Any questions so far?
[LAUGHTER]
This is like being in a War of the Worlds movie.
"Rabbit, I Love You."
"The capacity to feel is good to have.
You know you are alive when you feel the ravine's
minuet of sadness, the octopus' gladness of not being in the--
of being in the sea and not a jelly jar.
Having feelings allows us to do nothing
but still feel something is being done.
Many thinkers know the feeling of feeling.
But few had glimpsed the feeling of the feeling of the feeling.
The rabbit does not move, waiting for the yard
to turn rabbit-colored and, thus, make it feel invisible.
Huh?
You can argue for hours about a rabbit
if the feeling is there, which is often not
about the rabbit but the person you argue with.
Her hair tied to a river.
Her unstable tongue.
Such heat in the world, you and the rabbit share.
And cold, demures the glacier.
You lock your keys in the car.
And there's a feeling.
Read Nick Carraway's last words.
And, yep, a feeling.
There are no ordinary feelings.
Just as there are no ordinary spring days
or kicked over cans of paint.
Are feelings ever succinct?
The haiku is quick.
But its ripples to the horizon go.
Feeling, you think you have it under control.
Then whamo, a new blast hole in the middle of the couch
where your TV watching some excessively handsome people
try to diffuse an atomic bomb.
And now your throat is shaking.
Tears.
Even for the toddler, feeling is 1,000 years old,
just as the smile of Mona Lisa is new every 15 minutes.
You've got to be kidding.
Matter, antimatter, there's still a lot unaccounted for.
Feeling, you'll never stop bushwhacking me unsyntactically
like crows from a tree flying.
Even in sleep, dreamily, I leap from the top stair
to grab the arrow about to pierce my father's chest.
I saved him, I think, for a moment.
And then the feeling, no, that isn't so."