I was going to read some poems that
came out of that experience but I don't know if I will.
I think I won't.
I come from Detroit, Lois mentioned that,
and I've written a lot about it.
The young people were talking to me the other day
and asking me what I would do if I were they.
I would go out and have fun, I would not be a poet.
I don't know what the hell I told them,
I didn't know what to tell them, but when
I worked in the factories as a young man,
those are the worst years of my life
I think until I became a teacher,
but they were worse, much worse.
But I didn't realize that in three or four years
that really I was, I was meeting so many people
and I was a receptor for so many people.
I had no idea that 20 years later that it would all
be so alive for me in my imagination,
when I look back I can see so much of that experience
with incredible clarity.
This is a little poem that I wrote about one about five
or six years ago, maybe about five or six years ago.
I had a wonderful, just a fantastic week or two weeks.
I don't know I was going through a difficult time
and I went to bed, which might seem stupid,
but I just gave up on everything.
And I went to bed and I began to write in bed,
and I didn't want to get out really.
And I stayed in bed I don't know,
I guess it was a couple of weeks I wouldn't
go to work or talk to anybody.
And gradually things got really good you know I mean,
I got into this whole bed trip and into my poetry the way
I hadn't been in a long time enjoying things.
And this was one of the poems that came out of it.
Once I got up to go to the bathroom
my wife changed the sheets.
And in a curious way kind of killed it.
[LAUGHTER]
I came back and it did, I don't know it didn't seem like home.
So I went back to work and that's why I'm here today
really.
It sounds cold "Blasting from Heaven"
at the time I thought it was the worst of the poems I
wrote in that two weeks.
I wrote about 10 or 12 poems, but I think now
it was far and away the best.
It was all a little crude made.
When I was after it's a poem about being up all night
and across my factory, and I've been working
and I go into a little beanery of these strange people
and they've been up all night, everybody crazy
the way you are when you're up all night,
haven't slept a long time.
And I try to capture the kind of humor
and the stupidity and in the way everything seems so profound
at those times.
Called "Blasting From Heaven."
The little girl won't eat her sandwich.
She lifts the bun and looks in but the gray beef coated
with relish is always there.
Her mother says, do it for mother.
[LAUGHTER]
Milk and relish in a hard bun that comes off like a hat.
A kid's life is a cinch and a mother's life--
What can you do with a man like that?
She asks the sleeping cook and then the old Negro
who won't sit.
He's been out all night trying to get it.
I hope he gets it, what did he ever do but get it?
The Negro doesn't look, though he looks like he's
been out all night trying.
Everyone's been out all night trying,
why else would we be drinking beer at attention?
If she were younger or if I were Prince Valiant,
I would say that fate brought me here to quiet the crying,
to sweeten the sandwich of the child, to waken the cook,
to stop the Negro from bearing witness to the world The dawn's
still hasn't come.
And now we hear the 8 o'clock whistles
blasting from heaven and with no morning, the day is sold.