I think I'll end with this poem, and it's not very long.
No.
This is a poem about a geometric point.
It's called The Point.
It's talking about a little--
big piece of paper, and a little dot, that kind of thing,
a point.
And if you read Euclid and others,
it's sort of-- in a sense, it doesn't exist really, so forth.
It's just a very abstract, a very complex thing.
The Geometric Point, and so I'm thinking about that little dot
in a big piece of paper.
The Point.
It has four parts, but just a little pause between parts.
The Point.
This is a story afraid to go on.
This is the iron cradle of the stillness that rocks
the story afraid to go on.
How it regrets the loss of its purity.
The madness of this single burnt consonant, which now sits shy,
solitary among all these white spaces.
And it dreams, the story afraid to go on.
In its dream, it builds itself in the shape
of the gallows tree.
When the gallows are completed, it
hangs by the neck, what's left of its dreamings.
Underneath in the dirt, the shadow of its beginning
comes to nibble its quivering feet.
There is no point, says the story afraid to go on.
It's all a question of the mote in your eye.
It watches as you watch.
Perhaps this evening reflects its final blackness.
Reflects its final mourning, before it
dissolves into a tear.
After its death, they opened the story afraid to go on
and found nothing.
Inside nothing, they found a slip of the tongue.
Inside the tongue, a loose hair.
Inside the hair, they found whatever
is destroyed each time it is named.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]