[APPLAUSE]
All right, I'm going to read one more.
This is the last poem in the book.
It is about the really big blue couch that Franny and I bought.
[LAUGHS]
It doesn't seem like it's about that, but it is.
[LAUGHS]
It's called For the Record.
For the record, I don't know how I
began, how I entered this life of making repeatedly
the gesture of turning the same gold
light through the same window so that it
might come to matter less.
The turning, the easy epiphany, which by definition cannot be.
I admit there is a certain artfulness I lack fundamentally,
and by virtue of my lack of dedication to the idea,
a poem might carry anything.
Look at me, I have no boat.
I have only the old news a poem might strike readily, like
a match, or like a hammer.
Minuscule hammering against a dumbbell, me who would not sing.
Or that's what I said, didn't I?
During the lean years, I was fed and fed,
but couldn't, for the life of me, I couldn't swallow.
I buried what was given me in a series of someone else's yards,
readying I said for the winters come and gone.
Love, the poem is not a craft I steer to reach you, here I am.
For years, my father was always threatening
to take us, my sister and I, to see the Liberty Bell.
It was a kind of joke I didn't understand,
the bell that rang apocryphally for freedom.
And then, in the long wake for spectacle, stood in for freedom.
All those years, I refused to look at it.
I was so bored.
Another symbol cracked under the weight of what it stands for,
standing being its only function.
Love, I'm writing to you from our living room,
our extravagant blue couch.
I'm trying to be unafraid.
A little hammer hitting the same note until I,
which is not the same I, can hear it.
And if not exactly believe it is meant for us,
then, nonetheless, live as though.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]