This is a poem called The Biplane, which is one of those,
I guess, World War I planes that look
like they're made out of papier mache
and don't look like they could fly.
The poem was written under odd circumstances.
My father told me about a recurrent dream he'd
had many times over the years.
My father and I, by the way, grew up in the same house.
It was an old house that his father
had built in Massachusetts.
And in the dream a biplane landed
in the neighbor's garden-- the neighbor's field.
And he wondered whether the dream
had been a real experience, when he had been very young
and didn't really remember it correctly.
So he called a kid who had grown up
in the neighborhood with him.
This was just a year ago or so.
And the guy said, "Well, the Radski's garden plot
was just 20 square feet or so.
No plane could have landed in there."
So my father, like everybody else who doesn't write poetry,
told me I should write a poem about it.
In the poem, I am having the same dream my father has.
The Biplane.
"Sometimes the night is not enough.
I rise remembering, and the dream
is no longer a quaint story in another's life,
but my own, grown more real.
Last night, a biplane landed in my neighbor's field.
I watched, from my window seat, the canvas wings
graze the rows of corn and come to rest.
Afternoons seem always time between the crests of dream.
There is an oak outside my window.
So stunted, its limbs elbowing this way and that.
It seems it had made a decision not to grow beyond its needs.
In spring, the leaves appear.
In fall, they yellow and curl.
And I know the constant change in direction
is a ruse to make it seem more humble.
Again last night, the biplane landed in my neighbor's field.
It caught fire.
But when the wind finally blew it out,
I felt like the child who snuffs the match in a closet
and finds himself alone and bodiless.
Just think, I forgot the dream today.
I woke and drank my coffee, washed, put on my clothes.
On the way to work, I stopped and turned back,
but couldn't think what it was I had forgotten.
It was like biplane from World War I--
my father's war.
Beyond the window, the tree was waving its arms.
A pilot from long ago, wearing my father's cap and goggles,
was waving his arms.
Now I remember, it was my father's dream.
Told to me as a child, put on like a coat that one day fits.
I rise from my window seat, remember the child
who wanted never to grow up.
The child has gone and found his way."
[APPLAUSE]