[LAUGHTER]
So--
[APPLAUSE]
A lot of my friends have written poems
about their year in Paris, or the year in Berlin,
or wherever they went.
And here's a poem about my first year in Paris.
I hope it comes through.
I lived in an old hotel, called the Hotel de Santana
and it was full of Romanians who were exiles--
the fascists-- and who'd got some money
from a King of something.
It was all mysterious.
Once a month, they get a small check,
and they would spend it all, get drunk, and go back
to bed for a month.
And there was a guy that used to come out
in front of a restaurant we were at,
and he was selling a little red bibles.
It's sort of like Mao Zedong's red books, you know?
And he would say, 'fin du monde', end of the world,
you know, 'jeunesse passe'.
And we used to laugh at him.
Now I realize he was a great prophet.
[LAUGHTER]
And this poem is called, "Whatever Paris Meant."
We used to go in the middle of the night to get soup,
at a place called Les Halles, The Halls.
And then when the farmers came I think
Les Halles is no longer there.
"It wasn't till Monday, November 14,
1994, that I decided Offenbach was too glutted,
and the oom-pah-pah would have to go.
Though, sometimes, my mood changed,
and all the spitefulness of that half century
was converted to the pleasure of understanding the, oh, yes,
and ah, yes, I learned in my first 10 years,
behind two pillars in a room full of starch curtains.
Whatever Paris meant in 1950, whatever agit was in the air--
in pitched battles over Coca-Cola,
and the wearing of black behind a piece of horsemeat,
there still was enough, thanks god, of the bella, bella
to last a few more years.
And there was a man who carried a leather
bag of small red bibles.
He was our personal fury, who stood over us singing,
'jeunesse passe, jeunesse passe', something between a crow and a sparrow.
It was our cry for over a year.
It was a greeting between us.
Once at 3:00 in the morning, when my Romanians woke me up
for soup, we pounded each other on the bridge going over,
and sang it in French and German.
Something of Offenbach was in our hearts.
We jumped up on the rails, and fell to the sidewalk
on our knees.
We did it all night.
In the morning when I wrote and waited
for my Briton to make my bed, so I could bend over her,
I wiped those drums out, and buried those Romanians.
I didn't know about sighing yet.
I just stared at the fixture, and she fell asleep,
with her hand on my shoulder.
I walk with my two arms waving sometimes.
I'm explaining, and I have the limp I
started in Paris, a kind of rolling from side to side.
I still crash into male and female hybrids.
I still lean against the metal poles to stretch my hamstrings,
and I still do a dream walk from one end of New York
to the other.
West to east, and south to north.
The music goes oompa, oopma, oopma.
The words are 'jeunesse passe, jeunesse passe'.
The window faced the Moroccan smoke shop.
The street was empty."