Well, I think I'll read now the end
of my poem, my notorious poem, Litany,
which is in two columns and double columns.
And I've been asked many times how it should be read,
and in fact I had no particular way in mind
because my own way of reading is very sloppy,
and I assumed everybody was the same as me.
[LAUGH]
I did make a recording of it with another poet in which we
read simultaneously so that you could get only a few words,
but on the other hand, I don't.
[LAUGH]
Just because that's the way I hear things myself.
On the other hand, I don't mind it's
being read as separate-- two separate parallel poems,
either.
I'll read a little bit of the left
and then a little bit of the right.
[LAUGH]
Or say that between the effort and the screws
some scorpion intruded, and to top it off,
a storm interfered with the rescue efforts blurring them.
What then?
What do you make of the red traffic light turning
green to admit a few cars farther on in the shuffle when
night finds the tubing with rain,
and you can see yourself only as you used to be in college.
Make you mine, Valentine feeling fine to.
If consumed with energy to be mad and go
on confessing even if it means that the
sought after absolution be rescinded after a time.
And those who looked silently at you for a while
direct their gaze downward to the sunlit tundra.
And you go out to the party, his toes slip into shoes,
and I am not just left on the corner,
but him as the traveling salesman
of a joke with a permanent hard-on and no luck
and all these samples in this here suitcase want to see them?
Otherwise, why we don't know too much.
Fellow was over here recently from the British Isles
wanted to see something of how the life goes on.
He never made it back.
Well, some of us enjoy that way too as
though we knew life was a picnic or parade down
under the hassles and disrobing, the dust.
But now while we pretend to see otherwise
into the great blue eyes of concrete
that best our city in the time of industry
and so panic slowly in the vegetal heart of things until
told the disconnect the operation.
No wonder so many of us get discouraged
know not where to turn.
Some certified nut will try to tell you it's poetry.
It's extraordinary.
It makes a great deal of sense.
But watch out, or he'll start with some new notion or other
and switch to both leaving you wiser and not emptier
though standing on the edge of a hill.
We have to worry about systems and devices.
There is no energy here, no spleen either.
We have to take over the sewer plans.
Otherwise, the coursing clear water plains upon plains of it
will have its day and disappear.
Same goes for business.
Holed up in some office skyscraper,
it's often busy to predict the future for business plans.
But try doing it from down in the street
and see how far it gets you.
Really have to sequester yourself
to see how far you have come, but I'm not
going to talk about that.
I'm fairly well pleased with the way
you and I have come around the hill ignoring and then
anointing its edge even if we felt
it keenly in the back wind.
You were a secretary at first until it came time
to believe you.
And then the Black man replaced your headlights with fuel.
You seemed to grow from no place.
And now calmed down like a Corinthian column,
you grow and grow scaling the high plinths of the sky.
The truth is that nowhere in Europe, India, or America
is this a straight line drawn vertically from one point
to another so as to connect them and in so doing
provide a lot of fun and refreshment for the students
so they may never feel insecure again.
Such a line may exist, but it would
be horizontal like the Northwest Passage
and not connect people up with anything else.
It's a wager and emptiness and the warmth
and the color of baked loaves in the sun.
It has no idea of nourishment or where you should go.
Its idea is that the Latin text might also
have existed in German or be so close it doesn't matter anymore
and the cottage be shut up at the end of summer
and be there come early or mid-spring.
But this presupposes a helpless mankind pigeonholed
with a rival deity so that neither
can make the hands of the clock move
and it all goes down in darkness with the sun
to the Supreme moment then.
But it spreads out in sullenness over a vast tidal plane
to dissipate in what it is not even sure is horizon,
is nothing but images.
Earthly inadequacy is indescribable
and heavenly satisfaction needs no description.
But between them, hovering like Satan on airless wing
is the matter at hand.
The essence of it is that all love is intuitive, creative
and that we can't hear it.
Others, the tenor, the doctor, want
us to walk about on it to see how we feel about it
before they attempt anything.
Yet in whose house are we?
Must we not sit quietly?
For we would not do this at home.
A splattering of trumpets against the very high
pockmarked wall and a forgetting of spiny palm trees,
and it is over for us all not just us.
And yet on the inside it was doomed
to happen again over and over like a wave on a beach that
thinks it's had this tremendous idea coming to crash
on the beach like that.
And it's true.
It has.
Yet others have gone before and still others
will follow and far from undermining
the spiciness of this individual act, this knowledge
plants a seed of eternal endeavor
for fear of happening just once and goes on its way.
And yet the originality should not deter our vision
from the drain that absorbs night and day,
all our equations makes us brittle,
emancipated, not men in a word.
Dying of fright in the vial at night,
you come to understand how it looked to the ancestors
and what there was about it that moved them and are come
no closer to the divine riddle which
is aging so beautiful in the eternal honey of the sun
and spurs us on to a higher pitch of elocution
that the company will not buy.
And so back to our grandstand seat
with a feeling of having mended the contrary principles
with a cat gut of abstract sleek ideas that
come only once in the night to be born
and are gone forever after leaving
their trace after the stitches had been removed.
But who was to say they are traces of what really went
on and not today's palimpsest?
For what is remarkable about our chronic reverie,
a watch that is always too slow or too fast,
is a lively sense of accomplishment
that halos it from afar.
There is no need to approach closely.
It will be done from here and work out better.
You'll see.
Oh once a long time ago in towns and cities,
the line was different.
We lived in differently then, but perhaps more accurately.
And once it was over, we knew what to do with it.
We carried out our neighbors' lives,
and they had our instructions about where to go.
We lived inadequately blushing, but we
knew we were on the outside and that only one thing prevented
us from traveling inward.
And that thing was our knowledge of how little
we imagined everything as though a door were
enough to stop the average person
and he would just curl up on the doormat forever.
But this person turned out to be mass produced.
He was funny and knew about elegance,
how to dress for an occasion.
Yet the error that incites us to duplication
was missing or inexact.
We have not spoken to him.
It should be outrageous to do so.
Yet to ignore him will bring no light.
But to get it right, we might ask this once,
how goes it down there?
What objects have you found recently?
So the giant slabs of material came
to be in precious little else and no information about them,
but that was all right for the present century.
Later on, we'd see how it might be in some other epoch.
But for the time being, it was neither your
nor the population's concern and may
have glittered as it declined.
But for now, it would have to do as any magic as the right kind
at the right time.
There is no soothsaying, yet it happens in rose,
wind rose you call him in your far country.
There are no trade winds.
The ocean too, is someone's idea.
The pleasant banter of the elements cannot disguise this
basically send concept nor remove us from contemplation
of it.
And that is the best answer that may precede the question.
Until later when the shooting fires light up
the sides of the volcano and each task and catastrophe
become clear and succinct, by that time,
kindness will have replaced effort.
Why keep on seating the chairs when the future is night,
and no one knows what he wants.
It would probably be best, though to hang on
to these words if only for the rhyme.
Little enough, but later on at the summit,
it won't matter so much that they
fled like arrows from the taut string
of a restrained consciousness only that they mattered.
For the present, our not knowing delights them.
Probably they won't be devoured by the lions like the others
but be released after a certain time.
Meanwhile, keep careful count of the rows
of windows overlooking the deep blue sky behind the factory.
We'll need them.
That's the end of the left hand column
and the right hand finishes thus.
But you are leaving.
Some months ago, I got an offer from Columbia Tape Club,
Terre Haute, Ind, where I could buy one tape
and get another free.
I accepted the deal, paid for one tape and chose a free one.
But since I've been repeatedly billed for my free tape.
I've written them several times but can't straighten it out.
Would you try?
[LAUGH]
[APPLAUSE]
I'll just read a couple more recent ones, more recent ones.