Well, perhaps I think it's time for me to finish.
So I'd like to be the last poem in this book called
"Last Words."
It's a love poem.
Spike Milligan, an English comic writer,
asked me if I knew Gladstone's last words.
And I said, "No."
He said, "I feel better now."
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
"Last Words."
"Splendidly, Shakespeare's heroes, Shakespeare's heroines,
once the spotlight's on, enact every night,
with such grace, their verbose deaths.
Then great plush curtains, then smiling resurrection
to applause--
and never their good looks gone.
The last recorded words too of real kings,
real queens, all the famous dead,
are but pithy pretenses, quotable fictions composed
by anonymous men decades later, never with ready notebooks
at the bed.
Most do not know who they are when they die
or where they are, country or town, nor which
hand on their brow.
Some clapped-out actor may imagine distant clapping, bow,
but no real queen will sigh, "Give me my robe,
put on my crown."
Death scenes not life-enhancing, death scenes not beautiful
nor with breeding; yet bravo Sydney Carton,
bravo Duc de Chavost who, euphoric beside the guillotine,
turned down the corner of the page he was reading.
And how would I wish to go?
Not as an opera--
that would offend-- nor like a blue-eyed cowboy shot
and short of words, but finger-tapping still
our private Morse, "love you," before the last flowers
and flies descend."
[AUDIENCE CLAPPING]