So here goes the first one I'm going to read.
It's called Two Brothers and there's
a subtitle called A Fiction.
I think that that's all I have to tell you about this poem.
Two Brothers.
One.
Night tightens its noose.
You swim toward me out of sleep like an eel
as I put the glass canister beside you on the bed.
Death, Bobby, hit me like the flat of a hand.
Imagine you are made of crystal and someone ice
picks you and you shatter, all your cells coming almost
to despair,
it is so good.
Dallas, Dallas.
I turn toward the window, then turn back to you.
Remember that Crayola drawing of John-John's?
The black smoke coming out of the roof of the White House
like curly black hair?
How Jackie spanked his hand and drew him
another with angels lifting up our own childhoods, days
of ease and grace?
The good life sucking us deeper and deeper
in toward its hot liquid center, where
seasoned with the right diction, schools, and politics,
we would fry crisp and greaseless.
King for a day, that's who I was.
I drove power, the solid gold Cadillac.
Go ahead, frown, tell me about the sin of pride
and I'll tell you about the lie of forgiveness.
It wasn't Oswald killed me, it was envy.
Two.
I have this dream, Jack, you say.
I'm at Arlington, it's twilight, thousands of funeral markers
rise from the ground like dirty alabaster arms.
It's here, pilgrim, they seem to say, and then I'm in a room.
A man is counting green bills sharp enough
to cut while I pry the lid off a barrel and peer down into it,
as if inside, there are dark green pickles
or steel blue fish,
as if I were a boy on a crowded street in Russia with my hand
around a coin and the other in my brother's hand,
and while I scuff my shoe and try to decide, from far away
I hear bugles, hoof beats.
I see my brother's head suddenly rise from his body
like a tiny pink ball on a spout of dark red water,
clear past the rooftops into the serene evening sky.
I am that boy, Jack, dipping his hands in the one standing
barrel, into water warm as blood, with nothing
to say to anybody, except: my brother is the moon.
Three.
Riddles, I say, lifting the lid off the canister.
I pull out a wet, gray mass, stare at it, then put it back.
Some African tribes eat the brains of their dead.
It brings them closer.
It kills them too, but whatever it takes, Bobby, right?
I look out the window at the deep rose welts of dawn
streaking the sky's broad back, then hand you the canister.
You lift out my brain.
When you bite down, I burn.
The air smells like creosote, and I
stand before you, my skin plump and pink, my wounds healed.
I put my arms around you and you disappear into me.
I stare at myself in the mirror.
Jack Kennedy, thinner now, almost ascetic,
wearing the exhaust fumes of LA like a shark skin suit,
while the quarter moon hangs from heaven, a swing on a gold
chain.
My throne.
I step back and knot my tie.
Bobby, it's all a matter of showmanship.
You have to have the ability to entertain,
to stand like PT Barnum in the enchanted center
of the public eye,
to drop your pants now and then and have the crowd
cry for more, to give it to them,
to take those encores, till like the clown in the Piaf song,
the show is all there is, and the bravos, the bravos.
You give the people what they want, Bobby.
Someone they can't help loving, like a father or an uncle.
Someone who through his own magical fall
lifts them above the slime of their daily lives.
Not God made man, but man made God.
I step back to the mirror.
Break a leg, kid, I say to myself, give them a miracle,
give them Hollywood, give them Saint Jack.
[APPLAUSE]
My review is that I read that better last night;
I was trying to figure out why.
Some of the poems I haven't really
read very much, a few of them I'll probably let you
know which ones, because I might make a mistake.
Sometimes too what happens is my mind wanders,
and I'm thinking about dessert after the reading or something,
because say since I don't drink anymore it's all chocolate now,
which is rapidly taking the place of men I think too.
It's poetry, fashion, and chocolate
is how things stand at this point in my life.