OK.
One more last poem.
Just one more.
Got time.
It's a poem called "Crowds" from the last section of my book.
Again, simple title.
"Crowds" mean a lot of things to me.
I have a have a certain fear.
When I was really little, like when I was about 5 and 6,
my father used to take me to Yankee Stadium all the time.
And I guess it was some sort of shock
at seeing 70,000 people at that age or--
I think more of what it was is you always
had that feeling in Yankee Stadium
that you were going to fall off.
It's so strangely tilted.
And the aisles and the seats are so precarious.
And if you're six years old-- and that's
where it all started, I guess.
But I don't talk about Yankee Stadium in this.
I talk about something else closer to my heart.
It was the circus.
When you were a city boy, you never
got to see any animals except at the circus
or, well, the zoo once in a while.
"Crowds".
"Terrace bars rise now, though not
so high as the steeple above the marches on the Avenue.
Victory Day.
Hitler lying in a pool of blood.
A small pool.
The worst yet to come.
The pits and maggots on the bodies packed by bulldozers.
Gas exuding from uncovered graves dissipating in the air.
That now with the finding of a woman who cut nipples
off Jewesses at Buchenwald.
We hear from the street, she was a good neighbor.
Who remembers Buchenwald?
Such deaths legend.
The oven's myth like.
Bombs blazing above Hanoi, no more real than the traffic jam.
Marchers who remember, who can see death
as the pain in their cells, lying in the streets, clubbed,
gashes in their heads, billy clubs waving
in the air, eyes closing in the color of television
to this sight.
Sounds of politicos afraid of the crowds,
the pressure of bodies moving against silk suits.
Behind him, the living room fills with suits.
Through the greater doors, he sees
drinks ease the tongues of the celebrants hearing
the news from Germany.
He is scared of things so large, yet ogles
when the parents are gone and the German boyfriend
slides his hand up the thighs of the maid before the menorah.
Everything is larger than himself.
In crowds at the circus, he wants to sit on the elephants
to see eye to eye with monsters, shouting, extending hands,
fists clenched behind their backs as he is lost.
Later, his sister was lost.
The trees and thickets around him.
His sister crying, Central Park circling him.
Huge buildings to peer through their glass.
He calls out for God.
The God claimed when the self is too small and won't do.
In his fear, thoughts push each other aside.
Hearing the shots or backfires, he wishes to be a crowd."
That's about all I can handle.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]