I'll read one more poem also about the movie
"The Past" called "Thinking About the Past".
There are several names in it, a friends of mine in adolescence.
One I'd like to identify it.
I don't think it's quite clear without
a little identification, though, it may be suggested.
I mentioned a friend named Benton in the poem.
Benton was the friend with whom I
smoked my first pack of cigarettes,
who died a few years ago of a lung ailment.
Thinking about the past.
Certain moments will never change, nor stop being.
My mother's face all smiles, all wrinkles soon.
The rock wall building, build, collapse, then fallen.
Our upright loosening downward slowly out of tune;
all fixed into place now, all rhyming with each other.
That red-haired girl with wide mouth,
Eleanor, forgotten 30 years.
Her freckled shoulders, hands, the breast of Mary something.
Freed from a white swimsuit, damp, sandy, warm.
Or Marjorie's, a small cot bird.
Darkness they rise from, darkness they sink back toward.
How marvelous early cigarettes, oh, bitter smoke Benton.
And Kenny in wartime whites crisp cocky time, a bow bent
with his certain failure.
Dusks, dawns, waves the ends of songs.
That's all.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]