I want to read a poem that--
a couple of poems that concern friendship.
Steve and I, when we were at Iowa,
had a mutual friend by the name of Dave Schloss, who we later
had a falling out with in a poem that I'll
read to you afterwards and have since become friends
with again.
But-- this poem, if I can find it.
This is a poem dedicated to David.
When I was teaching in Oregon, as I
guess I implied when I was talking about driving out
there, I was in the midst of a bad marriage,
where my wife and I defeated each other's egos,
I guess, constantly, but we loved each other,
unfortunately.
We stayed together for years because of that.
It was a destructive kind of love.
And so I was in a marriage like that.
I was thousands of miles away from my best friends.
I was going through the paranoias
of early teaching and the long, Portland winter
where it rained seven days a week.
And I got fairly crazy.
And I wanted to write my friend David a letter,
just to make some sort of contact with him.
Happened I hadn't been successful writing poems
at all at that time.
And it started to become a poem, so I turned it into a poem.
But I called the poem "A Letter," OK?
It's addressed to him.
It's a little bit surreal in the beginning.
It's in four short parts.
Speaking of surrealism, my son is 3 and 1/2 years old,
and I asked him two days ago what he
wanted to be when he grew up--
when he grew up, and he said, a golf course.
[LAUGHTER]
That's ambition, huh?
[LAUGHTER]
God.
I asked him-- you know, you want to show off when
he does something like that.
So we asked him in front of someone
else today-- his pediatrician, in fact.
I said, what do you want to be?
And he said, I want to be a golf course or a fly.
[LAUGHTER]
Well.
Beginning of the poem is odd, and I'll
have to explain something to you.
When we lived in Portland, Oregon,
we had wild possums that lived in our house behind our stove.
Evidently, one of them was giving birth.
And we'd go out at night and hear
the skitter of little feet, and these strange possums
would be around the house.
And we'd feed them and so on, but they--
possums are evidently so dumb that they can't remember you
the next time they see you.
And that's a reference to the part
that-- the beginning of the poem refers to the possums.
"A Letter for David Schloss."
I put my soul in a tin dish.
All night, the possums laughed.
Next, I put my brain in the tin dish.
It was slick.
I put my brain in the tin dish, god awful.
I put my brain in the tin dish, the brain pan, the bowl.
I didn't want it.
One night, my hand became--" this is a weird poem.
"One night, my hand became a tarantula,
but I kissed its head.
I put my mouth down in the dark fur,
turned it over, breathed into the warm belly of palm.
And such repose, David, came over me.
But the other one, the hairless one, was a hand.
It shook in fear.
Now I have two hands, no intellect,
and each refuses to cut off the hated other.
Every year, I feel older.
It's normal, a task I don't love and haven't the time to hate.
Powerless now, I walk out, and inarticulate, I
breathe into the faces of the undergraduates.
A girl said, Mr. Anderson, you know so much,
and I touched her.
But my good hand ran along my face, its wilderness.
And David, but for love of you and some others, I'd give up.
You said, I can't find my life either.
It falls all winter.
It falls into your hair and your eyes, making them wet again,
the lost freshness for which we hurt ourselves and write
these letters.
[APPLAUSE]
A scattering of applause for that one.
[LAUGHS]