Yeah let me read you my $850 poem.
I was going to read it in Steve's class.
There was no time.
I don't know if it's any good.
I got $850 for it.
I love it.
I dance all night with it.
It's a very sad poem, maybe I won't.
No, that's stupid.
I'm not going to read it.
That's no way to introduce it.
How can you dislike an $850 poem?
You've got to be nuts.
I sold a poem the other day for $2.47, this one you can hate.
Now here's a poem I never read before in public.
It's called "Lost and Found."
Those of you know my work know that one of my books
is obsessed with the death of my father, which
reappears in this poem.
Died when I was very young.
"Lost and Found.
A light wind beyond the window, and the trees
swimming in the golden morning air.
Last night for hours, I thought of a boy lost in a huge city,
a boy in search of someone lost and not returning.
I thought, how long it takes to believe
the simplest facts of our lives, that certain losses are final.
Death is one, childhood another.
It was dark and the house creaked
as though we'd set sail for a port beyond the darkness.
I must have dozed in my chair and wakened
to see the dim shapes of orange tree and fig
against a sky turning gray, and a few doves
were moaning from the garden.
The night that seemed so final had ended,
and this dawn becoming day was changing moment by moment.
For now, there was blue above, and the tall grass
was streaked and blowing.
The quail bark from their hidden nests.
Why give up anything?
Someone is always coming home, turning a final corner
to behold the house that had grown huge in absence,
now dull and shrunken.
But the place where he had come of age, still
dear and like no other.
I have come home from being lost.
Home to a name I could accept, a face
that saw all I saw, and broke in a dark room,
against a world that heard all my secrets
and gave nothing back.
Now he is home, the one I searched for.
He is beside me as he always was,
a light spirit that brings me luck and listens when I speak.
The day is here, and it will last forever,
or until the sun fails and the birds are once again
hidden and moaning.
But for now, the lost are found, the sun has cleared the trees,
the wind risen, and we, father and child, hand in hand,
the living and the dead, are entering the world."