I'll try to rescue my--
what I just did to any children in the audience
by reading this poem.
It's called "When I Was 15."
I was asked to write for this anthology,
like it was the 15th anniversary of McSweeney's.
And so they were like, write up a poem
about-- write something about when you were 15.
So I took this very literally.
I grew up on the East Coast.
And so I mentioned down, down coat.
Yes, you guys, you have to wear down coats here,
because of mountains and stuff.
Sometimes I read a place, like what is down?
What is a coat?
"When I was 15."
When I was 15, I suddenly knew I would never understand geometry.
Who was my teacher?
That name is gone.
I only remember the gray feeling in a classroom
filled with vast theoretical distances.
I can still see odd shapes drawn on the board
and those inscrutable formulas.
Everyone was busily into their notebooks scribbling.
I looked down at the Velcro straps
of my entirely white shoes,
And knew inside me things had long ago gone terribly wrong
and would continue to be.
When the field hockey star broke her knee,
I wrote a story for the school paper,
Then brought her the history notes in the snow.
She stood in the threshold, a whole firelit
life of mysterious familial warmth glowing behind her,
And took them from my hands, like the blameless queen
of elegant violence she was.
Walking home, encased in immense amounts of down,
I listened to the analog ghost in the machine
pour from the cassette I'd drawn flowers on.
Into my ears, it sang, everything
they told you makes you believe you're trapped in a snow globe,
Forgotten in a dark closet, where exhausted shadows argue
what is sorrow cannot become joy.
But I am here from the future to tell you you are not.
All you must do is stay asleep a few more years, great
traveler waiting to go.