OK.
So I will end with this poem, which needs a little gloss,
I think.
Two things.
The reference to the eunuchs and what
they carry leaving the palace of the last emperor of China
is from Bertolucci's great film, The Last Emperor.
Have you seen that film, some of you?
Yeah.
It's a memorable scene.
And I've heard that somewhere in the Vatican Museum,
there's a room full of the broken
off private parts of the classical male nude statues--
[LAUGHTER]
--which were removed and replaced
with plaster fig leaves.
I can't vouch for the truth of that,
but I do enjoy entertaining the idea.
[LAUGHTER]
When I started writing this poem, all I knew
was that the statues were restless.
"Be Careful What You Remember."
"Can you see them now, the statues?
Can you see them stirring on their pedestals,
trying out their stiff arms, stepping gingerly down,
breaking the glass walls that encase them?
At the Vatican, forcing the door of the locked room,
tearing off the plaster-of-Paris fig leaves,
rummaging about in the heaps of broken off genitals,
so that, when they leave God's palace of art,
like the eunuchs of China's final dynasty
who left the palace for the last time, carrying in small jars
the parts of themselves taken by empire,
so too, the statues would be whole now, heading home.
They'd tear themselves from the fountains,
leaving behind the public play of the waters,
climb down from their candlelit niches,
deserting their place in the great composition.
They enter the long loneliness of roads,
their exodus making a path from the cities,
a gleaming white stream like refugees returning
to their distant, burned villages, their memories
of desolation, of marble.
Day and night they travel, some leading
the horses on which they've been mounted for years in piazzas,
their postures heroic.
All were on foot, even the gods, unaccustomed to walking,
and angels from tombstones, their wings hanging useless.
Scholars and poets, tall women in togas,
a boxer with a broken nose, a hooded woman stumbling
under her son's dead weight.
An armless Venus, a headless Victory
led by Justice, the blindfold torn from her eyes.
Their streams converging on the road to the mountains,
they climb higher and higher, like salmon
returning to the ponds that had spawned them.
The statues, relentless, made their way to the quarries from
which they were hewn, the open vein in the heart
of the mountain."
[ENGINE REVVING]
Perfect.
"An avalanche heard from a distance,
rumbling and thundering, or an earthquake.
A war begun or a world ending, we could only
guess what we had heard.
Then word spread that the statues were missing.
The fountains, the squares, the galleries stood empty.
The gardens were vacant, the pedestals naked,
the tombstones abstract.
And it is true.
Where the quarries had been, you can travel there
and see for yourself.
The mountain is whole again, the great rift closed,
and young trees grow thick again on the slopes."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]