I'm gonna read a poem that's very new.
I'll read three more poems.
This is a poem I'm still working on.
And again, in some ways, I owe this poem to--
I owe this poem to my friend Marie Howe, who--
we keep developing subject matter to write about.
Now I've never written a poem about--
I've written a lot about men's experience, you know?
But I haven't really written a poem about women's experience
in the sense that--
women being-- now, unfortunately when you talk about this,
you lapsed into PC dialect, but women as commodity and beauty
as a product that has an expiration date on it
and leaves us in the lurch.
The poem is sort of about my sister, who
was a beautiful, bouncy cheerleader and acquired
all the skills of same and went on in life
and majestically put it all behind her.
[LAUGHTER]
It's called, "Beauty."
"When the tiny veins in her face broke one week
and left a fine, barely noticeable purple patch
on either cheek about the size of dimes, a side
effect of some medication, my sister
said she knew she would never be beautiful again.
She should know better.
But I guess once you've been thought of as beautiful,
you never really get over it--
never quite adjust to just looking good enough
or even unattractive.
After all those years of holding her breath and waiting,
she said it was a relief being done with beauty.
But you could see her pause inside that moment,
as the knowledge spread across her face with a fine distress,
flattening her lips, making her cute nose
seem, for the first time, a little knobby.
I'm probably the only one in the whole world who actually
remembers the year in high school
she perfected the art of being a dumb blonde, spending recess
on the breezeway by the physics lab, tossing her hair
and laughing that canary trill that [AUDIO OUT]
and how she spent most of the next 12 years
looking for a man with the kind of attention span
that she could count on.
Then one day her time was over, done, finito.
And all those other beautiful women just
kept on being beautiful, everywhere
you looked, walking in that kind of elegant trance
in which you sense they always have one hand touching
the secret place that keeps their beauty safe,
inhaling and exhaling the perfume of it.
I suppose we should have thrown a funeral
to celebrate the passing of an era, the era of my sister's
gorgeousness.
But all the beautiful people were probably
otherwise employed that night.
And my sister just stood still for 30 seconds,
then kicked some dirt over the memory of her former looks,
like a cat using its hind leg to kick sand
over its own past tense before it moves on in a new direction.
Now that was beautiful.
[APPLAUSE]
Let's see.