I would like to read you a couple of poems if I may,
a couple of fairly early poems and then some very recent ones,
just a few.
It won't take long.
And I promise you you can get to the Best Picture
of the Year in a few minutes.
This poem that I would like to read you
is entitled "Forms of the Earth at Abiquiu."
And I wrote it several years ago.
And I have to tell you a little bit about it.
It is dedicated to Georgia O'Keeffe.
And I met Georgia O'Keeffe in the very early '70s.
It was like 1971 or '72.
I was living in Santa Fe and I admired her work very much,
I still do.
And so I drove up, you know, full of--
I was nervous to--
oh, great woman, great painter, one
of the great artists of our time and I
was so nervous about meeting her.
I went up and knocked on her door at a Abiquiu
and she opened the door.
She was dressed in a tuxedo.
Her hair was swept severely back even as mine is tonight.
And she had these wonderful, big, artists' hands.
And she was very beautiful and she invited me into her house.
And we sat in the living room, which was like a museum.
She was doing her so-called rock paintings at the time,
so she had rock paintings on the wall.
And she showed me the fireplace, which she had built
with her own hands and she--
there were window boxes filled with stones.
She loved rocks and she liked to go out into the riverbeds
and pick up stones and she filled window boxes with them.
There were bones.
Of course, she loved bones, and so they
were the skeletons, the skulls of cows
and sheep and everything like that.
There was a snake, the skeleton of a snake in a glass box.
And so I was admiring all of this, and we were talking.
And after about 30 minutes Georgia O'Keeffe
realized that she had neglected to offer me refreshment.
So she got very fidgety and she said, oh, I'm so--
I'm so sorry I've been remiss.
What would you like to drink?
And I couldn't have cared less.
I was having wonderful time and I said, oh, I'm fine please.
But she persisted, and she said, no, no, you must--
you must have something to drink.
And so finally I said, well, I'll have a scotch and Soda.
And so she nodded with satisfaction
and she left the room.
She went out in the direction of the kitchen,
and she did not return.
[LAUGHTER] And I waited, and I waited,
and I waited, and I became extremely uncomfortable.
She was already well into her '80s and I thought, oh dear,
what is she in trouble?
Should I go and investigate or should I stay here and wait?
And then to make matters worse, there came this din
from the kitchen that like the clanging of pots and pans,
banging metal on metal, and I didn't
know what to think of this.
And I was extremely uncomfortable and I began to--
Then she returned at long last, but she
was more flustered than ever.
And she said, oh dear, it's my maid's day off
and I don't know what she did with the key
to the liquor pantry.
And I was so relieved to see her that I said,
oh, please it doesn't matter.
Please don't go to any more trouble.
I'm fine.
Let us resume our conversation.
But that old-- that 80-year-old woman had got it into her mind
that I was going to have a drink.
And to my distress, she excused herself again.
She went out in the direction of the kitchen
and she did not return.
[LAUGHTER] And I waited, and I waited, and I waited,
and again a din, the banging of pots and pans,
noises that I cannot describe to you.
And by that time I had developed a tick under this eye.
[LAUGHTER]
Beads of blood began to appear--
appeared on my forehead.
I was a wreck, a nervous wreck, and I wanted just to leave.
I wanted to die.
[LAUGHTER] Whereupon Georgia O'Keefe returned with my drink
on a silver tray.
And it turns out that this 80 odd year old woman, and this
is true, had taken the pantry doors off
at the hinges with a screwdriver.
[LAUGHTER]
And I visited her several times after that.
Those meetings were not nearly so excruciatingly painful,
but I had to write a poem, of course,
and dedicated to Georgia O'Keeffe,
and so I'll read it to you.
By the way, another footnote is that when she died, on the day
she died I was giving a reading at Bucknell University
and I had this poem and so I was able to read it
as a kind of commemoration which was
a thing of which I'm grateful-- for which I'm grateful.
It's called "forms of the Earth at Abiquiu."
"I imagine the time of our meeting
there among the forms of the Earth at Abiquiu
and other times that followed from the one.
An easy conjugation of stories and late luncheons
of wine and cheese.
All around there were beautiful objects, clean and precise
in their beauty like bone.
Indeed bone, a snake in the filaments of bone,
the skulls of cows and sheep and the many smooth stones
in the window in the flat winter light were beautiful.
I wanted to feel the sun in the stones,
the ashen far flung winter sun.
Then in those days too, I made you
the gift of a small brown stone, and you described it
with the tips of your fingers and knew at once
that it was beautiful.
At once, accordingly, you knew, as you
knew the forms of the Earth at Abiquiu, that time involves
them, and they bear away, beautiful, various,
remote in failing light and the coming of cold."