Now I'm going to read a section from The Book of Nightmares
called "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair
in the Moonlight."
And it's just about going in to comfort
a child who wakes up in the middle of the night.
Her name is Maud.
And when the poem is over, she falls back asleep.
It's called "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair
in the Moonlight."
"When I sleepwalk into your room and pick you up and hold you up
in the moonlight, you cling to me hard,
as if clinging could save us.
I think, you think, I will never die.
I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as my broken arms heal themselves around you.
I have heard you tell the sun, "Don't go down."
I have stood by as you told the flower, "Don't grow old.
Don't die."
Little Maud, I would blow the flame out of your silver cup.
I would suck the rot from your fingernail.
I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light.
I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones.
I would help death escape through the little ribs
of your body.
I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood.
I would let nothing of you go ever,
until the washer women feel the clothes fall asleep
in their hands, and hens scratch their spell
across hatchet blades, and rats walk away
from the cultures of the plague, and iron twists weapons
toward the true north, and grease refuses
to slide in the machinery of progress,
and men feel as free on Earth as fleas on the bodies of men.
And yet, perhaps, this is the reason you cry.
This, the dream you wake crying from, being
forever in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.
In a restaurant once, everyone quietly eating,
you clambered up on my lap to all the mouthfuls
rising toward all the mouths.
At the top of your voice you cried your one word, "Caca!
Caca!
Caca!"
And each spoonful stopped, a moment, in mid-air,
in its withering steam.
Yes, you cling because I, like you, only sooner than you,
will go down the path of vanished alphabets, your arms
like the shoes left behind, like the adjectives in the halting
speech of very old men that used to be
able to call up the lost nouns.
And you yourself, some impossible Tuesday in the year
2009, will walk out among the black stones of the field
in the rain, and the stones saying over their one word,
"Ci-git, ci-git, ci-git," and you standing there,
unable to let them--
and the raindrops hitting you on the fontanel over and over,
and you standing there, unable to let them in.
If one day it happens, you find yourself with someone
you love in a cafe at one end of the Pont Mirabeau,
at the zinc bar where white wine stands in upward opening
glasses, and if you commit then, as we did,
the error of thinking, one day, all this will only be memory,
learn to reach deeper into the sorrows
to come, to touch the almost imaginary bones under the face,
to hear under the laughter, the wind crying across the stones.
Kiss the mouth that tells you, here, here
is the world, this mouth, this laughter, these temple
bones, the still undanced cadence of vanishing.
In the light, the moon sends back.
I can see in your eyes the hand that waved once
in my father's eyes, a tiny kite wobbling far up in the twilight
of his last look.
And the angel of all mortal things lets go of the string.
Back you go into your crib.
The last blackbird lights up his gold wings.
Farewell.
Your eyes close inside your head in sleep.
Already in your dreams, the hours begin to sing.
Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,
when I come back, we will go out together.
We will walk out together among the 10,000 things,
each scratched in time with such knowledge, "The wages of dying
is love."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]