A brief pause for mopping.
[LAUGHTER]
Everybody knows the bad stuff about old age.
It's kind of out there.
But how many know the joys of it?
Well, this poem is just a little short of that.
It's about those joys, the letting it go,
and as the title says, "Freeing the Hands."
Up there on the wall, this is for any of the young people
in this audience.
Thank you, by the way, any of you from the honors class, which
was an honor to visit today.
Had a great time with you guys.
If you've only seen digital time and you think it's linear,
that's the clock I'm talking about, OK?
[LAUGHTER]
"Freeing the Hands."
And it was all askew
Numbers scattered
A rock slide of lost count
And the little hand that once circled ours like a chained dog
And the long hand that kept pointing
to the minutes, useless now
And the lock unsecured the door
Flat in the wet grass
Torn from its hinges
Everything a ruin,
Strewn, the scatter of an old design on a smashed white plate
In all this shattered pattern, unreadable what came apart
What opened
Everything spilt, pouring
O, the flood of it!
The old bridge over it
Shaking the long river of it
Heading out past the old boxes
The last algorithm
The laughter of birds at the absurd processing of words
Imagine
Something deletes the period from every sentence
The judge has fled from the bench to the mountains
The streams are running cold and pure, pouring with melting snow
Spring is forcing the rock to relent along whatever
flaw opens a path for the flood
The jack is out of the box
The genie is out of the bottle
A trout leaps in the stream with a flung
dazzle of sun-filled drops
As the spring pours from the rock
Opening, error, era to air
Freeing the hands that once forever circled
the round, imprisoned face of time
[APPLAUSE]