WEBVTT

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Can you hear me if I speak this
loudly because I've got a cold

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and I don't know how
much is coming out?

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I'd like to begin
with a few poems

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from collecting the animals.

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This first one is called
The Playground Singing

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for psychiatric outpatients.

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Well, I live in Fresno.

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There is a psychiatric
program attached

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to various playgrounds.

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And in the evenings,
outpatients who

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are trying to find their way
back into a community go there.

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And in a sense this is
a very literal stating

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of an experience that
comes out of that.

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But the playground singing
for psychiatric outpatients.

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The bright faced
children have gone home

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trailing the sun to supper.

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Tonight these others have
come almost sweetly shy

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starched for their
monthly party.

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Nurse herds them
into metal chairs.

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I've come to sing,
nurse tells them.

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And they fold their
hands these lately mad

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who failed behind a door or
slipped under in a jammed

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street, whose eyes blossomed
like silver fists, and mirrors,

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and plate glass windows.

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Nurse is waiting for me.

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So I sing for them.

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For the boy in the front row
groping the stiff corners

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of his pockets, for the
ugly one in pink anklets,

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her legs have never felt a
razor though her wrist has.

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For him whose fingers are
eaten by ants, for her whose

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face sags like a torn sack.

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They do not like my
songs, but infinitely

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polite they turn their
smiles up into the dark

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as if a smile should fall
softly obliquely like rain.

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Home on the range,
nurse calls out,

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her sure fingers on
the pulse of America.

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I starred in
faltering voice, half

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forgetting those dead words
sung at campfires in the past.

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One joins and then another
home, home on the range

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where the deer where the skies
are the voices crack and lurch.

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We are singing the boy, the
ugly one singing like crows

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in the empty prairie of
a children's playground

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where if there are
distances that shine,

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they shine like
the eyes of pain.

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