The poem I'd like to read now is called
"Spending the New Year with the Man from Receiving at Sears.
[LAUGHTER]
New downed earth muse, moving away
from the King of Spain and George Washington,
whom I still hold dear in my heart.
We have dismissed like a doorbell being
rung by someone who has forgotten his key
to the building my childhood.
My mother, a bookkeeper who secretly loved women
from her well of loneliness.
My father, the sea captain figure
whose bedroom never contained Lafcadio Hearn's glimpses
of unfamiliar Japan water spotted from the Yangtze River.
My sister who married a lineman with the phone
company, a man who hang glides like a giant eagle
over the Pacific.
And I who probably should have died
in a teenage accident, first childbirth, when
a drunk and doctor cut me nearly in two
and I bled for three weeks.
But instead here I am like everyone else,
scarred, clinging to the rubber raft at my 40th birthday,
thinking of my son who is 21 and whom
I have not seen for 21 years.
I have mourned and mourned the loss of Rocha's mustache,
not that he lost it, but that he left me wearing it.
I never to see it like my son again.
It is hard to imagine women not wearing black shawls down
to their ankles, standing on cliffs
over the desert or the ocean wailing,
singing for their men lost at sea, gone to war,
or simply away having walked out of those black shawled lives.
Yet women are the ones who wear bright colors,
paint their faces into masks, and wear
diamonds and sapphires, even if they do not own them.
And today hide the shoals in a cookie jar
the shape of a penguin on a kitchen counter.
Scene, though dismissed, not quite dismissed.
I remember my mother, and sister,
and I sitting on the sagging couch in our house
in the orange grove.
The couch or the spring sticking out on which I gouged my knee
and began the bleeding, which was never to stop.
The new Sears Roebuck catalog had come.
I hated the clothes from Sears.
But my mother loved the act of reading the book with us,
looking and asking us which things we would like to wear.
I learned that if it was in a book, you could possess it.
Those beautiful colors tumbling before my eyes
in the department store, you could not have.
And when the packages arrived from Sears, flat and often
torn, the clothing in them was drab.
The clothes squashed into flat, wrinkled shapes.
And nothing which came from the catalog
looked like its picture.
That picture which itself never looked
as good as the yellows, and greens,
and burgundies on the racks and shelves of Whittier
California's tiny department stores.
Those you could not have.
You could have Sears E Gingham dress in sizes 2, 4, 6 and 6X,
colors blue or red.
Every year I wrote a letter to Santa Claus.
Dear Santa, please do not make me
wear any more clothes from Sears.
[LAUGHTER]
I know it is the most expensive, but could you
bring me a dress and a sweater from Myers department
store in Whittier, California?
I met you in Spain.
You were tall and I thought self-assured.
Years later, a letter comes from you.
Are you still tall?
You must be self-assured.
There are no typing mistakes in your letter.
A dissertation on smallness.
For some incredible reason, smallness
is a kind of virtue in women.
So I grew up rather smug about my small body, 5 foot
2", 24 inch waist, size 5 and 1/2 shoe.
Yet there was also something wrong.
I knew it, but couldn't quite figure it out.
Like my mother loving the Sears catalog so much,
when I could plainly see it contained ugly things.
Around the people I most admired I felt large and clumsy.
Now I understand that a little.
I loved them because they were smart, or strong, or very good
at something.
They made me want to grow.
But growing, growing that was something
which made you bigger.
And I had learned to think good equals small.
I was appalled at 21 when I found that I
had grown an inch taller.
I was 5 foot 3".
And a few years ago at my I physical
I found that now I am almost 5 foot 4".
I found it amusing the people always thought from pictures
or seeing me on platforms that I was tall.
And upon being introduced to me, they would of course exclaim,
but you're so little, I thought you would be tall.
I knew the guilty secret that I was almost 5 foot 4".
But Smugly would say, no, I'm exactly 5'
3" just the height of the average American woman,
taking such comfort in the smallness, the goodness.
By 30, I wore a size 6 shoe.
At 35, a 6 and 1/2.
Today when I bought a pair of moccasins, I had to get a 7.
And when I looked down at my feet, I am horrified,
they look big and ugly, and most of all
they do not look like my feet, my little feet.
I am telling myself all of these things
in order to try to understand why I thought small was
beautiful, womanly, desirable.
In retrospect, I see only a small, smug person,
hating the flat, ugly packages arriving
from Sears, one who has failed at being a woman,
rejecting motherhood, failing wifehood, and never succeeding
as femme fatale.
Some women were discussing clothes and weight
in my living room last year.
One witty woman said, the size of dress you wear
depends on your wealth.
If you buy a $100 dress, you may take only a size 7,
but if you buy a $15 dress, you may require a 12.
The rich like to think of themselves as small.
And the famous bon mot of our times,
you can never be too thin or too rich.
But my eyes see things diminished.
I bought two Pendleton shirts from friends at Christmas
last year and both men were insulted because the shirts
were several sizes too small.
I guess everything tiny looks good to me.
I want things to be beautiful, and beautiful is no, was once,
has always been small.
In Spain, his silence was beautiful.
I felt beautiful, small in his big silence.
Looking for the King of Spain while reading Lorca, Stevens,
and Yates and dreaming of Rocha's mustache.
Your silence is heavy like cigarette smoke,
and the smoke blows over into the new year.
Carrying rocks for my garden.
I am sitting heavy and tired from my own heaviness.
I dismiss these things, but carry them with me.
We are on a boat which is docked on Lake Michigan.
I am no longer small, but I have tried
to make myself as small as possible.
And thus, I am always cramped and hunched into my life,
and feel tired and swollen from small places.
The New Year's out there, large and empty.
And I want to be big and walk around
in a space as big as Madison Square Garden.
No, as big as the Sahara desert.
No, as much room as exists between the stars
in the Milky Way.
But I am sitting tired and slumped in a small boat.
You are not the King of Spain, but his crippled brother.
You are tall, but not as tall as he.
Your feet are bigger, though.
And while my own large feet appall me,
I actually love your big feet.
I once put my then size 6 foot into Robert Kelly's size 13
shoe.
He said, that is obscene, Diane.
Yet he has always known the value of largeness.
I have known it for men.
I want my men to be bigger, smarter, stronger, richer,
and more powerful than any other men in the world.
I want them so big they can carry me out
of a burning house, so big they can hold me
against bad weather.
But I wanted to be small, small, to be protected,
to be small enough to be protected.
I wanted to be small to their bigness.
I needed to be small because men are small, too.
And I needed to be smaller to be protected.
But my eyes, which bought those shirts diminish things.
A ray of light hitting a certain optic nerve
can change the relative dimension
of objects being observed through that phenomena.
You walking in the rain along the beach
of Lake Michigan gathering 25 pounds of rocks for my plants,
carrying them to me in a broken box.
You, the kind, crippled brother of the King of Spain.
A friend saying to me, another woman without a man,
where did you get him?
He's so cute.
Do grown women still talk like this?
Yes, we do.
I got him from the Sears and Roebuck catalog.
[LAUGHTER]
She goes home to read her Sears catalog.
One of my students found her man in the Eddie Bauer catalog.
A far better selection, I should think.
But history is with me.
You came from Sears.
Memories of my sad, dismissed childhood,
reading the Sears catalog with my mother.
On my bed there is a down comforter from Eddie Bowers.
Yes, it is hard to imagine women not wearing black shawls down
to their ankles.
I recently noticed, however, that the Sears catalog did not
contain a single shawl.
So now I am thinking of the bigger bed, the King size,
may I have one bed King of Spain size, please?
In the big, new year on which I will put my Eddie Bauer King
size down comforter and we will sleep under it together.
You have quit your job in receiving at Sears.
And now we will each give and receive big things,
as I want to be able to give my son whom I have never
seen a big spirit.
I want my big feet to look beautiful to me.
I want to stand up to my full 5 foot 4".
I guess there was something that was always
too big and a little embarrassing
in me bursting out of its seams, constantly needing new shoes.
I want to claim it now and pass it on to my son
and to my daughter and to share it with the man
from receiving at Sears the crippled brother
of the King of Spain, the man who still loves me the most.
[APPLAUSE]