Thank you.
I hope you excuse me, I have a slight cold
and I have a cough drop in my mouth.
I'll begin by reading a poem.
It's called "A Final Thing."
I didn't know it when I wrote it but I think it's about poetry.
Oh, it just occurred that I'm reading--
First poem I'm reading is called "Final Thing."
Maybe that doesn't make a lot of sense.
Well, maybe if I read it real well,
we can all leave afterwards.
I hope the whole reading isn't going to go backward.
"A Final Thing."
"I am that last, that final thing.
The body in a white sheet listening.
The whole of me trained, curled like one great ear
on a sound, a noise I know, a woman talking in another room.
The woman I love.
And though I can't hear her words by their voicing,
I can guess she is telling a story
using a voice which speaks to another, weighted
with that other's attention and devouring it
by deepening in intention.
Rich with the fullness of what's declared,
this voice points away from itself
to some place in the hearer.
Sends the hearer back to himself to find what he knows.
A saying full of hearing, a murmuring full of telling,
and compassion for the listener and for what's told.
Now interrupted by a second voice, thinner, higher,
uncertain.
Querying it seems an invitation to be met,
stirring anticipation, embodying,
incompletion of time and the day.
My son, my first born, and his mother are involved in a story
no longer only theirs for I too am implicated.
All three of us now clinging to expectancy, writing sound,
and air.
Will my first morning of heaven be this?
No.
And this is not my last morning on earth.
I am simply last to waken in my house
and the first sound I hear is the voice of one
I love speaking to one we love.
I hear it through the bedroom wall.
Something, someday, I'll close my eyes to recall."
I should get this out of my mouth
before it comes out, jettisoning out.
Actually can I put this in there?
Sorry.
Just because I have a cough I don't want--
The poem, of course, is about telling the--