[APPLAUSE]
Oh, my new sheet.
Where's my new sheet?
Oh here it is.
All right.
I'll read this.
This is my first book.
And when you write a book and you're all happy and then years
later you look at it and you would
like to revise every poem that's in here.
But then if you wait long enough, you look at it again
and you go, oh that was OK.
This is-- I'm going to do this.
I have a couple of poems I'm going to do for Frances.
My favorite poet in the world is a guy named Stephen Dobyns.
And when you read someone that you really like,
you read a lot of them, your next few poems sound just
like him.
And then, eventually, you will kind of
take what you need of him and absorb it into your own voice.
This is before I absorbed it into my own.
I was so into his style.
This is called "Balance."
A young boy finds a red rubber globe on the sidewalk.
His tiny foot connects with the ball and sends it soaring.
But it plops down and settles rather violently
in his upturned eye.
The eye waters and swells.
The boy screams.
A man walking by remembers a similar predicament
from his youth and smiles.
He tries to tell the boy his story
but the lad is not to be consoled.
The ball, meanwhile, has rolled away
to find another niche in tall wind shivered grass.
The man leaves the boy sitting on the curb, crumpled
and brooding and bitter.
Later that evening while his wife and children
devise new ways to avoid him, the man
suddenly realizes there is a certain beauty in balance.
He sits at the dinner table with one eye closed.
Notes the ultimate perspective and dutifully
points his working eye in the direction
of his wife's open mouth.
Then he takes a deep breath and shuts the other eye.
He nibbles at his dinner that way, delighted at the discovery
that his surroundings are conquered so easily.
He thinks of the boy.
Before slamming a swift door shut on the memory,
he idly wishes he'd had the compassion and presence of mind
to sock the little bastard in his other eye.
[LAUGHTER]
Very strange.