Here's a poem.
I think, like the goldfishes poem, that
tries to have a helpful title.
I always think title should be kind of invitational.
And I have very little tolerance with poems
that have titles like vortex 28 or something.
[LAUGHTER]
Where I just feel the rheostat beginning to go down
and a mild headache beginning.
[LAUGHTER]
So I think titles should be welcoming and helpful, and not
knotted and enigmatic.
But that's just me.
So the title of the poem is, "I Chopped Some Parsley
While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of Three Blind Mice."
"And I start to wonder how they came to be blind.
If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sisters.
[LAUGHTER]
And I think of the mother brooding
over her sightless young triplets.
Or was it a common accident?
All three caught in a searing explosion-- a firework perhaps.
If not, if each came to his or her blindness separately,
how did they ever manage to find one another?
[LAUGHTER]
Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse
to locate even one fellow mouse with vision, let alone two
other blind ones?
[LAUGHTER]
And how in their tiny darkness could
they possibly have run after a farmer's wife--
or anyone else's wife, for that matter--
not to mention why.
Just so she could cut off their tails with a carving knife
is the cynic's answer.
[LAUGHTER]
But the thought of them without eyes and now without tails--
[LAUGHTER]
--to trail through the moist grass
or slip around the corner of a baseboard
has the cynic who always lounges within me up off his couch
and at the window trying to hide the rising softness that he
feels.
By now, I am on to dicing an onion, which
might account for the wet stinging in my own eyes.
Though Freddie Hubbard's mournful trumpet
on "Blue Moon" which happens to be the next cut--
cannot be said to be making matters any better."
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]