I'd now like to turn to some rather different poems
that I've been writing in the last year or so.
And none of these have been published.
You notice that I was varying in these poems I've
been reading so far between meter and free verse.
In that time here, I think there are different potentialities
for both of them and I don't want
to give up meter for a free verse,
since there are things I feel, I can do in that,
that I can't do so well in free verse.
However, the rest of the poems I'll be reading
are in free verse or open forms.
This next one is called "The Idea of Trust."
This is based on something that happened to somebody in it
I referred to as Pretty Jim.
The people living above me in San Francisco
got robbed and one time.
The girl came down and said, somebody
ripped us off everything.
So I said, do you know who did it?
And she said yeah, it was Jim.
So I said Jim, which Jim?
There was lots of people around there.
And she said pretty Jim.
And I know it once.
It was people always call him that for some reason
mainly because he had no other characteristics.
[LAUGHTER]
He never said anything and but the day
after this theft occurred, somebody else who lived out
there, told me that he had had a long conversation with Jim
and Jim was not at all dumb.
He actually used polysyllabic words
and he had come up with an extraordinary statement which
I bring into the poem.
He said to this guy, just the day
before he robbed the household.
He said trust is an intimate conspiracy.
So this poem is about all of that.
"The Idea of Trust," the poem is called.
The idea of trust or the thief.
He was always around, pretty Jim like a lilac bush
or a nice picture on the wall.
Blue eyes of an intense vagueness and the well
arranged bearing of an animal.
Then one day he said something, he
said that trust is an intimate conspiracy.
What did that mean?
Anyway next day he was gone with all the money and dope
of the people he'd lived with.
I begin to understand, I see him picking through their things
at his leisure with a quiet secret smile choosing
and taking, having first discovered and set up
his phrase to scramble that message of enveloping trust.
He's getting free, his eyes are almost transparent.
He has put on gloves, he fingers the little privacies
of those who acted as if there should be no privacy.
They took that risk, wild lilac chokes the garden.