There's another little poem about Paris.
This poem is called "The Streets Grow Young."
Now that quotation is, of course,
from that very beautiful poem by e.e. cummings about Paris.
He loved Paris.
And Paris appeals to me so much because it's not only very
beautiful, but it's also very funny,
and cummings is a wonderful lyrical poet.
He's wonderful because he has such utter grace of feeling
and also he's very raunchy and very funny.
Remember his getting caught on that lawn in Paris
by a policeman after he had left a cafe.
He was all alone.
It was right after World War I. And a policeman grabbed him.
Somebody asked me about police.
A policeman suddenly grabbed--
this is so horrible because two or three
of greatest jokes about Paris have to do with police.
I won't go into them now.
But a policeman grabbed him, a gendarme, and cummings
thought this is it.
He's going to go into a drunk tank.
According to James Baldwin, if you're
going to get thrown into a drunk tank, do it in America.
Don't do it in Paris.
Just don't do it.
That's all.
cummings was there, and suddenly he
was surrounded by a crowd of Parisians who kept shouting.
I love this.
That's why I love the city.
They were all shouting "Reprieve le pisseur Américain."
Turn that American pisser loose.
[LAUGHTER]
And the cop did.
He has very many beautiful things about Paris,
and I was thinking about him on my first real visit to Paris.
His lines are about peculiar quality of the rain.
I want to read this poem partly because the rain here in Tucson
has reminded me of that Parisian rain, truly.
Now we just came from New York, and the rain there
is very depressing.
But there is a kind of rain that's different.
cummings wrote-- that wonderful, wonderful man--
wrote "In spring, Paris silently utters a cathedral,
beneath whose upward, lean, magnificent face
the streets grow young with rain."
He was a wonderful poet.
He also was very funny as I say.
Well, when we came to Paris, I had never
really known the city, and it was something like June 19th.
What a beautiful time to come to Paris and go over to the Left
Bank, get settled in your hotel, then take a walk along
Saint-Germain-des-Pres.
And I would have liked to travel,
but I hadn't known Paris.
And I hadn't quite understood what people meant by it.
We were walking down the street, and
among the strolling students--
remember we'd just come from New York--
I looked up.
I was being so exhausted by New York, and I saw the--
one of the Hari Krishna crowd.
And I turned and started to beat my head against a stone--
no, an iron fence we were along, thinking this is like
in [INAUDIBLE]---- oh my God, I spent all my life trying
to come to New York--
no, trying to come to Rome and the first person I meet
is a schnorrer.
And the kid came up and said, monsieur.
[LAUGHTER]
He was from Brooklyn, all right.
[LAUGHTER]
The first thing I said to him was "Partant!"
[LAUGHTER]
And he said "ni monsieur" and I said hit the road, punk.
[LAUGHTER]
He understood that.
[LAUGHTER]
Then we found some other things that evening which were--
well, here is the poem.
"The Streets Grow Young."
"One first summer evening in Paris, my love and I
strolled among the young students
studying the cathedrals in one another's faces.
No rain there.
Inside an alley behind our own green bones,
a peaked woman of 50 years, I guess,
darted straight down at me in the darkness
and bluntly asked for a coin.
A while later, Hari Krishna, his cigar, his piano,
and his orchestra--
[LAUGHTER]
Forgave me for giving him cancer.
The shrewd angel, the abandoner of his own solitude,
the native country of his hand, clambering from pit
to scar up his mother's Douglas chest.
He has no woman, but he has found
how to make a good thing out of hell.
No moss grows on those horny wings, even in Paris.
While he was forgiving me, the skinny whore
staggered past, gnawing her spit soggy claw of bread.
OK, I accept your forgiveness.
I started the Reichstag fire.
I invented the ballpoint pen.
I ate the British governor of Rhodesia.
But that was a long time ago, and I
thought he was assorted fruits and chicken sauce.
[LAUGHTER]
Still all the same, OK, now, hit the road
and leave me and my girl alone.
The amused Parisian snickered while a retorted fat man
on the corner shook a rubber rat in their faces
and in the faces of passing women.
The poor bastard needed money to beg with-- or to die with,
and he can't even beg."