[APPLAUSE]
I must apologize I'm here with all kinds of handkerchiefs
and glasses of water.
I am coming out of a rather severe head cold,
but I'm suddenly realizing what your pollen count
has in store for my allergies.
So the combination is at the very least
a kind of Lauren Bacall effect on my voice.
And at the worst something much messier.
So I apologize in advance.
I'll be reading primarily from my newest book, Waterborne,
but I'm going to read a poem or two from The Woman Who
Died in her Sleep.
"Line Drive Caught by the Grace of God."
"Half of America doubtless has the whole of the infield's
peculiar heroics by heart, this one's way
with a fractured forearm, that one with women and off-season
brawls, the ones who were down to business while their owner
goes to the press.
You know them already, the quaint tight pants, the heft
and repose and adroitness of men who are kept for a while
while they age with the game.
It's time that parses the other fields too,
one time you squander, next time you hoard,
while around the diamond summer runs its mortal stall,
the torso that thickens, the face that
dismantles its uniform.
And sometimes pure felicity, the length of a player
suspended above the dirt for a wholly deliberate perfect catch
for nothing, for New York for a million-dollar contract which
is nothing now, for free, for the body
as it plays its deft decline and countless humbling, deadly
jokes, so the body may once have flattered our purposes.
A man like you and me but for this moment's delay
and the grace of God.
My neighbor goes hungry when the Yankees lose,
his wife's too unhappy to cook, but supper's
a small enough price to pay, he'd tell you himself,
for odds that make the weeks go by so personal,
so hand in glove."