Can you hear me if I speak this loudly because I've got a cold
and I don't know how much is coming out?
I'd like to begin with a few poems
from collecting the animals.
This first one is called The Playground Singing
for psychiatric outpatients.
Well, I live in Fresno.
There is a psychiatric program attached
to various playgrounds.
And in the evenings, outpatients who
are trying to find their way back into a community go there.
And in a sense this is a very literal stating
of an experience that comes out of that.
But the playground singing for psychiatric outpatients.
The bright faced children have gone home
trailing the sun to supper.
Tonight these others have come almost sweetly shy
starched for their monthly party.
Nurse herds them into metal chairs.
I've come to sing, nurse tells them.
And they fold their hands these lately mad
who failed behind a door or slipped under in a jammed
street, whose eyes blossomed like silver fists, and mirrors,
and plate glass windows.
Nurse is waiting for me.
So I sing for them.
For the boy in the front row groping the stiff corners
of his pockets, for the ugly one in pink anklets,
her legs have never felt a razor though her wrist has.
For him whose fingers are eaten by ants, for her whose
face sags like a torn sack.
They do not like my songs, but infinitely
polite they turn their smiles up into the dark
as if a smile should fall softly obliquely like rain.
Home on the range, nurse calls out,
her sure fingers on the pulse of America.
I starred in faltering voice, half
forgetting those dead words sung at campfires in the past.
One joins and then another home, home on the range
where the deer where the skies are the voices crack and lurch.
We are singing the boy, the ugly one singing like crows
in the empty prairie of a children's playground
where if there are distances that shine,
they shine like the eyes of pain.