Slightly different direction now.
This is a poem called "The Lesson."
Came out of one of my books, a book actually
called Charon's Cosmology.
So to speak, after I came to this country,
I kind of forgot my European childhood.
And it took me years to begin remembering it.
I mean, I just wasn't thinking about it.
I mean, it wasn't that interesting.
And I had other things to worry about.
And so I-- and then at some point,
I started thinking about this.
And so here, this poem, this is really
one of those just waking up and thinking about some
of those things, and then essentially thinking
about history, 20th century history.
The poem is called "The Lesson."
"It occurs to me now that all these years,
I have been the idiot pupil of a practical joker.
Diligently and with foolish reverence,
I wrote down what I took to be his wise pronouncements
concerning my life on Earth.
Like a parrot, I rattled off the dates of wars and revolutions.
I rejoiced at the death of my tormentors.
I even became convinced that their number was diminishing.
It seemed to me that gradually, my teacher
was revealing to me a pattern, that what I was being told
was an intricate plot of a picaresque novel
in installments, the last pages of which
would be given over entirely to lyrical evocations of nature.
Unfortunately, with time, I began
to detect in myself an inability to forget
even the most trivial detail.
I lingered more and more over the beginnings--
the haircut of a soldier who was urinating
against our fence, shadows of trees on the ceiling the day
my mother and I had nothing to eat.
Somehow I couldn't get past that prison train that
kept waking me up every night.
I couldn't get that whistle, that rumble out of my head.
In this classroom, austerely furnished by my insomnia,
at a desk consisting of my two knees,
for the first time in this long and terrifying apprenticeship,
I burst out laughing, forgive me, at the memory of my uncle
charging a barricade with a homemade bomb.
I burst out laughing."