OK.
I'll read one more poem.
I knew there are a lot of writers sitting out there.
So this is a poem that sort of centers around
how hard it is to do this thing.
Life doesn't want us to make art.
Life wants us to make more life.
So it gets in the way sort all of the time.
This poem is set in Aix-en-Provence.
And there's a reference to thyme.
And that's the one with the Y, which grows wild on the ground
there.
There's a reference to the sanglier.
Those are those cute little wild pigs that run around,
not the scary ones with the big tusks,
about that high, that run around in the wild thyme.
And they're available.
[LAUGHTER]
And there's a reference, at the end, to the Bald Mountain.
And that's Mont Saint-Victoire, which, as you probably know,
Cézanne painted over and over and over and over from every
possible angle.
The poem is called "Largesse."
"Banging the blue shutters--
night-rain.
And a deep gash opened in the yard.
By noon, the usual unstinting sun but also wind.
The olive trees gone silver inside out, and the slender
cypresses like women in fringed shawls, hugging themselves.
And over the rosemary hedge, the pocked
fig giving its purple scroll to the ground.
What was it had made me sad?
At the market, stall after a noisy stall, melons, olives,
more fresh herbs than I could name,
tomatoes still stitched to the cut vine, the soft transparent
squid shelled on ice.
Also, hanging there beside the garlic braids,
meek as the sausages, plucked fowl with feet.
Under a goose-wing, I had a violent dream.
I was carrying a baby and was blind or blinded on
and off, the ledge I walked, blanking out long minutes
at a time.
He'd flung a confident arm around my neck.
A spidery crack traversed his china skull.
Then it was not a ledge but a bridge, like a tongue.
From the window over my desk, I could look down
at the rain-ruined nest, the sanglier
had scrabbled in the thyme, or up,
to the bald mountain and all the paintings.
I looked up.
That's where one looks in the grip of a dream."
Thanks for coming.
[APPLAUSE]