I just finished assembling this book.
And it takes me a while to find things
in it because I can't remember where
the absolutely single and only correct
order in which I finally decided to put them.
But in a moment, I will have found the poem.
Experienced platform performers, sometimes they
pretend to get lost just to give themselves
a break between pieces.
But I'm too professional to do anything like that.
[LAUGHTER]
[FLICKERING SOUNDS OF A CIGARETTE LIGHTER]
This is another little story, I guess, this poem.
It's called "Pissing Off The Back
Of The Boat Into The Nivernais Canal."
It's set in France, where it's OK to do such things.
[LAUGHTER]
The French have no shame.
"Pissing Off The Back Of The Boat Into The Nivernais Canal."
"It's so cold, my cock is furled like a nutmeat, and cold,
for all its warm aspirations and traffic of urine.
37 years old, and it takes me a second to find it--
[LAUGHTER]
--the poor pink slug, so far from the brash volunteer
of the boudoir.
I arc a few finishing stutters into the water.
Already they're converted, opaque and chill.
How commodious the dark universe is and companionable the stars.
How drunk I am.
I shake my shriveled nozzle and three drops
lurk out like syllables from before they were languages.
[LAUGHTER]
Snug in my pants, it will leak a whole sentence in Latin.
[LAUGHTER]
How like a lock-keeper's life a penis biography would be,
bucolic and dull.
What the penis knows of sex is only arithmetic.
The tongue can kiss and tell, but the imagination
has, as usual, most of the fun.
It makes discriminations, bad jokes.
It knows itself to be tragic, and thereby, silly.
And it can tell a dull story well, drop by reluctant drop.
What it can't do is be a body, nor survive time's acid work
on the body it enlivens, I think,
as I try not to pitch my wine-dulled body
and wary imagination with it into the inky canal
by the small force of tugging my zipper up.
How much damage to themselves the body and the imagination
can absorb, I think, as I drizzle to sleep,
and how much the imagination makes of its body of work,
a place to recover itself."
I have another poem that I'm going to have
to search for very briefly.
And while I'm looking for it, I'll tell you a--
my last words on the subject of the last poem.
Do you know what the elephant said to the naked man?
How do you eat with that thing?
[LAUGHTER]