WEBVTT

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So here goes the first
one I'm going to read.

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It's called Two
Brothers and there's

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a subtitle called A Fiction.

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I think that that's all I have
to tell you about this poem.

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Two Brothers.

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One.

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Night tightens its noose.

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You swim toward me out
of sleep like an eel

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as I put the glass canister
beside you on the bed.

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Death, Bobby, hit me
like the flat of a hand.

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Imagine you are made of
crystal and someone ice

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picks you and you shatter,
all your cells coming almost

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to despair,

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it is so good.

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Dallas, Dallas.

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I turn toward the window,
then turn back to you.

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Remember that Crayola
drawing of John-John's?

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The black smoke coming out of
the roof of the White House

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like curly black hair?

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How Jackie spanked
his hand and drew him

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another with angels lifting
up our own childhoods, days

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of ease and grace?

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The good life sucking
us deeper and deeper

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in toward its hot
liquid center, where

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seasoned with the right
diction, schools, and politics,

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we would fry crisp
and greaseless.

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King for a day,
that's who I was.

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I drove power, the
solid gold Cadillac.

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Go ahead, frown, tell me
about the sin of pride

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and I'll tell you about
the lie of forgiveness.

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It wasn't Oswald
killed me, it was envy.

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Two.

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I have this dream,
Jack, you say.

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I'm at Arlington, it's twilight,
thousands of funeral markers

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rise from the ground like
dirty alabaster arms.

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It's here, pilgrim, they seem
to say, and then I'm in a room.

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A man is counting green
bills sharp enough

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to cut while I pry the lid off
a barrel and peer down into it,

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as if inside, there
are dark green pickles

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or steel blue fish,

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as if I were a boy on a crowded
street in Russia with my hand

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around a coin and the
other in my brother's hand,

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and while I scuff my shoe and
try to decide, from far away

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I hear bugles, hoof beats.

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I see my brother's head
suddenly rise from his body

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like a tiny pink ball on
a spout of dark red water,

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clear past the rooftops
into the serene evening sky.

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I am that boy, Jack, dipping
his hands in the one standing

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barrel, into water warm
as blood, with nothing

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to say to anybody, except:
my brother is the moon.

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Three.

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Riddles, I say, lifting
the lid off the canister.

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I pull out a wet, gray mass,
stare at it, then put it back.

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Some African tribes eat
the brains of their dead.

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It brings them closer.

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It kills them too, but whatever
it takes, Bobby, right?

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I look out the window at
the deep rose welts of dawn

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streaking the sky's broad back,
then hand you the canister.

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You lift out my brain.

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When you bite down, I burn.

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The air smells like
creosote, and I

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stand before you, my skin plump
and pink, my wounds healed.

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I put my arms around you
and you disappear into me.

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I stare at myself in the mirror.

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Jack Kennedy, thinner
now, almost ascetic,

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wearing the exhaust fumes of
LA like a shark skin suit,

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while the quarter moon hangs
from heaven, a swing on a gold

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chain.

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My throne.

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I step back and knot my tie.

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Bobby, it's all a
matter of showmanship.

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You have to have the
ability to entertain,

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to stand like PT Barnum
in the enchanted center

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of the public eye,

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to drop your pants now and
then and have the crowd

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cry for more, to
give it to them,

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to take those encores, till
like the clown in the Piaf song,

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the show is all there is,
and the bravos, the bravos.

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You give the people
what they want, Bobby.

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Someone they can't help loving,
like a father or an uncle.

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Someone who through
his own magical fall

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lifts them above the slime
of their daily lives.

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Not God made man,
but man made God.

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I step back to the mirror.

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Break a leg, kid, I say to
myself, give them a miracle,

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give them Hollywood,
give them Saint Jack.

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[APPLAUSE]

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My review is that I read
that better last night;

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I was trying to figure out why.

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Some of the poems
I haven't really

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read very much, a few of
them I'll probably let you

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know which ones, because
I might make a mistake.

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Sometimes too what happens
is my mind wanders,

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and I'm thinking about dessert
after the reading or something,

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because say since I don't drink
anymore it's all chocolate now,

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which is rapidly taking the
place of men I think too.

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It's poetry, fashion,
and chocolate

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is how things stand at
this point in my life.

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