[LAUGHS]
This poem, I wrote when I was working at the Poetry Center
and I had to lecture a freshman class on The Great Gatsby.
"Unrequited Elegy with Gatsby's Shirts."
"I know how you wanted her.
Those billboards of reinvention.
The crowd.
The avenue eyesores.
I know you were driving.
Hot August Sundays are interchangeable from the city
to East Egg.
The dark ache in an impossible pink suit,
pining at a window from the tree line.
The moonlight whispers something altruistic.
I've heard that same whisper, crouched low
in my teenage Toyota, parked down the street from a girl's
house, watching a single lighted room in the too-late hours.
How it smelled like the oil ticking in every engine
from here to the East Side.
The green light at the end of her dock
was as close as you dared get, but the self
you'd baked from scratch required validation.
Once, in my newest incarnation, I was a measure away
from telling that girl, I have something to give you.
I don't want it anymore.
Five years of rehearsal failed me.
I balked in that space between breath and kiss,
because the truth is, I might as well have thrown a crumbling
brick, love me, scratched across one face in indelible ink,
right through her window.
I should have shattered that winsome torture
with the reality of her lips, the violence of her freckles
against my cheek.
But I couldn't have my threadbare self,
newly elaborated and finally workable,
undone by something as difficult as a kiss five years
in its coming.
I should have shattered the space between us
like an accident.
I was a measure away.
Her waist and hips, the reality of her lips, a tailor ripping
the seams in a shirt sleeve.
I might have shattered the space between us.
I should have thrown that brick.
I know how you wanted her.
Your greatest moment casting your brand new shirts
across the bed.
How they fell like invention.
Sleeves, collars, and cuffs.
Broadcloth and oxford.
Every color, weave and print.
An avalanche of cotton and almost.
You hoped she'd pick just one favorite.
One you could slip your arms into with a flourish
of stiff starch.
Because in that color and cut, she would love you.
Instead, she cried at all your beautiful shirts.
You couldn't know the space between you
was already a boot, stuck in the estuary past.
I imagine floating silver and pneumatic alone
across the pool, watching the tawny autumn fall consequently
across the water, falling stiff and regal
as shirts across a bed.
We should both be stoned for our pride and omissions".