Yes.
48 years ago, March 1970.
And--
Just.
--I think the--
How's that?
Try this-- better?
Yeah.
OK.
A long time ago.
[LAUGHTER]
The cottage was a very different cottage.
It was a real cottage.
There was a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a garden.
And I found out that the night of the reading I
was not to eat with everybody else.
But I had my dinner in the cottage.
And I had a cook who also mixed cocktails for me.
[LAUGHTER]
So this was very different, I mean, from any reading
that I gave anywhere.
But first I--
I didn't think much of it, be thinking like, oh, [? I ?]
like the British people.
But after a couple of martinis, I changed my mind.
And I think I had a steak, but I don't
remember the details of it.
I'll start with a poem that I'm sure I
read that night because it was from a book, my first book that
came out in 1967.
Let's [? see, ?] yeah, 1967, so a lot of years.
"Butcher Shop."
"Sometimes working late at night,
I stop before the closed butcher shop.
There is a single light in the store,
like the light in which the convict takes his tunnel.
An apron hangs on the hook, the blood on it smeared
into a map of the great continents of blood,
the great rivers and oceans of blood.
There are knives that glitter like holsters in a dark church,
where they bring the cripple and the imbecile to be healed.
There is a wooden block where bones are broken, scraped
clean.
The river dries to its bed, but I'm fed where deep in the night
I hear a voice."