This poem's called "A Miracle."
And I think there are miracles in my life that
aren't miracles in your life because I grew up in a house
without a telephone.
[APPLAUSE, LAUGHTER]
And yes, it was a kind of miraculous silence.
And when people wanted something,
they just broke the door open--
[LAUGHS] --and took it.
It beats the phone all to hell.
Anyway, one of the miracles in the poem
is the ability of people to cross great continents
with their telephones.
There are other miracles in the poem.
There's a miracle I ever finished it.
[LAUGHS]
There's the miracle that The New Yorker bought it.
[LAUGHTER]
And then I got a lobotomy with the $482 they gave me.
[LAUGHTER]
And now, I'm rarely sad and always stupid, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
And the miracle that being stupid, I seem to write better.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm a better father, a better husband, better Philip.
[LAUGHTER]
Oh, cut it out.
[LAUGHTER]
"The Miracle."
I happen to be-- and this is something
I might as well tell you, because it's an essential fact
in another poem.
I happen to be a twin brother-- identical twin.
And it's a key to one of the other poems I'm going to read.
But it's sort of part of this poem too.
"A man staring into the fire sees his dead brother sleeping.
The falling flames go yellow and red.
But it is him--
unmistakable.
He goes to the phone and calls his mother.
Howard is asleep, he tells her.
Yes, she says, Howard is asleep.
She doesn't cry.
In her Los Angeles apartment with its small color TV humming
now unobserved, she sees Howard walking alone beneath the waves
of an ocean she cannot name.
Howard is asleep, she says to the drapes drawn on the night.
That night, she dreams a house alive with flames--
their old house-- and her son sleeping peacefully
in the kingdom of agony.
She awakens near morning, the dream
more real than the clock luminous beside her,
or the gray light rising slowly above the huddled town.
More real than the groan of the first car.
She calls her son, who has risen for work and tells him,
Howard is warm and at peace.
He sees the crusted snows of March draining the cold light
of a day already old.
He sees himself unlocking the front door of his shop,
letting the office help in, letting Eugene and Andy
the grease men step before him out of the snow.
When she hangs up, he looks out on the backyard--
the garbage cans collapsing like sacks of air, the fence holding
a few gray sparrows.
He looks out on the world he always sees and thinks,
it's a miracle."