Wanting to reassure my depressed friend,
I said no, I'm still your suffering colleague.
And I showed him this and he felt so much better,
because it's so pissed off, you know.
God, Phil's still pissed off.
There's hope.
And the only thing you have to know
is that I am an identical twin and I was born in Detroit.
I don't think there's anything else referred to that--
extraordinarily clear and lucid poem.
[LAUGHS] It's called "You Can Have It."
My brother comes home from work and climbs the stairs
to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop one by one.
You can have it, he says.
The moonlight streams in the window
and his unshaven face is whitened,
like the face of the moon.
He will sleep long after noon and waken to find me gone.
30 years will pass before I remember that moment when
suddenly, I knew each man has one brother who dies when he
sleeps and sleeps when he rises to face this life,
and that together, they're only one man, sharing a heart that
always labors, hands yellowed and cracked,
a mouth that gasps for breath and asks,
am I going to make it?
All night at the ice plant, he had fed
the shoot its silvery blocks.
And then I stacked cases of orange soda
for the children of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time,
with always two more waiting.
We were 20 for such a short time and always
in the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt and sweat.
I think now we were never 20.
In 1948 in the city of Detroit, founded by de la Mothe
Cadillac for the distant purposes of Henry Ford,
no one wakened or died.
No one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,
for there was no such year.
And now that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,
calendars, doctor's appointments, bonds,
wedding certificates, driver's licenses.
The city slept.
The snow turned to ice, the ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters.
Then bright grass rose between the thousands of cracked
squares, and that grass died.
I give you back 1948.
I give you all the years from then to the coming one.
Give me back the moon with its frail light
falling across the face.
Give me back my young brother, hard and furious,
with wide shoulders and a curse for God
and burning eyes that look upon all creation and say,
you can have it.
[APPLAUSE]