Next to last poem for those of you who want to go home.
I don't mean that.
But I think it helps you to know that.
You wake up a little bit so you can hear the last two.
Wake up.
I don't know.
I get tired.
My head gets tired trying to listen.
If you know it's the home stretch,
suddenly there's a nice little juiciness.
It comes back inside your head.
People don't get tired because they don't like poetry.
It's hard work.
It's the most unnatural thing in the world.
I was saying to somebody here, I don't
know why people read poetry.
My mother used to say, if that's what you meant,
why don't you say it instead of--
[LAUGH]
I'm sure those of you who live in the South
know the rest of the sentence was if that's what you meant,
why didn't you say it instead of going all around the barn?
This is called Going Wrong.
Now I'm living in a Greek village
on the island of Lesbos, up in a Greek village where nobody,
no foreigner had ever lived.
It's a wonderful place.
All the young men have gone away to work on ships.
It's just the old men and women and children.
It's the Greece that will last about another maybe 15 years.
It's a Greece that's lived for 2,000, 3,000 years
and now it's over because time has speeded up
and American girls come in bikinis,
the kids don't want to stay on the farm,
the boys don't want to stay on the farm.
A famous writer once said that the dark ages
ended when the bells began to ring
and the ships began to sail, meaning that in the Middle Ages
you lived in God's time.
There was no time.
You were living here until you went to your grave
and into heaven.
You didn't have any clocks.
There were no public clocks, no wristwatches.
They didn't count time.
They say there's a village in Spain where people don't
keep records of the birthday.
Nobody knows how old they are.
It said to be the youngest village in the world
because you don't know what's appropriate.
If you don't know that you're 40,
you don't know to act that way.
I'll go off and talk about the way they come in
and look at tomatoes.
The farmers will come in with two tomatoes
and they'll put them down and go sit down
and nothing will happen for 20 minutes.
Then an old farmer will get up and go over and stand and look
at the tomatoes for a long time sometimes.
They go over and say nothing, go over and sit down.
Then maybe an hour will go by and maybe another farmer
will come over and pick up the tomato and turn it over.
It's wonderful.
It's so pure.
Incredible.
Well I'll tell one little thing I liked.
All the old women hang their laundry
out, except the one beautiful, young wife in the village.
Her lingerie is never hung out.
And this story tells about how they would bring--
Every morning a truck would come up at dawn with the fish catch
from the sea.
You kind of run up when you hear the whistle
and you get in with all the old women
and you kind of push your way to the front.
You don't.
Not with these women.
You don't push your way to the front.
You wait your turn.
I wait my turn.
They get all the good fish and then
I get fish I think for a penny.
So there's no hurry, but you get caught up in the thing.
The fish are dreadful.
I mean, they're fresh but there's something mysterious
about fish.
They're not like us.
The fish are dreadful.
They're brought up the mountain in the dawn most days,
beautiful and alien and cold from night under the sea,
the grand rooms fading from the flat eyes.
Soft machinery of the dark, the man thinks as he washes them.
"What do you know of my machinery?" the Lord says.
"Sure," the man says quietly and cuts into them,
laying back the dozen struts, getting
at the muck of something terrible.
"You are the one who chooses to live this way," says the Lord.
"I built cities where things are human.
I make Tuscany and you go to live with rock and solitude."
The man washes away the blood and arranges the fish prettily,
starts the onions and hot olive oil and puts in peppers.
"You have started to live without women."
He takes everything out and puts in the fish.
"No one knows where you are.
People forget you.
You are vain and stubborn."
The man slices tomatoes and lemons, takes out the fish
and scrambles eggs.
I am not stubborn, he thinks, laying all of it
out on the big table in the courtyard
full of the early sun, the shadow of swallows
flying on the food.
Not stubborn at all, just greedy.