Let me read just a couple or more.
This is a rather different poem, and again I'm
not sure that this is finished.
I mentioned my grandmother before.
She came to this country from Italy,
settled in Pennsylvania in the coal fields,
raised a family there.
And her ways were very much old world ways, and in many ways,
a very tough lady.
This poem brings her back into it.
It was also a reference to a man named
Lud who was a man I knew worked in a foundry when
I was a young.
I think it's a matter of self explanation.
Poem's called How To Handle It.
My grandmother seldom said much.
Her cabbages eaten by worms, a shoe that pinched,
bad weather, funerals, a man squeezed in the mines
until he pissed blood, go shit on the sun, she'd say,
a kind of politics after all.
I think of Lud too, by a ladle of hot iron,
pot-bellied sweating who dropped his pants
and shook his long pale cock at the furnaces bawling
over the factory noise.
If I'm going to work like a horse,
I might as well look like a goddamn horse.
Speech is one thing, silence another.
There was a widow next door, old peevish who
papered her windows with newsprint,
stuffed rags beneath the door, and disappeared
for a long winter with only her lamp at night
throwing a small sooty glare into the wind's teeth.
And how will I speak of those coming
into the circle of my own lamp who mumbled in public
and wore black, who bore a grudge and broke it like bread,
the man who dreams of dynamiting fish,
the one beating his car with a stick,
the human dog who howls back.