I think, this is a poem roughly about insomnia, and it's--
I always thought insomnia sounds like the name of one
of the muses, doesn't it?
I mean, the 10th muse, she stands there
at the foot of the bed every night, Insomnia in her robes.
[LAUGHTER]
It's also about how different philosophies and religions tend
to take our invisible insides, and partition them up
like pie slices.
So that-- I mean, Freud would be id, ego, super-ego,
and Christianity would be conscience and soul
and rationality, and everyone who sort of has a theory--
one of the obligations of a philosophy
is to partition our invisible parts,
and the poem is also based on that dividing.
It's called "The Night House."
"Every day, the body works in the fields of the world,
mending a stone wall or swinging a sickle
through the tall grass.
The grass of civics, the grass of money.
And every night, the body curls around itself and listens
for the soft bells of sleep.
But the heart is restless and rises
from the body in the middle of the night,
leaves the trapezoidal bedroom with its thick, pictureless
walls, to sit by herself at the kitchen table
and heat some milk in a pan.
And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe
and goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,
and opens a book on engineering.
Even the conscience awakens and roams from room
to room in the dark, darting away
from every mirror like a strange fish.
And the soul is up on the roof in her nightdress,
straddling the ridge, singing a song
about the wildness of the sea, until the first rip of pink
appears in the sky.
Then, they will all return to the sleeping body
the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,
resuming their daily colloquy, talking
to each other or themselves, even
through the heat of the long afternoons.
Which is why the body, that house of voices,
sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen
to stare into the distance, to listen to all its names
being called before bending again to its labor."
[APPLAUSE]