Well, now that I mention it, let me read my twin brother poem.
Oh, wait, there's another poem I want to read first.
The other day a guy came up to me-- a guy I like a lot--
and he said, you know, I saw a poem by you in a magazine,
and I was so happy.
What's happened to you?
[LAUGHTER] I said, you know.
You know, I mean, you used to write
those great depressing Jewish poems, you know.
[LAUGHTER]
You're not going to abandon us.
We're all depressed, and you're finding happiness?
[LAUGHTER] I said, it's OK.
It's OK.
I'm really deeply thinking about suicide today.
[LAUGHTER]
And I'm only smiling because I can't figure out how to do it.
[LAUGHTER]
My right hand keeps grabbing my left hand,
and my right hand's stronger.
[LAUGHS] Anyway, this was the poem that upset him
so because it was happy.
People don't want you to change.
Or they do, but they don't tell you.
[LAUGHTER]
The only ones that tell you are the ones who are unhappy.
This is called, The Gift.
And it comes out of the fact that I spent my first 25
years in the city of Detroit.
And then I left.
And there's no other part of the world, thank God,
that looks like Detroit.
[LAUGHTER]
It didn't matter which direction you took, it was up.
[LAUGHTER] The Gift.
Wheat fields the wind praised, and the great river freighted
with long barges of logs.
And then, on past the darkening fields, where suddenly a town
sprouted--
tall silos, loading docks, and a long train
chuffing toward the night.
I went on farther and farther from home
toward where the mountains lifted me slowly at first.
Then, suddenly the dark steep climbs--
and here and there, a pair of eyes burning
like tiny candles by the roadside.
At last, dawn broke behind me.
I pulled over and slept an hour or two
and woke at great height, turning above the frozen Earth
as though I were a bird--
or had woken from dreaming into dreaming.
But this was me--
different now.
Or so I thought.
Still a man, still lonely, even at great height.
But remembering it all--
the city where I thought I'd died.
The river black at night with darkness over the oil
are both gleaming with the lights of all the fires
that burned beside it.
I was still there, even if that had passed.
Even if all the lives that held me let me go and then
themselves let go.
I could return someday and walk the same streets
in the same light.
And no one would look my way or say my name.
I was there because I had to be.
But this flying in paled air, breathing
a fallen crystals, and blank stone above the tree line.
This soaring without wings and without faith.
This was the world no one promised me.