Thank you so much for being a great audience.
I'm just going to read this last poem.
Soon-- Samuel is four now.
Well, not that soon in his life, but he'll be turning 10.
And I'm going to read a poem for him called "On Turning 10."
And this poem started out by being
a kind of takeoff on what you might call midlife crisis
poems.
Death is basically what poets write about.
Death is our-- that's our stock, that's our thing.
We're death merchants.
If you major in English in college,
you're majoring in death.
This is what 98% of lyric poetry is about.
And it's-- any day is, any time at all,
is a good time to write about death.
It's like Martha Stewart says, it's
good at holiday time or any time.
But if you're having a birthday that is divisible by 10,
you have a kind of professional obligation
to mark this occasion in verse.
And so you have poems about, I'm turning 40, and 50,
and so on, that are all mostly very gloomy affairs.
And I thought I would trace it all back to its source
in the poem, "On Turning Ten."
"The whole idea of it makes me feel like I'm coming down
with something, something worse than any stomach
ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.
You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible by drinking
a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.
But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today, all the dark blue speed drained out of it.
This is the beginning of sadness,
I say to myself, as I walk through the universe
in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends, time
to turn the first big number.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing
under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees.
I bleed."
Thank you.