The next poem is called "At Mt.
Auburn Cemetery."
At Mt.
Auburn Cemetery
Walking among the graves for exercise
Where do you get your ideas
How do I stop them
Looking for Mike Mazur's marker
I looked down at the grass and saw Stanislaw Baranczak
Our Solidarity poetry reading in Poznan
Years later, in Newton now he said
I'm a US Liberal with a car like everybody else
When I held Bobo dying in my arms
His green eyes told me I am not done yet
Then he was gone
When he was young, he enjoyed
Leaping up onto the copy machine to press
A button and hear it hum to life and rustle
A blank page, then another out onto its tray
Sometimes he batted the pages down to the floor
I used to call it Bobo's hobby
Here's a marble wicker bassinet
Marking a baby's grave
To sever the good fellowship of dust
The vet's needle first, a sedative, then death
Now Willie paces the house
Mowling his elegy for Bobo
They never meow to one another,
Just to people or to their nursing mother
when they're small
I marvel at this massive labelled American elm
Spreading above a cluster of newer names
Chang, Ohanessian, Kondakis joining Howells,
Emerson, Shaw
And here's a six-foot sphere of polished granite
Perfect and inscribed Walker
Should I have let him die his own cat way
The cemetery official confided
Bruce Lee spends less on a stone than Schwarzenegger
What will mark the markers like
When mourners they bow and kneel
And fall down flat to kiss the heaps
They have in trust under the splendid elm
Also marked with its tag a noble survivor
Civilization lifted my cat from the street
Gave him a name, his shots, and managed his death
Now Willie howls the loss from room to room
When people say I'm ashamed of being German, Said Arendt
I want to say I'm ashamed of being human
Sometimes when Bobo made his copies of nothing
I'd crumple one for him to chase
And combat in the game of being himself
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thanks very much