This is the "Paschal Lamb," and this
was when the prose poem form was starting to get
a little bit out of control.
"Well, David said.
It was snowing outside and his voice
contained many registers of anger,
disgust, and wounded justice.
I think it's fucking crazy.
I'm not going to be a sacrificial lamb.
In Greece sometimes, when she walked
in the road above the sea back to her house
from the little village in the dark, a friend told me,
and the sky seemed immense, the moon terribly bright,
it made her wonder if her life were a fit gift.
And there is that poor heifer in the poem
by Keats, all decked out in ribbons and flowers, no terror
in the eyes, no uncontrollable slobber of mucus at the muzzle,
since she doesn't understand the festivities.
And David after he quit academic life, actually
bought a ranch in Kentucky near a town named Pleasureville,
and began to raise sheep.
When we visited that summer and the night
was shrill with crickets and the heat did not let up,
we sat for a long time after dinner
and he told again the story about his first teaching
job and the vice president.
When he bought the place, he continued his subscriptions
to The Guardian and the Workers Vanguard,
but they piled up in a corner unread.
He had a mortgage to pay.
He didn't know anything about raising animals for slaughter,
and so he read The American Sheepman
with an intensity he said he had never even approximated
when he was reading political theory for his PhD orals.
The vice president of the United States,
after his term in office, accepted a position
as lecturer in political science at a small college
in his home district, where David had just
taken his first job.
The dean brought Hubert Humphrey around to introduce him
to the faculty.
When they came to David's office,
the vice president, expensively dressed, immensely hardy,
extended his hand and David did not
feel he could take it because he believed
the man was a war criminal.
And not knowing any other way to avoid the awkwardness,
he said so, which was the beginning of his losing the job
at that college.
But that was the dean's doing.
The vice president started to cry.
He had the hurt look in his eyes,
David said, of the kicked dog with a long unblemished record
of loyalty and affection, this man who had publicly defended,
had praised, the terror bombing of villages full of peasants.
He seemed to David unimaginably empty of inner life
if he could be hurt rather than affronted by a young man making
a stiffly moral gesture in front of two men his father's age.
David said he didn't like the fact that he did it,
but that he had never looked at another human being
with such icy wondering detachment.
And so in the high ceiling kitchen, the air drenched
with the odor of clover, we remembered Vic Doyno
in the snow in Buffalo, in the days when the war went on
continuously like a nightmare in our waking and sleeping hours.
Vic had come to work flushed with excitement
at an idea he had had in the middle of the night.
He had figured out how to end the war.
It was a simple plan.
Everyone in the country--
in the world, certainly a lot of Swedish and English
students would go along--
who was opposed to the war would simply
cut off the little finger on the left hand
and send it to the president.
Imagine!
They would arrive slowly at first, the act of two or three
maniacs, but the news would hit the papers
and the next day there would be a few more.
And the day after that more.
And on the fourth day there would be thousands.
And on the fifth day, clinics would be set up--
organized by medical students in Madison, San Francisco,
Stockholm, Paris--
to deal with the surgical procedure safely
and on a massive scale.
And on the sixth day, the war would stop.
It would stop.
And the day after that, the helicopters at Bienhoa
would sit on the airfields in silence
like squads of disciplined mosquitoes.
And peasants, worried and curious
because peasants are always worried and curious,
would stare up at the silence of an unfamiliar blue
cirrus-drifted sky.
In years later, we would know each other
by those missing fingers.
An aging Japanese businessman minus a little finger
on his left hand would notice the similarly mutilated hand
of his cab driver in Chicago, and they
would exchange a fleeting unspoken nod of fellowship.
And it could happen.
All we had to do to make it happen, David, Vic had said,
while the water for tea hissed on the hot plate
in David's chilly office and the snow came down thick as cotton
batting, was cut off the little fingers on our hands right now,
take them to the department secretary,
and have her put them in the mail."
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]