And I'm just going to finish with one poem from A Toast
In The house of Friends.
And I'm not an alcoholic, by the way.
I know there were several references to alcoholism there.
And I didn't invent Kentucky Bluegrass or alcoholism.
But what a bestseller that would have been.
I could have had stocks in either of those.
I'm going to read the very first poem in this book.
It's called In Aporia.
And this book is dedicated to my son, Oluchi;
my mom, Mrs. Melvaline Oliver; and my brother, Mark.
There's a quote here from Andy Warhol.
It's about death.
But don't-- you know, it's happy death.
[LAUGHTER]
I realized everything I was doing must have been death.
It was Christmas, or Labor Day, a holiday.
And every time you turned on the radio,
they said something like, four million are going to die.
Andy Warhol.
I'm trying on egos, a justification for the planet's
continuance.
Oh, hello transgressor, you've come
to collect utilitarian debts, humbling narrative space.
Give me a condition and wheatgrass.
I, his body, is disintegrating.
I, his body, is ossification, death my habit radius.
Yeah, yeah.
I, his, body can't refuse this summons.
I can't get out of this room.
Tell me something different about torture, dear trickster.
Tell me about the lightness.
My mother told me to pick the one
I love the best, how it signals everything
I ever wish to believe true, just wholly on my ship.
I jump all over this house.
This is it, what I thought is, thought only, nothing
more deceptive than--
I, his body, keeps thinking someone
will come along, touch me, as like human or Lima beans.
I'm cradling you to my breast.
You are looking out.
A little wooden lion you and Peter carved on Bluff Street
is quieting across your cheekbone.
Not at all like the kind of terror found in sleep
on trembling grounds.
It is yesterday, now.
I have not had a chance to dance in this century.
Tonight.
Tonight, I shall kill someone.
A condition to remember Sunday mornings.
And this too is fiction, the book I would want to write,
the restored fallen heroic.
Did you expect a different grace from the world?
I'm working on tough.
They think I am already.
All ready.
Who is the dead person?
Is I'm sorry real to a dead person?
Browning grass, my hands on this table,
a contentious sentry, a place to pay rent, redemptive moments.
Am I now the dead person?
Dead person.
Will you partake in my persimmon feast?
The body inside the body astounds,
confesses sins of the funhouse.
I, too, have admired the people of this planet,
their frilly ordered intellects.
The youth they've made of cardamom.
Radiation as well.
How they've pasteurized milk, loaned surnames to stars,
captured tribes, diseases, streets, and ideals, too.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]