Let me read another poem out of the same period in my life.
It's called "Heaven," and it's about meeting--
but, no it's not about meeting.
It came out of the experience of meeting an extraordinary man.
I worked with him for a long time.
He was a very strange and silent man.
Gradually, kind of took me into his life and showed me
the way he lived, and I couldn't believe it.
I'd never seen anyone live like that.
And the way he lives stuck in my imagination for a long time,
and then one day I wrote about it.
It's called "Heaven."
It's just about this guy and it takes place
during the Second World War.
"If you were 27 and had done time for beating your ex-wife,
and had no dreams you remembered in the morning,
you might lie on your bed and listen
to a mad canary sing and think it all right to be there
every Saturday ignoring your neighbors, the streets,
the signs that said join, and the need to be helping.
You might build, as he did, a network of golden ladders
so that the bird could roam on all levels of the room.
You might paint the ceiling blue,
the floor green, and shade the place
you call the sun so that things came softly to order
when the light came on.
He and the bird lived in the fine weather of heaven.
They never aged, they never tired or wanted all
through that war, but when it was over
and the nation had been saved, he knew they'd be hunted.
He knew, as you would too, that he'd
be laid off for not being braver and it would do no good
to show how he had taken clothespins and cardboard
and made each step safe.
It would do no good to have been one of the few
that climbed higher and higher, even in time of war,
for now, there would be the poor asking for their share and hurt
men in uniforms, and no one to believe
that heaven was really here."