I'll read one more poem.
It's rather long.
It's about five pages long.
Did somebody gasp?
Is that alright, five pages long?
The lines are long, so it takes longer than--
It's a long lined poem.
All my life, I wanted to write a song
of songs, my song of songs.
I thought that was the most beautiful poem in the world.
And of course, it's archaic and everything else,
but it's lovely.
It's so impassioned.
And the reason I guess I love it is because
of its cultural setting.
It's not merely an utterance of love.
And it is that, but it has a kind of cultural setting to it,
even historical setting.
The metaphors are historically and I think and culturally
informed.
And I never could--
the language never came to me.
And about two years ago, I think the language
started coming to me.
And I've been working on.
I'm not entirely finished with it but I'll read it.
Alas, it isn't what I thought it was, but what can you do?
And in the meantime, I've been reading
a lot of the poetry of the troubadours.
And it's probably not a good idea
to read poetry, the troubadours.
It's a little--
I don't know, romantic or something.
But I'm apologizing for my own being, for standing up,
this is awful.
That's it, I wrote a long love poem.
[LAUGHTER] You're here, I'm going to read it.
[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
It's called "The City in Which I Love You."
There's the scene in it that I witnessed
when I was very young.
My father and I were in-- it's called a becak in Indonesia.
It's like a rickshaw except the person who's
pulling it is behind you, he's pushing it on a bicycle.
And I remember once we were going down the road--
what's it called?
[INAUDIBLE]
And we were going down the road and there was a big commotion
ahead, and we stopped.
And we knew that there were arrests being made and so on.
And when my father got out, he said stay here.
And he walked a little ways and I followed him.
And all I remember seeing is this,
the commotion and somebody lying on the ground.
And what I noticed, there was a cart
that a man sells pastries in.
And on the cart, plastered, no hanging,
was a gray even white, whitish-gray gelatinous stuff.
And it wasn't until later my father told me
that was a guy's brains.
But I remember being horrified.
I couldn't understand how his brains got on there.
It was so wild.
And in fact, it was something comical about it.
I may have laughed.
Children are-- I think they're not taught how to react.
So I may have found it comical, it seemed strange to me.
And I talk about that in here.
And I just wanted to let you know
that that's what's going on.
And let me see if there's anything else I should.
I mentioned another city, that's the city of Jakarta.
And there's an epigraph here from the Song of Songs
that says, I will arise now and go
about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways,
I will seek whom I so loveth.
"The City in Which I Love You."
"And when in the city in which I love you,
even my most excellent song goes unanswered
and I mount the scabbed streets, the long
shouts of avenues and tunnel sunken night in search of you.
But I negotiate fog by two minutes
rain, ringing like teeth into the beggar's tin.
Or two men jackaling a third in some alley, weirdly
lit by a couch on fire, that I drag my extinction
in search of you.
Past the guarded schoolyards, the boarded up churches,
swastika-ed synagogues, defended houses
of worship, past newspapered windows of tenements
among the violated, the prosecuted citizenry
throughout this storied, buttressed, scavenged, policed
city I call home in which I am a guest.
A bruise blue in the muscle, you impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache home, so I'm vexed to love you.
Your body, the shape of returns, your hair a torso of light,
your heat, I must have, your opening, I'd
eat each moment of that soft finned fruit,
inverted fountain in which I don't see me.
My tongue remembers your wounded flavor, the vein in my neck
adores you.
A sword stands up between my hips,
my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil.
The shadows under my arms, I promise, are tender,
the shadows under my face do not calculate.
But come smooth other, rough sister.
Yet how will you know me among the captives?
My hair grown long, my blood motley,
my ways trespassed upon.
In the uproar, the confusion of accents and inflections,
how will you hear me when I open my mouth?
Look for me.
One of the drab population under fissured edifices,
fractured artifices, make my various names flock overhead,
I will follow you.
Hew me to your beauty.
Stack in me the unaccountable fire.
Bring on me the iron leaf.
But tenderly, folded one hundred times and creased,
I'll not crack.
Threshed to excellence, I'll achieve you.
But in the city in which I love you, no one comes.
No one meets me in the brick clefts.
In the wedged dark, no finger touches me secretly.
No mouth tastes my flawless salt.
No one awakens the honey in the cells,
finds the humming in the ribs.
The rich business in the recesses.
Hulls clogged, I continue laden, translated by exhaustion
and time's appetite.
My sleep abandoned in bus stations and storefronts
stoops.
My insomnia erected under a sky cross-hatched
by wires, branches, and black flights of rain.
Lewd body of wind jams me in the passageways.
Doors slam like guns going off.
A gun goes off, a pie plate spins
past whizzing its thin tremolo, a plastic bag fat with wind
barrels by and slaps a chain-link fence,
wraps it like clung skin.
In the excavated places, I waited for you.
And I did not cry out.
In the derelict rooms my body needed you
and there was such flight in my breast.
During the daily assaults, I called to you.
And my voice pursued you even backward
to that other city in which I saw a woman squat in the street
beside a body and fan with hr handkerchief
flies from its face.
That woman was not me.
And the corpse lying there.
Lying there so still, it seemed with great effort
as though his whole being was concentrating
on the hole in his forehead.
So still I expected he'd sit up any minute and laugh out loud.
That man was not me.
His wound was his.
His death not mine.
And the soldier who fired the shot then lit a cigarette.
He was not me.
And the ones I do not see in cities all over the world,
the ones sitting, standing, lying down, those in prisons
playing checkers with their knocked out teeth,
they are not me.
Some of them are my age, even my height and weight, none of them
are me.
The woman who is slapped, the man who was kicked,
the ones who don't survive, whose names I do not know,
they are not me forever.
The ones who no longer live in the cities
in which you are not, the cities in which I looked for you.
The rain stops, the moon in her breaths appears overhead.
The only sound now is a far flapping.
Over the National Bank, the flag of some republic
or other gallops like water or fire to tear itself away.
If I feel the night move to disclosures or crescendos,
it's only because I'm famished for meaning.
The night merely dissolves.
And your otherness is perfect as my death.
Your otherness exhausts me like looking suddenly up from here
to impossible stars fading.
Everything is punished by your absence.
Is prayer then the proper attitude
for the mind that longs to be freely blown
but which gets snagged on the barb called world,
that toothache, the actual?
What prayer would I build and to whom?
Where are you in the cities in which I love you?
The city's daily risen to work and to money,
to the magnificent miles and the gold coasts.
Morning comes to this city vacant of you.
Pages and windows flair and you are not there.
Someone sweeps his portion of sidewalk, wakens the drunk,
slumped like laundry and you are gone.
You are not in the wind which someone
notes in the margins of a book.
You are gone out of the small fires
in abandoned lots where human figures huddle,
each aspiring to its own ghost.
Between brick walls in a space no wider than my face,
a leafless sapling stands in mud.
In its branches, a nest of raw mouths gaping and chirping,
scrawny fires that must eat.
My hunger for you is no less than theirs.
At the gates of the city in which I love you,
the sea hauls the sun on its back,
strikes the land which rebukes it.
What ardor in its sliding heft, a flameless friction
on the rocks.
Like the sea, I am recommended by my orphaning.
Noisy with telegrams not received, quarrelsome
with aliases, intricate with misguided journeys
by my expulsions have I come to love you.
Straight from my father's wrath and long
from my mother's womb, late in this century
and on a Wednesday morning, bearing the mark of one
who's experienced neither heaven nor hell.
My birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned.
In league with the stones of the earth,
I enter without retreat or help from history.
The days of no day, my earth of no earth,
I re-enter the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude of dreams
and many words was vain."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]