisoners, even the sky which surrounds us,
all seem to disappear.
The pupils of his eyes are like bowls which can contain me.
They frighten me more than all the Germans I have seen.
So I close my eyes and manage to awaken myself.
For a brief moment, I am awake, looking straight
up at the ceiling, which at first glance
looks like a wall on its side.
But Desnos will not let me go.
He grabs me back into sleep by the throat.
I feel the sensation of suffocation.
"It is not easy to leave me," he says,
"although we always try to return to the world
that we know.
But me?
I am more at home in this world than you are when you
walk into your local grocery.
Only sometimes, when you let your mind wander there,
say, when you pick up a piece of fruit, and you let it become--
or rather, it itself becomes--
the skull of a small animal.
But I am this way all the time.
For me, the tomato is always inside the skull of a fox.
What is so strange about Desnos is
that he says he is not afraid of going crazy, of dying,
or even of the Nazis who are always watching him.
"The Nazis are so easy to understand," he says.
"They have no inner life.
When you look into their eyes, or into the barrels
of their Lugers, it is always, at bottom, the same thing.
Sometimes, the German believes his gun is only
an extension of his hand.
The barrel, his longest, most hollow finger,
which he may point at anyone to escape from himself."
Desnos holds seances in his cell.
He makes the table rise, the bed,
even the hands of the cellmates, who
will not speak to him because they believe he is crazy.
Desnos believes he can communicate with the dead,
though he says he does not need to hear from them.
What seems to frighten most of us
is his ability to disappear--
or make us disappear-- from his consciousness.
One moment, someone may be speaking with him,
and the next moment, he is in a trance.
No one knows what he is thinking, where he is going.
We only know we cannot reach him.
It is this realization that makes him disappear.
I am frightened, and I am no longer able to wake myself,
and I am no longer in a cell with him.
But in the middle of the night, I'm in an open field
just outside the camp.
A light shines on me.
And, suddenly, I'm surrounded by Nazis again.
In broken French, a guard asks me, "what am I doing here?"
I tell him, "I do not know.
I only know I do not belong here."
"Ce n'est pas assez bon," he says.
"It is not good enough."
He raises his hand to strike me with the butt of his gun.
And the moment before he strikes me,
I can see inside the barrel.
It is not quite a tunnel or an abyss,
but it is almost as though I could see him hiding along
the edges of that barrel.
And when the gun goes off, accidentally, I
see arms floating in front of my face,
a pair of eyes moving off toward the stars,
and a large hand reaching for the back of my neck.
I know I will never sleep again.