"The Size of Spokane."
I just read this in Phoenix and told the story
about my husband, which is, I mean,
I realize now I'm trotting him out all the time.
I'm sorry.
But I'm very proud of him.
He's the only man in America who took his wife's last name.
So he deserves a few ceremonial gestures
among the ceremonial gestures or some
that he maybe won't look fondly on,
but they're all affectionate.
When he first arrived from Bulgaria
seven or eight years ago, his first researchers
were televisionistic.
The first thing you do is to watch all 93 channels
26 hours a day.
First, he watched all the Christian channels.
That was unbelievable to him that you
could have a number of Christian channels on TV.
I mean, you come from Bulgaria, you do not believe that.
Then, all the CNNs.
His mother got into the A&P and she never
got past the pickle section.
[LAUGHING]
It was the first section and there
were 113 kinds of pickles, many of which were exactly the same,
but all had different writing.
You have to read everything.
It made me realize how much we just process immediately,
bypass.
But she had to read everything.
And she never could get to the bad hot dog
rolls, which were next.
Anyway, he's watching TV all the time.
And I, who already know what's on there,
I'm doing the other stuff, like cleaning the toilet
and making the meals.
And every now and then I hear him
in the next room talking back to the television.
So I crept up to the room once to hear what he was saying.
I came to the door of the living room and I leaned in.
And what he was saying was, I hate the Michelin Baby.
[LAUGHING]
I was so proud of him.
So this has been a salutary influence for me,
who I'm a sap from way back.
This guy has no sentimentality.
A lot of this poem owes its temperament to him.
"The Size of Spokane."
"The baby isn't cute.
In fact, he's a homely little pale and headlong stumbler.
Still he's one of us--
the human being stuck on flight to 95, Chicago to Spokane.
And when he passes my seat twice at full tilt
this then that direction, I look down from Lethal Weapon 3
to see just why.
He's running back and forth across a sunblazed circle
on the carpet--
something brilliant, fallen from a porthole.
So it's light amazing him, it's only light,
despite some three and one half hundred people, propped
in rows for him to wonder at.
It's light he can't get over, light
he can't investigate enough, however many zones he runs
across it, flickering himself.
The umpteenth time I see him coming,
I've had just about enough, but then he notices me noticing
and stops--
one fat hand on my arm to inspect the oddities of me.
Some people cannot hear.
Some people cannot walk.
But everyone was sunstruck once, and set adrift.
Have we forgotten how astonishing this is?
Can nothing now amaze me?
Have I practiced all my senses numb, so now instead
of seeing I foresee?
Each spectral port, each human eye is shot through with a hole,
and everything we know goes in there, where it feeds a blaze.
In a flash, the baby's old, Mel Gibson's hundredth comeback
seems less clever, all his chases and embraces narrow down,
while we fly on--
in our plane radiance of vehicle toward what cannot stay small
forever."
That's where circling back to the title helps,
"The Size of Spokane."
At least Spokane liked to think that that was what
couldn't stay small forever.