 Okay, now my job. When Dean Grasso asked me to provide you with some inspiring words on this auspicious occasion, I was, took me a little while to figure out what I wanted to do. And I've decided that I'd like to read you three poems that I've written and that just came out. They're in honor of this commencement in a strange sort of way. I've chosen these poems because they speak in some way to the process of education. It's struggle, it's triumph, it's capacity for helping us to realize our potential. Now you're gonna have to listen closely to these poems to decide for yourselves wherein these properties reside. Because it's always been my belief that the best thing a poet or an artist can do is to supply you with a car, a vehicle. And it's up to the reader or in your case, the listeners to drive that car and decide where it's gonna go, what road it's gonna go down, what the journey is gonna be like. The first poem that I'm going to read to you is one that I wrote in Germany two years ago when I was there teaching during a summer session and it's called The Rebel in Me. There's a large window in front of the desk where I write. This window looks down on a busy street where I enter the lives of strangers for 30 seconds or so before they turn a corner or disappear into a car parked on the other side of the street. Each person I see is in transit, home from the grocery store on the way to school back to work and everybody moves with an exacting deliberation. Except for this boy I watched yesterday who was barely managing. He looked like a miniature old man instead of 10 stooped over by the weight of his world and I mean this literally. He carried school books that ballooned a backpack, a bulbous musical instrument in one hand and in the other a thick plastic tube that might have contained a map of the universe. He bore a look of utter misery down there alone struggling against his Herculean burden sweating in the simmering heat of the first day of summer. The Rebel in Me was tempted to yell down, go ahead and dump that backpack. Take off your sweaty shirt, sit down on the curb and play a few bars of something jazzy up to me. But that might have changed the whole tenor of this street, disrupted its beehive of purposeful activity and left a scar on the kid so deep he might have gone home and told his parents to shove it. Tonight he would do no homework. This is another poem that I wrote again from that stay in Germany and it's called From the Tongues of Strangers. It's graduation day at St. Stephens or it might be a wedding. My lame German makes it either one, a distinct possibility. A Bach concerto rendered on an accordion serves as background music for the many dressed up high school students gathering in the churchyard below, each bearing attached parents from whom the teenagers like all teenagers everywhere and always seek a quietly desperate escape. The hard consonants of random conversations sluice up to me in between the Bach notes. I glean a few fragments. Mein Sohn, GNU, Sergut. But my concentration fixes on the visuals. Men inserting index fingers into the perspiring gap between necks and buttoned up shirt collars. Women wearing gauzy summer dresses negotiate the clipped and calculated movement required for walking cobblestones in spike-heeled shoes. Pedestrian passerbys glance over into the courtyard, smile and then move on. As the true stranger in this strange land, I possess no such luxury. Everything I see here pulls me in. As I slowly relearn the act of silence, a particular offering that's available to strangers alone, abroad, who must speak less than they understand to appreciate that there are many languages out there and only some of them use words. And lastly, last summer I was fortunate enough to be back in Europe and I went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and this is a poem that I wrote after touring that spectacular place and it's called Failure. With so many things to admire, it's easy to overlook the perseverance, the getting up each morning to paint again, to drink another cup of bitter coffee and go back to work. This was long before any of this work, yellow sun clusters spackled to the blank face of white canvases auctioned for millions of euros. These days, he's off somewhere, shaking his head in befuddlement. What he remembers is slightly less wonderful, so much failure to overcome. Not lucky in love, not lucky with friends, not lucky selling the damn paintings. Still, he kept finding purple irises, rioting alongside the cracked wall of an asylum. A haloed sewer tossing sunflower seeds that bear in soil. The white explosions of peach blossoms blooming hysterically in some absent farmers orchard. When world finally recognized the achievement, it had to divide it into pieces, painting by painting one or two per museum. The other alternative, an entire room full of rolling French landscapes and flaming gardens in mid-summer heat would likely have blinded the human eye in a susami of color, ignite an internal blaze as it does daily in Amsterdam, where the walls and ceilings must be made of asbestos. Visionaries find their own way. Legacy's come from equal part talent and refusal to quit. While failure's specter dogged him all the way into that wheat field with crows, he never forgot in the time it took to stretch a canvas and drop himself down into another painting, for those hours at least, beauty reigned. Thank you.