I'm glad too that the [INAUDIBLE] stopped,
but I'm not going to go too long.
I'm going to read a poem that's called "Lucy".
And I want to thank Catherine again
for helping to think of what to read tonight
and just for general companionship on this trip.
Lucy, I'd like to tell you is--
some of you may know this--
she's a skeleton from Ethiopia.
You know about her?
Yeah.
Well, I didn't, but I heard about her.
But then I read something about her,
so let me read it just in case you didn't hear about it.
Her skeleton is approximately 3.2 million years old,
whose genus and species are Australopithecus afarensis,
or southern ape of afar after the region of Ethiopia
where the bones were found.
She was discovered in 1974 in Hagar in northern Ethiopia.
Lucy remains the oldest and most complete
adult human ancestor fully retrieved from Africa soil.
The Ethiopian people refer to her as Dinkenesh,
an Amharic language term meaning you are beautiful.
In this poem, which is 15 poems one after another.
I'll tell you the things I'm referring to ahead of time,
so I won't stop.
There's a song.
There's a quotation from William Carlos Williams, "My saxifrage
that splits the rocks."
There's a reference to 9/11 when I
talk about bodies falling from the towers
or friends of mine who died last summer:
Ruth, Grace, Helen Ruth, Jane.
They're mentioned.
Nicolay, who I refer to is a monk
who has just died in Chekhov's story Easter Eve,
and Ieronim, in the story, a friend of his,
is when a lame monk who works the ferry across the river
to the monastery in the story.
There are wild turkeys and deer in the poem.
I was in the country when I wrote it, and there were.
Everything happened to me.
Rilke lines from the "Book of Hours"
were written on the wall of the room I was in.
Lucy's picture is a reconstruction
that I saw from her skeleton of what she may have looked like.
You know how museums do that?
So that's it, I think.
Oh, and Martín Ramírez, who was a Mexican immigrant painter.
You may know about him.
He lived for more than 30 years in DeWitt State
Hospital in California until his death in 1963.
His work was shown at the American Folk Art Museum
in New York City in the spring of 2007 where I saw it.
There was going to be another show in about two weeks.
Half his lifetime of work was in the doctor's garage, a doctor
who treated him for years.
He used to bring them home.
He would do his art on paper bags or things like that.
The doctor would bring him pencils, colored pencils.
His art is wonderful if you get the chance to see it.