So I'm going to begin with a poem about my father.
And whenever I read this poem, I always
say it got started because it was Christmas time.
I was in Houston, trying to find a gift for my niece and nephew.
And that's really only part of the story.
The truth of the matter is I got in a tiff with my mentor.
My mentor was Tony Hoagland.
Right.
And some of you might know Tony and that he
was a very complicated person.
But he was a wonderful mentor to me.
And anyway, some of the poems that I
was drafting at the time--
I was a PhD student at Houston, University of Houston.
And I had showed him some poems that
would become The Stuff of Hollywood,
and he was not having it at all.
And so the last time I saw him, actually, before he died,
I showed him these poems.
And he just looked at me like Tony could look at you.
And he said, you should have been a playwright.
[LAUGHS]
[LAUGHTER]
And I looked at him, and I went, hmm.
[LAUGHS] And I stormed out of the guest house
he was staying in.
And I was like, so basically, you're
saying I'm not a poet based on these poems
that I've showed you?
And so I was like, what can I write?
And so that's how this poem came about.
So thank you, Tony, wherever you're at.
And so what I did was I wrote this poem.
I can't remember how long it took.
But I wrote the poem.
And I got this card that was a blank card, and I typed it out.
And I folded it up, and I said, since I'm
supposed to be a playwright, and I sent it to him.
[LAUGHS] And then several months later, he emailed me,
and he's like, so how are you doing?
[LAUGHS]
This is "Bird."
"Yesterday, at Shepherd and Gray,
the parking lot was filled with birds,
black birds, actually, grackles.
It was a grackle lot.
Instead of a bumper on a car, there were 10 grackles.
Instead of a sunroof, 50 grackles
sat high, their bodies shimmers under cheap strip mall lights,
as shoppers delayed their spending
to pull out phones and take shots.
Such spectators we were, like that summer in July,
when I was left again to wonder who was the child
and who the adult. That Sunday evening, that
hung in the air like bug spray when my father, the one who
fed me and gave me his last name,
stood two stories on our family porch, every neighbor,
in all manner of dress, drawn from their homes,
in the street, watching.
Let me tell you how he spread his arms wide,
like the man he was before Vietnam
or before the schizophrenia.
Let me tell you how a child learns the alphabet by counting,
how she learns only two letters separate the words hero
and heroine, how he stood high on the ledge of a porch
the child never much liked because there
was a crack in its wooden center,
as if the world was waiting to open its jaws to swallow
her body whole.
Let me tell you how that evening didn't hold death,
but instead was the preface to death.
The point being he jumped.
Some will say, there are worse songs to sing.
Others might believe it a tragedy.
But who are we to question the gods
when a man, unconcerned with the inconvenience of his presence,
shows up in a parking lot, winged as an army of himself?
Eventually, lights went dark in the shops.
And each watcher retraced their steps back home
to find their families, to rejoice over food,
to laugh and settle the night.
And the birds, steadfast they stood,
not quite ready for flight."
[APPLAUSE]