And I'll end with a poem called Repressed Theme.
That comes from a time that I spent in Europe visiting Rome
and Southern France and Spain all along the Mediterranean.
And at the beginning of that trip,
I took a day trip out of Rome to Tarquinia
where there is fields of nothing until you go underneath,
and there are tombs in these fields that have been emptied
out of most of their artifacts.
But what remains are the pastel paintings
on the four walls of the tombs.
I was struck by those images and they entered
the dream time of that trip.
Repressed Theme.
But most of all my knowing I would write to her
after sleeping through hours of broadcasting,
us backlit by so much moonlight, and the population of the city
immediately behind.
Is it an idea to consider that the person with whom
one speaks less and less is the one after all one came to see?
The lightness I wake with, knowing self as fruit.
At bottom a pit unmarked by sepulchral engravings,
the ancient tombs at Tarquinia.
The body's weight and its perennial shift
even as the sweetest of savants rises upward
in a tower of bells.
Is it our pet then, the hunchback
who fondles even fucks the gargoyle
in the dream where I wake to the pitch of your breaking voice?
Fragments, and only slender hope of offering something
more than obscure and less than obvious.
The instructions return cranked like a phonograph.
Descend into the rooms of the ancient dead who
are by now nonexistent against these lyrically frescoed walls.
A simple fish, a swallow, the horizontal male figure
suspended in the pastels of a pre-century century.
Yes, open the tourist door to the arm rail and stair.
A breath held 30 centuries exhumed
in an era of nuclear silos erect in a similar field.
The absence of them.
The absence of their swords and lutes.
A young girl's mirror surviving like an accusation,
respecting you less and less for clinging to a version wrought
of things you cannot bear.
The exact position of the woman you love
seated for centuries in someone's arms by the fire.
The noon peach, so juicy you have to lean over.
It's painful.
The specter that rises like a scarecrow making visible
the acre in which it stands.
Orchards by sex to flesh from stones.
This body extended like a thought long believing nothing
after all is lost, not even by comparison.
[APPLAUSE]