WEBVTT

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Now I'm going to read a section
from The Book of Nightmares

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called "Little
Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair

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in the Moonlight."

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And it's just about
going in to comfort

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a child who wakes up in
the middle of the night.

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Her name is Maud.

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And when the poem is over,
she falls back asleep.

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It's called "Little
Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair

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in the Moonlight."

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"When I sleepwalk into your room
and pick you up and hold you up

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in the moonlight,
you cling to me hard,

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as if clinging could save us.

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I think, you think,
I will never die.

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I think I exude to you the
permanence of smoke or stars,

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even as my broken arms
heal themselves around you.

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I have heard you tell
the sun, "Don't go down."

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I have stood by as you told
the flower, "Don't grow old.

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Don't die."

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Little Maud, I would blow the
flame out of your silver cup.

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I would suck the rot
from your fingernail.

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I would brush your sprouting
hair of the dying light.

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I would scrape the rust
off your ivory bones.

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I would help death escape
through the little ribs

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of your body.

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I would alchemize the ashes
of your cradle back into wood.

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I would let nothing
of you go ever,

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until the washer women feel
the clothes fall asleep

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in their hands, and
hens scratch their spell

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across hatchet blades,
and rats walk away

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from the cultures of the
plague, and iron twists weapons

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toward the true north,
and grease refuses

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to slide in the
machinery of progress,

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and men feel as free on Earth
as fleas on the bodies of men.

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And yet, perhaps, this
is the reason you cry.

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This, the dream you
wake crying from, being

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forever in the pre-trembling
of a house that falls.

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In a restaurant once,
everyone quietly eating,

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you clambered up on my
lap to all the mouthfuls

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rising toward all the mouths.

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At the top of your voice you
cried your one word, "Caca!

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Caca!

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Caca!"

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And each spoonful stopped,
a moment, in mid-air,

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in its withering steam.

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Yes, you cling because I, like
you, only sooner than you,

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will go down the path of
vanished alphabets, your arms

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like the shoes left behind, like
the adjectives in the halting

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speech of very old
men that used to be

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able to call up the lost nouns.

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And you yourself, some
impossible Tuesday in the year

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2009, will walk out among
the black stones of the field

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in the rain, and the stones
saying over their one word,

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"Ci-git, ci-git, ci-git,"
and you standing there,

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unable to let them--

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and the raindrops hitting you
on the fontanel over and over,

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and you standing there,
unable to let them in.

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If one day it happens, you
find yourself with someone

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you love in a cafe at one
end of the Pont Mirabeau,

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at the zinc bar where white
wine stands in upward opening

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glasses, and if you
commit then, as we did,

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the error of thinking, one day,
all this will only be memory,

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learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows

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to come, to touch the almost
imaginary bones under the face,

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to hear under the laughter, the
wind crying across the stones.

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Kiss the mouth that
tells you, here, here

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is the world, this mouth,
this laughter, these temple

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bones, the still undanced
cadence of vanishing.

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In the light, the
moon sends back.

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I can see in your eyes
the hand that waved once

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in my father's eyes, a tiny kite
wobbling far up in the twilight

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of his last look.

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And the angel of all mortal
things lets go of the string.

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Back you go into your crib.

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The last blackbird
lights up his gold wings.

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Farewell.

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Your eyes close inside
your head in sleep.

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Already in your dreams,
the hours begin to sing.

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Little sleep's-head sprouting
hair in the moonlight,

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when I come back, we
will go out together.

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We will walk out together
among the 10,000 things,

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each scratched in time with such
knowledge, "The wages of dying

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is love."

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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