Lately I've been a little nostalgic for earlier periods
of my life.
And-- but-- and but--
I'm not certain about sex.
The sense that one has of sex at 15 or 16,
when I think there may be two minutes in a year
when it's not on your mind, you know?
And it's really true.
I mean, I was completely obsessed with it.
And I went through a period where I thought
everything, everything--
pig iron had a lot to do with special sexual actions
that I didn't yet understand.
I suspected this.
And I was talking on the way over with a friend.
And she was saying, is it true that people, as they get older
you know, get conservative?
And I thought, yes, that's definitely true.
But I believe it was Montesquieu.
He's got an essay on repentance.
And he talks about how people my age suddenly
tend to become moral, as though we have made
wise decisions at that point.
And he said, if you're going to repent, repent when you're 17.
It'll mean something.
Otherwise, don't bother.
So, "Sex."
It was when I read Lawrence that I first
saw the world as a prime lushness, an opening
not to be refused.
Wonderful hairs, wonderful mysterious equations,
each hedge dripping, each clock breathlessly
ticking in the heat of that transcendent,
pollinating clarity.
Not a rock or tree that was not suffused with it.
Every bug-ratty spider web a doppelganger
for the flimsy, verbal chiffon that revealed it.
Each sermon, each lecture, a wire
that carried it to where I lay studying it,
if I studied anything more resonant than the tiles
on the ceiling.
For, even as I smudged real numbers on a grid
or traced vectors to a nexus of force and speed,
my mind kept struggling manfully to represent
its infinitely compelling budding and lubricity.
And one morning, Professor Nielsen
said, with regard to my heroic inability
to accept what was given, try to imagine
a circle whose circumference is inside a proton
and whose center is everywhere.
I have thought of it long as a figure for desire,
a patent for the ridiculous.
One of the paradoxes, the need for grace
conjures up from lassitude and greed
like a logical boulder or a Latin-speaking frog.
Often it takes the form of a vulva or a nipple,
when it is not moonlighting with a physicist as a black hole
in one of those Baroque cosmologies
that leads us, like a big head, through blinding insights
until we end up bodiless in a mathematical field.
But as the boy I was grows distant,
he seems not me but some antiquated piece of fiction,
expurgated from the years and quoted by testosterone.
Beef and ambition, fluttering under damp sheets,
he hums his soulful ditty to the sixth dimension.
And for a while, the god in his britches
brings him the ambiguous miscellanies and et ceteras
of pleasure, like bisque that comes
on a flounder-shaped platter at La Lastra in Puebla,
a deep and pungent gruel, alive in black olives,
the crab leg indistinguishable from the eye of the octopus.
And all of it compounded in many spices,
like those prayers of penitence the young Baptists weep
onto the altar cloth, less because they
are admissions of guilt than because they are
truly elegies for promiscuity.
Wonderful hairs, wonderful mysterious equations.
I could confess too, now as my early lust
began ossifying into greed.
I could counsel abstinence.
I know the sorry old man is sorry for something.
One night, a woman came to me, not as a tree or a rock,
but in the one fire of her true life.
What's that got to do with anything
naked in the naked faces of children?
This afternoon, I'm barely aware of the young women,
as they jog over the bridge into Thompson Woods.
But someone must stand very still in the shadows,
listening to the gusts that come just behind them, as
though the veil of matter had been ripped all the way back
to the light of the beginning.
I hear it too, fainter and fainter, then darkness comes.
Why should I praise the exemplary life possible only
in age or failing health?
All that I love was founded on the same premises as heaven,
that pleasure lasts longer than death.
[APPLAUSE]