On the downside part of the hill now.
Oh, yeah.
Really groovy reading it.
You have to read the poem that you just wrote today.
So this is it.
It's good poem.
Don't laugh.
Few things you--
Also stolen from something I heard.
Someone on the radio was helping out the lovelorn and otherwise
miserable and said something to the effect that singles
don't like to go out alone.
Wow, what a line.
There's poems all around us.
They talk about disease in the air.
Those aren't disease germs.
Those are poems in the air.
This poem is in the category of strange happenings.
And strange happenings come with good authority.
One of my favorite authors, Mary Austin,
when she was a girl of, I don't know, 9, 10 years old,
saw God in the walnut tree in her backyard.
And I've never seen that and probably don't
want to see that.
But I'm always fascinated by people
who do see things like that.
Also, I grew up in the woods, and I always felt that there
were strange things happening out there that other people
were seeing, but I wasn't.
Actually, what I did see and what has marred me
for life is when I was little kid,
I was always frightened of cows because I was so small
and they were so big.
And they'll always look at you with those weird eyes
and move their horns like this.
One word you may need to know--
some of you probably already know it-- is mycelium.
That's simply a reference to the fibrous ball of tissue
that makes up fungus.
That appears at the end of the poem.
So this is my idea of what star people must be like.
You know those people who come to Earth?
You see them out at El Con walking around.
[LAUGHTER]
And I really want to believe that those people are really
from stars.
Called "Saints".
"Because singles don't feel comfortable among the herd
but also don't like to go out alone,
I've always thought of famous people
as those who choose someplace like the countryside
around Darien, Connecticut, to step out
of an old oak tree, desiccated but holy,
prefiguring Jane Fonda emerging from her orgasmatron,
innocently looking around in search of a more
classical music experience.
The wandering child who sees this
is damaged for life, his head thereafter a bruised
peach he carries on his shoulders,
and runs off to become a musician or dig
holes in the ground.
And after that, disappears from my story.
But for most of us, not having to bear witness to that
but knowing such things are going on
out in the woods every day, how do we handle it?
Of average intelligence, our experience
is mostly with cows--
gentle but monstrous, who roll their eyes at us
at 4:00 in the morning.
Armed like that, we go on through life telling
no one, not even our spouses.
But when out strolling in the wilds around the Tiergarten,
we see them, noses to ground, hearing the fish when they cry.
Or as a surprise, in the middle of a baseball game,
one jumps up and runs around the bases, his robes and sandals
flapping while the crowd cheers.
We know who he is.
Or on an airplane, sitting next to a business
man who, for an hour or two, shows us his family pictures.
Getting an inkling, we make bold and tell them
about this, who at that turns knowingly,
takes our hand in his cold grip.
And for a moment, the jewel, the tumultuous mycelium
of the globe glitters in the middle of his forehead."
That's why I don't fly on planes, especially
on planes which have passengers with jewels
in the middle of their forehead.
When you're on a plane, don't you
feel like maybe the person next to you
has a jewel in the middle of his forehead
and you don't dare look?
You never feel that way?
I always do.