And finally, preceded by a statement
of my gratitude for your patience,
a poem called "Put Back the Dark,"
which ends the book and the reading.
Let's not stop and cold, in drought,
but blanket and seed our own bed.
We'll be a long time dead.
We walk now on stilts, on dagger heels,
through the howling of impatience and the ailing
imprisoned.
We walk now through the jails, nothing
to provide a notion of being free leading us
from these helpless, away from ambition and vanity
toward the comfort of solitude like a tree
living two-thirds in death.
There is nothing left to resist where
there is nothing irresistible.
So these poor cities fade from vision,
not maniacally, but as an old memory,
which was not important to that dream when your hand into mine
put back the dark
So, thank you.
[APPLAUSE]