The next poem I'm going to read is called Windows
and was written after a particularly difficult time
for me.
We'd moved from a beautiful house in the country-
[MOTORCYCLE REVS IN DISTANCE]
[LAUGHTER]
Where you couldn't hear a motorcycle.
[LAUGHTER]
[MOTORCYCLE REVS]
Tucson, home of the Hell's Angels.
I always wondered about you guys out here.
Well, we moved from, as I was saying,
trying to be professorial.
We moved from a house in the country
to a small house in town, in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
And it was a very small town.
And it was a very small house.
The study where I had to work in was about six feet long
and about a foot and a half wide.
And had a window, which was above your body.
So you could only look up occasionally and see, perhaps,
a waving tree.
I blame this room entirely for not being able to write.
And it was good to have a room like that, for that reason.
When I finally broke out of a writing slump of about a year,
I wrote this poem called Windows.
And I can thank the window in this tiny little room
for the poem.
Windows.
The window's site is small.
A branch with leaves, some trees swaying in the background.
A dimensionless guy behind it, wavering with clouds.
Inside, there is less.
The home, its desk, shapes of furniture, so much idle
thought.
The window is a bridge of glass.
A surface to see through.
A stranger's face.
In its frame, there is an artless picture,
a dull form in slow motion, the psychology of discontent.
There is a window in the hand's palm, in the drinking glass.
Soon enough, it all adds up.
There is a place where the inner and outer worlds must touch,
but don't.
Where yes and no make no sense.
Perhaps the vandal who breaks a window, the burglar who
travels through it, do battle with boredom.
Break the surface of the world as it appears to us.
Or at night, when no world appears beyond the window,
and we settle for less.
What we see in its reflection is what
we want, but don't believe in.
Things we couldn't bear to love.
The first time I read that poem was in New York City
and I got home from the reading to find that there was a phone
call from my wife in Ohio.
To find out that our house had been burglarized.
[LAUGHTER]
I didn't know that burglars read poetry,
but if you're out there, I want the TV back.
[LAUGHTER]