I want to read now a rather long poem, which was
a long time in coming to me.
It derives from a person I met in Rome in 1954.
And I've been thinking about him ever since.
Our first night in Rome in 1954, we were taken around the city
by a pleasant young Italian water
engineer named Dino Rotunde.
We'd met him on the boat.
And he'd whizzed us all around Rome in his Alfa Romeo,
saying, there's the forum, other points of interest, you know.
And finally, after he'd rather breezily
pointed out most of Rome to us, he
took us to see what he regarded as the real wonder of the city.
There was-- perhaps still is--
a little joint near the Pantheon,
called the Pizzeria Sacrestia.
And it wasn't really a pizzeria, it was a restaurant,
and bar, and hang out.
And there was at this place an extraordinary man, lank,
ill looking, either saintly or diabolical in aspect.
He played the guitar, and sang off color songs.
When not doing that, he would come to your table on request,
and for a couple of cigarettes or a bit of wine,
he would read your mind.
And well he simply did read our minds.
Then, and many times thereafter, while we were in Rome.
And we used to enjoy taking skeptical friends around
to have their hearts broken by this man.
One person we took was the professor of--
was the Norton professor of Italian at Harvard.
A fine theologian, but a thorough skeptic.
The sort of person who doesn't want
to believe in poltergeists, because he thinks if he does,
he may have to believe in God.
[LAUGHTER]
And this friend of ours, you asked your questions
of the mind reader in the form of a written
scribble in Italian.
And our friend wrote, where can I
find an autographed manuscript of Boccaccio?
To which the mind reader gave this answer: Stop looking.
There is no such thing as an autographed manuscript
of Boccaccio.
I think it's fairly good mind reading.
[LAUGHTER]
The mind reader once said to the professor who
became an unwilling but complete convert,
it isn't pleasant, you know, to have a mind that's
like a common latrine.
And since writing this poem, I've
heard of other mind readers who suffered similarly.
Well, he's talking, the mind reader,
to my professor friend in 1955.
"Some things are truly lost.
Think of a sun hat laid for the moment on a parapet,
while three young women, one perhaps in mourning,
talk in the crenellate shade.
A slight wind plucks and budges it.
It scuffs to the edge, and cartwheels into a giant view
of some description.
Haggard escarpments, if you like,
plunge down through mica shimmer, to a moss of pines.
Amidst which, here or there, a half seen river lobs up
a blink of light.
The sun hat falls with what free flirts and stoops
you can imagine, down through that reeling vista, or another.
Unseen by any.
Even by you or me.
It is this when a pipe wrench catapulted
from the jounced back of a pickup truck, dives
headlong into a bushy culvert.
Or a book whose reader is asleep, gobbling the story,
glides from beneath a steamer chair
and yields its flurried pages to the printless sea.
It is one thing to escape from consciousness,
as such things do.
Another to be pent in the dream cache or stony
oubliette of someone's head.
They found when I was little, that I could tell
the place of missing objects.
I stood by the bed of a girl, or the frayed knee of an old man
whose face was lost in shadow.
When did you miss it?
People would be saying.
Where did you see it last?
And then those voices, querying or replying,
came to sound like cries of birds
when the leaves race and whiten, and a black overcast
is shelving over.
The mind is not a landscape.
But if it were, there would in such case, be a tilted moon,
wheeling beyond the wood through which you groped,
its fine spokes breaking in the tangled thickets.
There would be obfuscations.
Paths which turn to dried up stream beds.
Hemlocks which invited through shiny clearings to a groundless
shade.
And yet in a sure stupor, you would come at once
upon dilapidated cairns, abraded moss, and half healed blazes.
Leading to where, around the turning of a fear,
the lost thing shown.
Imagine a railway platform.
The long cars come to a cloudy halt beside it.
And the fogged windows offering a view,
neither to those within, nor those without.
Now in the crowd, forgive my predilection,
is a young woman standing amidst her luggage.
Expecting to be met by you, a stranger.
See how she turns her head.
The eyes engaging and disengaging, pausing
and shying away.
It is like that with things put out of mind.
As the queer saying goes, a lost key
hangs, trammeled by threads, in what
you come to see as the webbed darkness of a sewing basket.
Flashing a little.
Or a photograph, misplaced in an old ledger,
turns its bled, oblivious profile to rebuff your vision.
Yet glistens with the fixative of thought.
What can be wiped from memory?
Not the least meanness, obscenity, humiliation, terror,
which made you clench your eyes, or pulse of happiness,
which quickened your despair.
Nothing can be forgotten.
As I am not permitted to forget.
It was not far from that to this.
This corner cafe table, where, with my lank
gray hair and vatic gaze, I sit and drink
at the receipt of custom.
They come here.
Day and night.
So many people.
Sad women of the quarter, dressed in black,
as to a black confession.
Blinking clerks, who half supposed that Taurus
ruminates upon their destinies.
Men of affairs down from Milan, to clear it with the magus,
before they buy or sell some stock or other.
My fellow drunkards.
Fashionable folk, mocking and ravenously credulous.
And skeptics, bent on proving me a fraud.
For fear that some small wonder, unexplained,
should leave a fissure in the world.
And all St Michael's host come flapping back.
I give them paper and pencil.
Turn away and light a cigarette, as you have seen me do.
They write their questions, fold them up.
I lay my hand on theirs, and go into my frenzy.
Raising my eyes to heaven.
Snorting smoke.
Lolling my head as in the fumes of Delphi.
And then, with shaken spirit guided fingers,
set down the Oracle.
All that of course, is trumpery.
Since nine times out of 10, what words float up within another's
thought surface as soon in mine.
Unfolding there like paper flowers in a water glass.
In the 10th case, I sometimes cheat a little.
That shocks you.
But consider.
What I do cannot so most conceive, be done at all.
And when I fail, I am a charlatan.
Even to such as I have once astounded.
Whereas a tailor can mis-cut my coat and be a tailor still.
I tell you this because you know that I have the gift.
The burden.
Whether or not I put my mind to it,
the world usurps me ceaselessly.
My sixth and never resting sense is a cheap room
black with the anger of insomnia whose wall boards vibrate
with the mutters, plaints, and flushings of the race.
What should I tell them?
I have no answers.
Set your fears at rest.
I scribble when I must.
Your paramour is faithful.
And your spouse is unsuspecting.
You were not seen that day beneath the fig tree.
Still, be more cautious.
When the time is right, expect a promotion.
I foresee a message from a far person who is rich and dying.
You are admired in secret.
If in your judgment profit is in it, you should take the gamble.
As for these fits of weeping, they will pass.
It makes no difference that my lies are bald
and my evasions casual.
It contents them, not to have spoken, yet to have been heard.
What more do they deserve if I could give it, mute breathers
as they are, of selfish hopes and small anxieties?
Faith, justice, valor.
All those reputed rarities of soul,
confirmed in marble by our public statues.
You may be sure that they are rare indeed,
where the soul mopes in private, and I listen.
Sometimes I wonder if the blame is mine.
If, through a sullen fault of the mind's ear,
I miss a resonance in all their fretting.
Is there some huge attention, do you think,
which suffers us and is inviolate?
To which all hearts are open?
Which remarks the sparrows weighty fall?
And overhears, in the worst rancor, a deflected sweetness?
I should be glad to know it.
Meanwhile, saved by the shrewd habit of concupiscence, which
like a visor narrows my regard.
And drinking studiously until my thought is a blind,
lowered almost to the sill.
I hanker for that place beyond the sparrow.
Where the wrench beds in mud.
The sun hat hangs in densest branches.
And the book is drowned.
Ah, you have read my mind.
One more perhaps.
A mezzo litro.
Grazie, Proffessore."
[APPLAUSE]