--a poem call "Memory."
Somewhere, this is, in some ways,
a memory of Allen Ginsberg [INAUDIBLE].
But I can't quite quickly recall.
One of his, toward the end of his life, books,
he has a dream in which his mother tells him
that she's met God.
And God turns out to be an old and somewhat derelict
person, a man who lives across the river in the Palisades.
[LAUGHTER]
And he lives in a rather humble manner.
And she talks to him and asks him
how come he's let the world into such a state.
And he says, well, he's done his best he but just can't keep it
together.
[LAUGHTER]
It was wonderful, I was reading Nietzsche no less, or something
to do with Nietzsche.
It came up as a wonderful quote of Nietzsche's of Stendhal,
a terrific French writer.
And he's really saying, he really wishes--
one of the minds he really delights in is Stendhal's.
And he says, in fact, he almost wishes that he hadn't really
existed, because he preempts all of Nietzsche's sort
of punchlines about religion, et cetera.
And the great one he quotes as instances of Stendhal's,
a vigorous atheist, saying, the only excuse God has
is that he doesn't exist.
[LAUGHTER]
Which is pretty quick.
That's the only thing he can say in defense is he doesn't exist.
Otherwise, he's in trouble.
[LAUGHTER]
"Memory."
Somewhere, Allen Ginsberg is recalling
his mother's dream about God.
An old man, she says, living across the river in Palisades,
obscure, battered, in a shack with hardly any provisions.
Straight off she asks him, "How could you
let the world get into such a mess?"
And he can answer only, I did the best I could.
She tells Allen he looks neglected
and there are yellow pee stains on his underpants.
"Hard to hear God could not do any better than any of us--
just another old man sitting on some bench or some chair.
I remember it was a urologist told me
how to strip the remaining pee from my penis
by using my fingers' pressure, just
back off the balls, the prostate, then
bringing it forward so that the last drops of it
would go into the toilet, not onto my clothes.
Still it's of necessity an imperfect solution.
How stand at the public urinal, seeming to play with oneself?
[LAUGHTER]
Yet, how not-- if that's what it takes not to walk out,
awkward, wide-legged, damp from the crotch down?
I cannot believe age could be easy for anyone.
On Golden Pond may be a pleasant picture
of a lake in that general area of New Hampshire,
but it's not true--
any of it.
Please, don't put, if you can help,
your loved ones in a care facility.
They will only die there.
Everyone's sick there.
It's why they've come.
I don't know now what will or may happen to me.
I don't feel any longer a simple person with a name.
I'm like a kid at his or her first day of school--
all new, all surprising, the teacher
with her curious, large face, the other unexpected children,
all of us finally unsure.
The seeming fractures of a self grow ominous,
like peaks of old mountains remembered
but faint in the obscuring fog.
Time to push off, do some push-ups perhaps,
take a walk with the neighbors I haven't spoken to in years."