[CLAPPING]
Thank you, Jim, and Frances, and everyone at the Poetry Center.
And thank you, you vast, black swath of nothingness.
I understand you're there, but I can't see you.
I'm going to read three very different things to you
this evening.
The first is going to be the beginning of a short story
in Jack Kerouac is Pregnant, which is by the way,
for sale by a very nice man in the hall.
And it's actually coming out in paperback in about 10 days,
but he is going to rival the paperback price for you
tonight.
So you can get one of these classic, underground editions.
This story is called "Look at the Moon."
"'What's wrong now?'
The therapist asks.
Samantha is a magazine on the couch, colorful, well-edited,
folded over.
'It seems nothing has gone wrong in my life, Bob.
That's the problem.
I was hoping to have had some minor childhood trauma.
I even had the man picked out, that tall,
red-haired friend of my father.
That would explain my aversion to red-haired men,
but nothing has surfaced there.
What's the point?
Should we try hypnosis again?'
'It's up to you, Samantha.
I have some time next Tuesday afternoon for a long session,
and of course, the rate is doubled per hour.'
'Of course, you have that much more of my unconscious to work
with when I'm under.'
The therapist looks like her father and mother.
He looks like her brother, professor, and the girl
in nursery school, who punched and broke
her tiny, bean-shaped nose.
Samantha thinks for a moment of her sex life.
That is what's important here, but sex for Samantha
is watery as a desert mirage.
Where is the thirsty traveler?
'Do I look different when I'm under hypnosis?'
She coyly asks.
'How do you think you might look?'
Responds the therapist, stifling a yawn.
Samantha thinks, I might look like Ingrid Bergman or Tess
of the D'urbervilles.
She uncrosses and re-crosses her legs,
exposing, remembering, and recovering
a run in her stocking.
She looks out the window.
Oh, to be a bird.
Writing the check, her hand trembles.
She is sorry to leave the therapist, to whom she has just
told a dream.
She feels that paying for this experience cheapens it.
She now wishes she hadn't mentioned the dream at all.
For the favor of an ear, she writes
in the memorandum section.
She smiles at the therapist's crotch on her way to the door.
Samantha sits on a stool at the diner.
Lawyers come here.
She leans toward them in an effort to hear.
Jail terms-- they fascinate her.
She spoons in ice cream, meditating on the numbers, one
month, eight months, 300 years.
The man down the counter is blowing his nose over and over.
Victim of a romantic disaster?
Perhaps, he needs a friend, someone to talk to.
Samantha imagines the Eiffel Tower, marble tables,
heads bent together under an umbrella,
and then the law reaches her through the other ear.
You would never find Samantha in jail, never, never, never.
Samantha sits in her apartment and stares at the walls.
She's got a closet full of clothes,
stained and threadbare.
Lined up in a neat row, her misshapen shoes
conjure up the Depression era.
Pictures from magazines smugly stare out
from plexiglass frames.
These photos of faraway places are
centered on each white wall.
Yes, Samantha is a good and happy girl.
And she is wearing her white sweater, buttoned up
to the neck, and her ankles are bound or crossed at the ankles.
'Hello', she says anxiously after the phone rings once,
and she's leapt from catatonia to quick, hopeful attention.
Perhaps, it is a secret admirer.
'Grandma, how nice of you to call.'
Samantha surveys her room, in her mind,
putting away any incriminating evidence,
the paraphernalia of a life rejected by the church.
Samantha will ferret out any sign of sloth or pleasure
for its own sake, other than small pleasures, of course.
Pleasures so mean that to enjoy them,
one also wants to commit suicide on the spot.
No, her apartment from this angle
appears convincingly ascetic--
only don't look at the bed, hard and flat,
covered with a natty, practical throw, even the pillows,
seemingly sewn to the mattress, as if to prevent
spontaneous reactions.
Looking at that bed too long would turn even a
confirmed Catholic girl into a slut.
Samantha fingers the crucifix around her neck.
The old woman gave it to her for confirmation
15 or 20 years back.
There's the tiniest pinpoint of a diamond
in the middle, craftily embedded in a chiseled mirror.
Samantha likes the diamond and always thinks of it as the size
it pretends to be.
She never once considered the cross just
a cheap piece of metal.
What could her grandmother be calling for?
To inquire about her health?
What should she tell her?
The crucifix-giver has forgotten Samantha's address.
She wants to send her a birthday present, which means,
as it does every year, a card and $5.
Samantha flips through her address book, buoyed by lust.
Her fingers stop at one name, one Mark Braun.
It is Thursday night, well into the dinner hour.
Surely, she could be calling to reminisce,
as civilized people do.
Mark Braun was her junior high paramour,
a boy who first impressed Samantha
by walking down the school hall with his butt in the air,
leaning on a field hockey stick and calling himself
a constipated gym teacher.
It's a stretch.
Still, there is the glamour, or the hunger,
that makes calling a man, even one
who's dusty, crinkled condom package she's picked up
off the assembly hall floor, a viable alternative
to another early night alone in the arms of her monkish bed
covers.
Samantha picks up the phone and dials.
Yes, it is a yes.
Before she knows it, Samantha is dressed for Saturday night.
She's bought new violet-colored contact lenses
for the occasion.
She wears her "Brattleby, the Heart of Connecticut" t-shirt.
Cupid's arrows have struck."