And we actually have one more poem from this book.
At some point in my life, I noticed
that I didn't cry as much as I used to when I was younger.
I'm not like a child, but when you're in your 20s,
you cry more than when you're in your 30s, I think, or 40s,
at least I did.
And I started writing poems about crying,
or the longing to cry, or something like that.
This is called, "Measuring."
And I guess another inspiration here
is that when I was once in Montpelier, Vermont,
I was in a museum where they had these tear vial glasses.
People actually would save their tears in Victorian times.
I don't know what they did with them after that,
but there were tear vial glasses,
and that gets into the poem too.
Called, "Measuring," "We're watching the sad movie
for the seventh time today.
Let's take off our tear vial glasses and observe.
Like yawns, tears travel the audience, dumb tears,
cockney tears, red, white, and blue tears,
touching only to his mother tears.
Leaky tear valves fill the Potomac.
Frenchmen cry into their berets, children cry
on metal decks of ocean liners.
I'd like to cry with you for just one minute, five short
of the national average for women, but then again,
I'm no average woman.
We could conquer television with our true emotions,
make announcers weep, and executives foam like geysers.
I'll cry over the burned English muffin on my plate,
you'll cry into the sink.
What are tears like?
Variety shows, door keepers who've lost their keys,
mother in laws naked, a shabby church where a Madonna is
said to have wept last Tuesday.
We lose patience with our own grand gestures.
We are left with one memento, the saddest of them all,
our desire to emote like factory chimneys in December."