[APPLAUSE]
Well, I know everybody here.
[LAUGHTER]
It's very exciting.
It's-- I'm not used to--
is this doing the feedback or something?
I can't really hear it.
OK.
Sound OK?
I don't know.
I can't hear it.
Keep talking.
We'll tell you.
Keep talking, they say.
I'm not used to giving a poetry reading,
and for a long time in front of everybody that I know.
And Gail-- my wife Gail is here and all my friends.
Well, it's a real honor to give a reading in one's own home
and also a little daunting because I can't fake anything.
You all know who I am.
So I'll start.
Mia, could you go ding when I hit 50 minutes.
Even if I'm in the middle, you know?
[LAUGHTER]
That's a way to do with that.
A lot of my poems set in the last several years are funny,
but sometimes they're not, and I think they are,
and I find out that people don't find them funny.
There are some folks that aren't funny at all,
and because you get in the mood for laughing sometimes,
I will tell you when a poem is somber or not funny at all.
Well, I gave a reading some months ago,
and everybody's laughing.
And then, I read this really sad moment,
and people started to laugh.
And I had to say, no, no.
No.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't-- I don't know whether this opening poem is funny
or not, but I thought it was.
But somebody said it wasn't.
OK, it's called "Blind Date."
And just imagine yourself on a blind date with someone
who likes to ask a whole lot of questions.
"After Where were you born?
And How long were you married?
Comes the first sip of wine and after
that the clash of cutlery and the shuffling
shoes of the waiter, then the silence so brief
you almost don't hear it.
What are the smallest objects you have lost?
What sudden smells make you stop and think back?
And the struggle, the summoning up, the visualizing,
the squinting into the past.
Now and then she interrupts and asks
for a story, a theory, speculation, interpretations.
How many close friends have died and where do you
think they went and how do you talk to them
now that they're gone?
And your mind is eagerly opening, swelling,
a cavern in which what have been formally hidden
from you by the public din now dart around
like bats with their insistent intimate squeakings.
Did your mother like you?
How do you start a conversation with a stranger?
By now, the answers come easier, more flowing,
a zone, a spigot, a well.
What parts of yourself have you given up
since leaving your home town?
Have you ever been lost?
Broke?
Hungry?
Have you ever asked your sister what she thought of you back
then, when you were kids?
The conversation of call and response,
and when she enters the taxi, and waves bye-bye,
you are left standing at the altar in the Church
of Lost Memories wearing that ridiculous tie, your hands
in your pockets, jingling the change,
sniffing the ancient air for clues, for distillations,
perfume fresh from the flowers.
Have you ever?
Have you ever?"