We were talking about this poem last night
at the bar after class.
And I think I was implicated as putting
Scarlett Johansson and the Janjaweed
on the same moral plane of existence.
[CHUCKLING]
Which I did not intend to do.
I like Scarlett Johansson way too much.
[CHUCKLING]
Janjaweed militia's in Somalia--
Ethiopia.
Sudan.
My ignorance is profound.
[CHUCKLING]
In Ethiopia.
I'm one of those atheists who wakes up
in the middle of the night, and says, God help me.
[CHUCKLING]
I was thinking about that when I wrote this poem.
I don't believe God exists.
But there I am, making these appeals.
They're quite real.
I can-- I'm not kidding.
This is called "Powers."
Informally, I believe in God's powers, though not
in his presence.
And I can see that this has led to
various momentary advantages, a certain freedom of choice.
And so, like other citizens, given half a chance,
I have fallen half in love, any number of times,
with one sonsy actress or another.
Please insert here, if you wish, the lips
and decolletage of the ineffable Scarlett Johansson.
Her air-conditioned tattoos not unlike those
of 1,000 bicycle shop clerks.
And as such, in similarly pleasurable ways,
I like to watch a black dog enter a drenched field,
and immediately soak it up.
And have repeatedly and gladly given money to men and women
because they could play the guitar and sing.
And on my 11th birthday, asked for,
and received from my parents, a set of cuff links
and plated tie pin.
My luck has been in friendship and love.
I like to be carried by people and things.
And in fact, once stood on the deck of a white hydrofoil,
as it did what a white Greek hydrofoil is supposed to do.
With burning diesel fuel and water,
it made a summer wave off Naxos.
On the other hand, believing in God's powers,
but not in his existence, may have had some drawbacks.
Feelings of being stranded, say, either gone
deep into the brine of my being, myself, in solitary,
lost inside my mind, in the invariable infinity
of variant neurons.
Or forced to inhabit a planet with frequent, inexplicable--
or all too explicable-- episodes of cruelty.
Insert here, at the moment, the wrath
of the Janjaweed in Hashaba Wasit,
or elsewhere, sweatshops, approved
of by theorists of economic development and efficiency.
But staffed, 15 hours a day, by women,
who, like my great Aunt Anna Mello,
will probably end up with wrists swollen
to twice their size, necks bent by bad light,
and balky sewing machines.
As in the long view, it often seems one unwavering orbit
of infected geese, cold refugees, and insurgents,
traveling from here to here.
What I mean to say is that God has abandoned both us,
and his powers.
He's given them up.
And they hurtle around inside us.