Now I have a treat.
I consider it a treat.
I don't mean the poem but the reader.
I have a poem for two voices, a man and a woman's voice.
It is not an autobiographical poem.
It's a poem about--
but it is a poem about two people
who've been married for many years to each other.
I couldn't have written it if I hadn't
been married to the same woman for many years.
And I have asked someone to help me read it.
The woman I've asked to help me read
it is a graduate student and a teaching
assistant in the creative writing program,
very fine poet, a very fine reader, talented in many areas.
The thing I want to tell you about her,
which you might not know, has to do
with the show they had last summer in the art
department, a photography show.
I missed it.
I'm sorry to say.
I was out of town.
But it was a banana show.
Some of you know about that, I think.
They had people submit photographs
with titles like, Banana Descending a Staircase.
[LAUGHTER]
And they had, Whistler's Banana.
[LAUGHTER]
Banana on a Half Shell.
[LAUGHTER]
It must have been a--
must have been a wonderful show.
You can do this with literature.
No, it's a lot of fun.
You could be reading Browning and you
say, "this is my last banana."
[LAUGHTER]
And Eliot, Eliot is wonderful.
Nothing is sacred, of course.
Eliot is wonderful.
It would be, "let us go then, you and I, for bananas
are spread out against the sky."
[LAUGHTER]
"Like a patient etherized upon a table."
This young lady, who is going to help me read this poem,
was not a photographer in that contest.
She was model.
So it gives me great pleasure to present--
[LAUGHTER]
It gives me a great pleasure to present,
Miss Lynn Fleischman, the top banana.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
In this poem, the husband and wife
are not speaking to each other.
What you are hearing is their silent thoughts.
I suppose the point of the poem is,
can you have any silent thoughts after you've
been married 22 years?
I know sometimes my wife and I speak a private language.
We're not aware of it.
We speak sort of subconsciously to each other.
And I think all couples, if they're compatible,
do that without really knowing it.
I think the thing that really kicked this poem
into being was a situation in which I
was telling a friend about a wonderful dream I'd had.
I was narrating the dream.
I got halfway through it and realized it wasn't my dream.
It was my wife's dream.
She had told me the dream.
And I had--
[LAUGHTER]
But it was so right that I just thought it was my dream,
and I remember dreaming it.
[LAUGHTER]
And that's sort of what happens when
you married all these years.
But I stress, the poem is not autobiographical.
The title of the poem is, "A Bird in the Hand: Two Solos."
There was nothing wrong with our dreams.
They fit us like scales on a fish.
Our dreams of patience and goodness
were not beyond our abilities.
And our dreams of sex were harmless.
There was nothing wrong with our dreams,
except they were the wrong dreams for us.
Now, we see we had little choice.
And once we had chosen each other,
even that was taken away.
When I reached out with my right hand and touched you,
I knew everything had been planned.
Even what I am saying now, had been prepared for me to say.
And if I had reached out with my left hand, at a different time,
on a different day, you would have been there.
And everything would be the same.
Coming of age, I found myself in the desert
following the wrong leader.
But how could I have abandoned you
when I knew you would perish without me?
So I said, let it ride, and I rode with it through a God
forsaken land without trees or flowers or anything beautiful,
while the wind played my ribs like a harp.
I don't enjoy being laughed at, but I
have learned to practice a certain amount of madness,
most difficult of the arts and the least rewarding.
Before we realized what they were, they were over.
Those days when we lived in furnished rooms
and could laugh at their ugliness.
Later, well on our way and established
in our own shambles, drinking good wines
and eating good salads, we gave up bread and butter
and those private days, those brief, beautiful days,
gladly as if we had a choice.
I keep busy all day.
But when the sun goes down, I seem to go with it.
Once, I walked out the door and entered night
because it was there and because it promised everything.
But what became of the promises we didn't live up to?
Only the young are aware of life burning at their shoulders.
Only they know his touch.
Later, it is all speculation and empty phone booths waiting
for violent acts of love.
I keep telling myself I will feel better tomorrow,
but I don't believe it.
There is always tomorrow night.
I saw you sleeping, knees bent to the right a little apart,
head turned to the left, right arm at your side,
your hand caught in the wildness of your hair.
Until I saw you like that, I never
understood why there were so many paintings of nudes.
We are separate people.
Each what he fears most, each his own trap, his own bait,
his own victim.
I'm not responsible for your life.
You are not responsible for mine.
I wanted to get married, and you thought that meant I loved you.
Now, you're going deaf, and I pity you.
How hard it must be for a man who
has been blind all these years.
There are others who had all the advantages I had and kept them.
But deafness grows on my family tree like a vine,
choosing one limb and avoiding another.
Now that my ears have started to go blind,
I find myself among the chosen, and someday I
will hear the true sound of darkness.
I have learned to expose my eyes to the lips of strangers
and understand what they cannot say, living as I do,
with my secrets and heard and listening always with my eyes,
how can I blame you if you turn your face away?
All afternoon, your shadow, your only child grew taller.
Now, he is leaving, and you will be alone
in the darkness that has been, and the darkness that
is coming, the same darkness.
Bright moons in the blood move on
as water moves in the bed of a river, sleeping at night
and waking somewhere else.
Once I turned quickly and saw you looking only at me.
Even if I could explain, I wouldn't.
Even if I could explain to you, I would, oh I would,
how any love story is a sad story.
And we kiss ourselves goodbye each time we kiss each other.
Those who have no children become the children they were.
And those who have several children
extend themselves like fingers stretching into deep grass.
But we have only one child, and both of us
must crowd into his body, elbowing each other for space.
I remember when this photograph was taken.
The aperture opened on my life as it
was, as it appeared to be, with the eyes of a deer
on the wall and a tongue, which could tell the truth.
But the other was easier.
My life created for me, and I like
a fool accepted it with its hand over its mouth
to hide the bleeding.
Waiting on the steps of the front porch for years saying,
you are young.
You will find somebody.
My life with a life of its own daring me to leave it.
Saying, I am all I have.
It isn't enough.
Waiting is hardest, but we have to wait for the good things
to come to us.
I always have this next thing to do while I'm waiting,
something important that needs to be done--
a dog to be fed, a plant to be watered.
I had two friends.
One is gone.
The other is dead.
Now our son is grown up and no longer needs me.
And you say I am the cause of all your unhappiness.
These things are true, but there is always this next thing
to do, something important that needs to be done,
while I am waiting.
Ambition, worm in my bowels, the more I
starve you, the more you grow.
Others have killed their thousands,
but you have killed your tens of thousands.
I tell you, the stars can see only into the past.
They do not know what I am doing and do not care.
And the moon, which knows everything, cares even less.
But you answer me with the story about water
always running away from home and returning purified.
Years ago, I took this woman.
You took this man, and we kept each other.
But each of us still wants to be a victim, as if love
were an accident caused by carelessness,
and we could hold one another responsible.
In order to get what we need from each other,
what have we traded except parts of our lives,
huge parts of our lives?
And what have we gained except huge parts
of each other's lives?
Love always gives more than we bargained for.
I heard a bird cry a name, and when I looked,
I found you in the trap of my hand crying and name
I could not understand, your own or the name
of someone you lost.
It was never mine.
I tried to find someone to love me before it was too late,
but there was no one.
I heard a bird call my name, but when I found the bird
it was you caught in the trap of my hand.
And what I heard was your pain.
It has always been.
I tried to find a place where I could not hear that sound,
and there was no place.
I heard a bird cry a name.
I heard a bird call my name.
And when I looked--
It was you.
In the trap of my hand--
What I heard was your pain.
Crying a name I could not understand.
It has always been.
Your own or the name of someone you lost.
It was never mine.
I tried to find--
A place.
Someone to love me.
But there is no other place.
There is no other one.
[APPLAUSE]