Well, I guess I'll read the last poem.
The title of it is "Spit."
The epigraph comes from a book that
was called the Black Book of Poland, that was published
during the second war when no one believed
that what was supposedly happening in Europe
was actually happening.
And there was another book soon after called
the Black Book of Europe.
And about 10 years ago, I was working
on a poem called "A Day for Anne Frank,"
and I came across this, the sentence.
And it got into my mind, and I tried for about 10 years
to write a poem about it and never could.
And then finally, I started writing
a poem about how hard it was to write a poem about it.
And then I wrote it, and threw out that--
very funny.
The sentence from the Black Book of Poland
is, "then the son of the 'superior races
began to spit into the rabbi's mouth,
so the rabbi could continue to spit on the Torah."
"After 30 years, it's still overpowering.
The SS man with this hard hair and his uniform.
The rabbi probably in a torn overcoat,
probably with a stained beard that the other would
be clutching.
The Torah, God's word on the altar.
The letters blurring under the blended phlegm.
The rabbi's parched mouth.
The SS man totally absorbed, obsessed
with perfect humiliation.
30 years, and what can you say about the soldiers
waiting impatiently outside in the cold?
About the one chafing his hands thinking, kill him now.
While back there the lips of the rabbi and the other
would have brushed.
And if time had stopped like that,
you would have thought they were lovers.
So lightly kissing, the sharp Luger hand under the dear chin,
the eyes furled slightly.
And then when it started again, the eyelashes of both of them
shyly fluttering as wonderfully as the pulse of a baby.
Maybe we don't have to talk about it at all,
it's still all the same thing.
The war first, that happens and stops happening,
but is always somehow right there twisting and hardening
us.
Then what we'd make of God, words spit, degradation,
murder, shame, every conceivable torment.
Then this strangely compelling community,
of victim and torturer.
All these ways to live that have something
to do with how we live, and that we're
almost ashamed to use as metaphors for what goes on
in us, but that we do anyway.
So that love is battle, and we watch ourselves
in love become maddened with pride and incompleteness.
And God is what it is, when we're alone
wrestling with solitude and everything
speaking in our souls, turns against us like his fury.
And just facing another person, there
are so much terror and hatred that's
spitting in someone's mouth.
Making him defile all of his own meaning,
would signify the struggle to survive each other
and what we will enact to accomplish it.
There is another legend.
It's about Moses.
That when they first brought him as a child
before pharaoh, the king tested him
by putting a diamond and a live coal in front of him.
And Moses picked up the red amber,
and popped it into his mouth.
So for the rest of his life, he was tongue tied
and Aaron had to speak for him.
I wonder what his scarred tongue must
have felt like in his mouth.
It must have been like always carrying something there
that weighed too much.
Something leathery and dead, that felt as though its
greatest gravity was to loll out like an auction's.
And when it moved, it must have felt like a thick embryo slowly
coming alive, butting itself against the inner sides
of his teeth and cheeks.
And when God burned in the bush, how could he not cleave to him?
How could he not know that all men were on fire,
and that every word men said would burn forever
in pain unquenchably and that God knew it?
And would say nothing himself ever again beyond this, ever.
And would only live in the flesh that men use like firewood.
In all the caves of the body, the gut cave, the speech cave.
He would slobber and howl like something just barely
a man, that beats itself again and again against the dark,
moist walls away from the light.
Away from whatever would be like for this last eternity.
Now therefore go, he said, and I will be with thy mouth."
[APPLAUSE]
[INTERPOSING VOICES]