WEBVTT

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And I'll end with a poem
called Repressed Theme.

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That comes from a time that I
spent in Europe visiting Rome

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and Southern France and Spain
all along the Mediterranean.

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And at the beginning
of that trip,

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I took a day trip out
of Rome to Tarquinia

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where there is fields of
nothing until you go underneath,

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and there are tombs in these
fields that have been emptied

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out of most of their artifacts.

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But what remains are
the pastel paintings

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on the four walls of the tombs.

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I was struck by those
images and they entered

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the dream time of that trip.

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Repressed Theme.

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But most of all my knowing
I would write to her

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after sleeping through
hours of broadcasting,

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us backlit by so much moonlight,
and the population of the city

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immediately behind.

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Is it an idea to consider
that the person with whom

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one speaks less and less is the
one after all one came to see?

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The lightness I wake with,
knowing self as fruit.

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At bottom a pit unmarked
by sepulchral engravings,

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the ancient tombs at Tarquinia.

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The body's weight and
its perennial shift

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even as the sweetest
of savants rises upward

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in a tower of bells.

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Is it our pet
then, the hunchback

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who fondles even
fucks the gargoyle

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in the dream where I wake to the
pitch of your breaking voice?

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Fragments, and only slender
hope of offering something

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more than obscure and
less than obvious.

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The instructions return
cranked like a phonograph.

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Descend into the rooms
of the ancient dead who

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are by now nonexistent against
these lyrically frescoed walls.

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A simple fish, a swallow,
the horizontal male figure

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suspended in the pastels
of a pre-century century.

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Yes, open the tourist door
to the arm rail and stair.

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A breath held 30
centuries exhumed

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in an era of nuclear silos
erect in a similar field.

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The absence of them.

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The absence of their
swords and lutes.

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A young girl's mirror
surviving like an accusation,

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respecting you less and less for
clinging to a version wrought

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of things you cannot bear.

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The exact position
of the woman you love

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seated for centuries in
someone's arms by the fire.

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The noon peach, so juicy
you have to lean over.

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It's painful.

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The specter that rises like
a scarecrow making visible

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the acre in which it stands.

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Orchards by sex to
flesh from stones.

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This body extended like a
thought long believing nothing

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after all is lost, not
even by comparison.

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[APPLAUSE]

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