[CLEARS THROAT]
Excuse me.
I have a little poem about [INAUDIBLE]..
How about I have what the children have--
some children have-- something they did,
or I think some of them still do, in the summertime.
It's called "The Lanyard."
"The Lanyard."
And I tried in this poem, I tried
to do what I do in several poems.
And so, as a kind of reader courtesy,
I think, one reason that many poems are deflective
of entry, as one of my friends said,
is that so much has gone on in the poet's mind,
from the first seeds of the poem to its composition
and through various drafts and revisions that--
and the reader is really not in on any of that.
And so some of these poems, I try
to back up the poem's story with the very inkling of the poem
and then move forward, so I don't get too far
ahead of the reader.
Just a little [INAUDIBLE].
"The Lanyard."
"The other day I was richocheting slowly
off the pale blue walls of this room,
bouncing from typewriter to piano, from bookshelf
to an envelope lying on the floor,
I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past, a past where
I sat at a workbench at a camp by a deep Adirondack
lake learning how to braid thin plastic strips into a lanyard,
a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard or wear one,
if that's what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand
again and again until I had made a boxy red and white lanyard
for my mother.
She gave me a life and milk from her breasts
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim, and I, in turn,
presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said, and here
is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied
which I made with a little help from my counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth, and two clear eyes
to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift, not the archaic truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when
she took the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be that this useless, worthless
thing I wove out of boredom would
be enough to make us even."
[APPLAUSE]