The next poem is called, "Running Away from Home."
And it always offends somebody.
I find, as I grow older, I sort of
count the groups I have yet to offend.
And they're on my list.
This is a poem about growing up in a small town in the West,
a town dominated by the Catholic church of my childhood--
which, I remind you, is rather different than the post-Vatican
Council church of Pope John.
It's called, "Running Away from Home."
And it is dedicated to two of my fellow Westerners, Kenneth
Hansen and Richard Hugo.
Between the four of us, we grew up in Washington, Oregon,
Idaho, and Montana.
Most people from Idaho are crazed rednecks,
grown stunted in ugly shadows of brick spires;
corrupted by fat priests in puberty;
high from the dry altitudes of Catholic towns;
spooked by plaster Madonnas; switched by sadistic nuns;
given sex instruction by dirty old men in skirts;
recoiling from flesh-colored calendars; bloody gods.
Still, we run off at the mouth.
We keep on running, like those rattling roadsters
with vomit-stained back seats, used condoms
tucked beneath floor mats that careen down hairpin
turns through the blinding rain just in time to hit
early mass at Coeur d'Alene.
Dear Phil, dear Jack, dear Tom, dear Jim,
whose car had a detachable steering wheel--
he'd hand it to his scared, protesting girl, saying,
'OK, you drive,' steering with his knees.
Jim drove daddy's Buick over the railroad
tracks piss drunk, just ahead of the Great Northern
Freight barreling its way through the dawn straight
for Spokane.
Oh, those great times in Wallace and Kellogg's-- the good,
clean fun.
Dear Sally, dear Beth, dear Patsy, dear Eileen--
pale, faceless girls, my best friends at 13,
knelt on cold stones with chilblained knees to pray,
'Dear God, dear Christ, don't let him go all the way.'
Oh, the black Cadillacs skidding around corners
with their freight of drunken Jesuit businessmen--
beautiful daughters of lumber kings
avoided the giant nuptial mass at Saint Joseph's and fled
into nunneries.
The rest live at home, bad girls who survived abortions, used
Protestant diaphragms, or refused the sacred obligation
of the marriage bed, scolded by beat off priests
after five and five years by Bill or Dick or Ted.
I know your secrets.
You turn up by 10:00 AM at the beauty shoppe drunk.
Your kids sent breakfast lists to school.
You knew that you were doomed by 17.
Why should your innocent daughters fare better than you?
Young, you live on in me, even the blessed dead.
Tom slammed into a fire hydrant on his Indian Chief
and died castrated.
Jim, fool, fell four storeys from the roof of his jock
fraternity at Ag and Tech.
And the pure losers cracked up in training planes in Utah
or shot by a nervous rookie at Fort Lewis.
At least they cheated the white-coiffed ambulance chasers
and death bed bedevilers and died in war in peace.
Some people from Oregon are mad orphans
who claim to hail from Stratford-upon-Sodom.
They speak fake BBC, their Unitarian ferries
from the yang group or the yin group-- no middle way.
Some stay Catholic junkies, incense sniffers who scrawled
'Jesus saves' on urinal walls between engagements,
or white disciples of Black Muslims,
balding blondes who shave their pubic hair or heads for Buddha.
I find you in secondhand bookstores or dirty movies,
bent halos like fedoras pulled well down, bogarts of buggery.
We can't resist the furtive question,
'Are you a writer, too?
How did you get out?'
[LAUGHTER]
We still carry those rosary scars,
more like a herpes simplex than a stigmata.
Give us a nice, long fit of depression.
Give us a good bout of self-hate.
Give us enough Pope, we pun, and we'll hang--
hung, well hung, or hung over in the world's most
durable morning after.
We'd sooner keep the mote and lose the eye.
Move over, Tonio Kruger.
You never attended Our Lady of Sorrows or Northwestern High.
Some people from Washington are great poet tasters,
imbibers of anything, so long as it makes us sick enough
to forget our sickness and carry on from the carryout,
Hostess winkies wild duck.
We "relate" as they say, to the Indians,
bravest of cowards furtively cadging
drinks with a shitfaced grin; outcasts
who carry our past like a 90 pound
calcified fetus we park in the bus station locker
and run like sin.
Boozers and bounders, cracked up Cracker Barrel jockeys,
we frequent greasy bistros, Piraeus, and Marseilles.
As we wait for our ripoff pimps, we
scribble on napkins depthful verse we
trust our executors to decry.
Wills.
We are will-less.
As we have breath, we are willful and wishful,
trusting that Great Archangel who
Still Cares, who presides at the table
set up for celestial bingo.
We try to focus our eyes and fill in the squares.
Some people from Spokane"--
my hometown-- "Some people from Spokane are insane salesmen
peddling encyclopedias from door to door,
trying to earn enough to flee to the happy farm before they jump
from the bridge, or murder mom, or cut up their children with
sanctified bread knives, screaming, 'You are Isaac,
and I am Abraham.'
But it's too late.
They're the salutary failures that keep God
from getting a swelled head.
[LAUGHTER]
Some shoot themselves in hotel rooms
after gazing at chromos of the scenic route
through the Cascades via Northern
Pacific or the old Milwaukee and Saint Paul,
those trains that won't stop rattling in our skulls.
First, they construct crude crosses out of Band-Aids
and stick them to the mirror, then rip pages from the Gideon
Bible and roll that giant, final joint, a roach from Revelations
as they lay dying.
[LAUGHTER]
Bang, it's all over.
Race through purgatory, at last unencumbered by desperate
manuscripts and the salesman sample case,
along with the dirty shirts.
After Spokane, what horrors lurk in hell?
[LAUGHTER]
I think continually of those who are truly crazy.
Some people from Montana are put away.
They shake their manacles in a broken dance with eyes
blue-rimmed as a Picasso clown's.
Still chaste but nude, hands shield their organs
like the original mom and dad after the fall,
or they dabble brown frescoes on the walls of solitary.
Their Ajanta and Lascaux.
While the ones that got away display giant kidneys
at the spiral skating rink of Frank Lloyd Wright, or framed
vermin in the flammable Museum of Modern Mart.
But they're still Missoula in their craft and sullen
ebbing, Great Falls and Butte.
Meanwhile, Mondrian O'Leary squints
at the light staining the white radiance
of his well-barred cell, till ferocious blurs bump
each other like dodgem cars.
Oh, that broken-down funhouse at Natatorium Park--
held, the only fun the boy Mondrian ever knew.
Now, seven humped, mutated, radioactive
Chinook salmon taint the white radiance of O'Leary's brain.
Oh, mad medical lake, I hear you have reformed,
no longer Sunday afternoon the trippers' joy.
Watch the nuts weep our endlessly nimble fingers--
funny, huh?
The white ruin of muscular men twisting bars like gargantua;
lewd Carusos; maimed chanticleers running off
at the scars, they hoot their arias
through the rhythmic clashing of garbage
can lids that serve as dinner trays.
Inmates are slopped while fascinated onlookers watch
Mrs. Hurley, somebody's, grandma eating gravy
with her bare hands--
just animals, Rosetta.
She's not your mother.
Don't let it get you.
Suddenly, Mr. Vincenti-- who, with his 11 brothers,
built roads through the Spokane Valley,
where Italians moved like dreams of Martha Graham,
as they laid asphalt over subterranean rivers--
spots a distant cousin, Leonard--
an architect until seventh grade--
who seems to know him.
Leonard displays by way of greeting his only piece
of personal adornment.
How the tourists squeal.
Watch them fumble at coat and fly.
Gurgled and ginghamed relatives disperse back
to the touring car, the picnic basket with its homemade grappa
in giraffe-necked bottles as sun-scarred men
urge olive children on.
Grandma Hurley, who thought the treat was for her,
shyly waves her gravy-dappled fingers, couple
colored as her old brindle cat.
Enough of this madness.
It's already in the past.
Now they are stabbed full of sopers,
numbed and lobotomized in the privacy of their own heads.
It's easier for the chaplain there, nodding.
If you consent to be saved, just nod for God.
[LAUGHTER]
It's never over, old church of our claustrophobia;
church of the barren town, the vast, unbearable sky;
church of the Western plains, our first glimpse
of brilliance.
Church of our innocent incense, there is no goodbye.
Church of the coloring book, crude crayon of childhood,
thank God, at last you seem to be splitting apart.
But you live for at least as long
as our maimed generation lives to curse your blessed plaster
bleeding heart."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I seem to be consuming all of the water under this lectern.