There's no sex in the sonnet then.
It's just panting and tail wagging.
[LAUGHTER]
And blandishments.
[LAUGHTER]
This poem is called "Osso buco," which is
this the dish you get in some--
you find it on menus of Italian restaurants often.
And it is, as you probably know, it means
the bone or the empty bone.
And it's the bone of the little animal called the veal I think,
and that's your small nocturnal animal--
[LAUGHTER]
--known as the veal.
[LAUGHTER]
And it is vegetarians' nightmare.
[LAUGHTER]
But to me a source of pleasure.
And the poem is basically a difficult subject
to write about-- it is contentment.
Since the ties that connect serious art
and misery are time-honored and fast.
And it's difficult to break out of that
and write poems about pleasure.
But I would go headlong into this and attempt it.
So the poem is called
"Osso buco."
"I love the sound of the bone against the plate
and the fortress-like look of it lying
before me in a moat of risotto.
The meat-- soft as the leg of an angel who has lived
a purely airborne existence.
And best of all, the secret marrow--
the invaded privacy of the animal
prised out now with a knife and swallowed down
with cold exhilarating wine.
I am swaying now in the hour after dinner,
a citizen tilted back on his chair, a creature
with a full stomach--
something you don't hear much about in poetry--
that sanctuary of hunger and deprivation.
[LAUGHTER]
You know, the driving rain, the boots by the door,
small birds searching for berries in winter.
But tonight, the lion of contentment
has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest.
And I can only close my eyes and listen
to the drums of woe throbbing in the distance,
and the sound of my wife's laughter
on the telephone in the next room.
The woman who cooked the savory osso
buco, who pointed to show the butcher the one she wanted.
She who talks to her faraway friend
while I linger here at the table with a hot companionable cup
of tea, feeling like one of the friendly natives--
a reliable guide, maybe even the chief's favorite son.
Somewhere, a man is crawling up a rocky hillside
on bleeding knees and palms--
an Irish penitent carrying the stone
of the world in his stomach.
And elsewhere, people of all nations stare at one another
across a long empty table.
But here, the candles give off their warm glow.
The same light that Shakespeare and Isaac Walton wrote by.
The light that lit and shadowed the faces of history.
Only now, it plays on the blue plates, the crumpled napkins,
the cross knife and fork.
In a while, one of us will go up to bed
and the other one will follow.
Then we will slip below the surface of the night
into miles of water, drifting down and down
into the dark soundless bottom until the weight of dreams
pulls us lower still.
Below the shale and layered rock,
beneath the strata of hunger and pleasure,
into the broken bones of the Earth
itself, into the marrow of the only place we know."
[APPLAUSE]