Let me read just a few more poems.
I'd like to read a poem I wrote last summer that I
sent to a friend of mine who was sort of in a bad way.
And it seemed to do something for him.
It warmed his heart or something, and he felt revived.
And his name is Bruce.
He's a very dear friend of a woman in the audience.
It's got a strange title.
It's called "The Poem Circling Hamtramck, Michigan,
All Night in Search of You."
Hamtramck is a little--
not so little-- it's a community inside Detroit.
It's a city all of its own.
When I was young man, it was mainly inhabited by Poles.
But now, it's about half Black and half Pole.
And there were a lot of factories there.
It was a very ugly place, and I worked there.
The New Yorker took this poem, and they
asked me to change the title.
They said it was too mannered.
I thought they ought to know, being the most
mannered magazine in the world.
I couldn't understand why they would object to that.
I dropped "Michigan", and they said, all right.
[LAUGHTER]
It's a poem, the title meant a lot to me.
Because when I was a young guy, 18 to 20 or so,
I used to go out almost every night and circle Hamtramck
in search of something.
I don't know what it was, and I never found it.
And then I got older.
And I got tired.
And I didn't go searching.
I think it was some person or some part of myself
that poets go chasing after or any person goes chasing after.
Because anybody can be a poet.
Poets just probably remember it more exquisitely, and use it.
And I wasn't going out anymore.
So I sent the poem out instead.
It's about lovers.
He hasn't gone to work.
He'll never go back to work.
The wife has gone home mad, with the baby on one arm.
Swaying on his good leg, he calls out
to the bare bulb a name, and opens his arms.
The old woman, the beer gone from her glass,
turns back to the bar.
She's seen them before with hard, knotted bellies,
with the bare, white breasts of boys.
How many times has she stared into those eyes glistening
with love or pain and seen nothing but love or pain?
Deep at night when she was coldest,
he would always rise and dress so as not
to miss the first streetcar burning homeward.
And she would rock alone toward dawn.
If someone would enter now and take these lovers, for they
are lovers, in his arms and rock them together
like a mother with a child in each arm, this man with so
much desire, this woman with none,
then it would not be Hamtramck.
It would not be this night.
They know it and wait.
He, staring into the light, she, into the empty glass.
In the darkness of this world, men
pull on heavy canvas gloves, dip into rubber coats,
and enter the fires.
The rats, frozen under the conveyors,
turn to let their eyes fill with dawn.
A strange star is born one more time.