[APPLAUSE]
OK.
Much, much better.
Now we bring the mic up a little.
How's that?
Better?
Yes.
OK.
The back, you all right?
If you can't hear me, wave at me, OK, and I will get louder.
Is it too loud?
Is it echoey?
No.
It's not.
OK.
All right, so you've now met George, you met Pam,
now you're going to meet Brian.
Upstairs neighbor, "Brian."
"Mornings, he dipped down five flights
dressed for an office vanished 30 years ago.
Fedora, houndstooth jacket, seething fumes, alcohol,
burnished by archaic smokes, Tareytons, Pall
Malls, something I didn't think they made anymore.
He still auditioned, never got a part, got by on what?
Circumspect?
Only a little confiding now, and then,
a girlish flash of camp when he figured no one overheard.
A little gossip, the neighbor is the dragon lady downstairs
who terrified him.
Then heigh-ho, a bit of whistle tune, and he'd be off.
Returning early evening, he'd sit on the stairs.
Going either way, he'd say--
and if I passed him going either way, he'd say,
I'm waiting for my breath to come back
from wherever it's gone.
I saw his exhalation in the form of a shadow,
a phantom silhouette from some old movie
slipped down the stairs in search of a city
no longer in evidence.
So the shadow came home always, and Brian
would resume his climb, cough echoing down to my apartment
door, climb to his two fifth-floor rooms
to distillates the same amber as his clothes,
and the solace of memory breathed out
onto disks of black vinyl, hundreds of them,
his record collection, the Skylark trills of Artie Shaw,
the wry and wounded Eros of Lady Day, his balm, and oxygen."