I was very lucky to get to know Kenneth Koch in the last six
years of his life.
He is very, very important to me,
as a poet, which is incredibly obvious.
I think most of the time I get the sort of figmentive portion
of [INAUDIBLE].
And when he died, I felt like I should write.
I wrote an elegy.
It was an impossible task for me,
so I tried to make it very, very small.
It's called "Elegy on Toy Piano."
"You don't need a pony to connect you
to the unseeable or an airplane to connect you to the sky.
Necessary it is to die if you are a living thing, which
you have no choice about.
Necessary it is to love to live, and there are many manuals
but in all important ways one is on one's own.
You need not cut off your hand.
No need to eat a bouquet.
Your head becomes a peach pit.
Your tongue a honeycomb.
Necessary is to live to love, to charge into the burning tower
then charge back out, and necessary it is to die.
Even for the grass, even for the pony connecting you
to what can't be grasped.
The injured gazelle falls behind the herd.
One last wild enjambment.
Because of the sores in his mouth,
the great poet struggles with a dumpling.
His work has enlarged the world but the world
is about to stop including him.
He is the tower the world runs out of.
When something becomes ash, there's
nothing you can do to turn it back.
About this, even diamonds do not lie."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]