The next one is also written in rhyme and meter, which I wrote
for about 10 years, I guess.
But I'll only read probably three poems.
I tend to read newer things more.
I suppose everybody does.
This is a poem on the other end of the scale.
It's a kind of elegy.
When my father died a couple of years after my son was born,
I wrote a poem called "Christmas Eve in Whitneyville."
He was buried on Christmas Eve because he
died on the 22nd of December.
And Whitneyville is the name of a section
of Hamden, Connecticut where I was born
and where he was born and died.
It was named after Eli Whitney, who had a factory
and built workers' housing--
Whitney's Village, which then became Whitneyville.
When I wrote the poem, I was already
beginning to write free verse and syllabics
to move around and look for new kinds of noise to make.
But I wrote this in iambic quatrains, A-B-A-B,
partly because I thought I could do it.
I thought I knew I could do it.
And also partly because I wanted the reference really
to Gray's "Elegy."
I thought of calling it "Elegy in a Suburban Churchyard"
for a while but that was just too flippant for the poem
that I was writing.
I think I'll try the glasses for this one.
I just got reading glasses about a year ago.
And I am not vain about them at all, but for some reason,
I keep forgetting them when I go to poetry readings, of course.
December and the closing of the year.
The momentary carolers complete their Christmas Eves
and quickly disappear into their houses on each lighted street.
Each car is put away in each garage.
Each husband home from work to celebrate.
Has wedged-- has closed his house around him--
I want to stop.
I'm really feeling freaked out for some reason.
I'll get over it.
December and the closing of the year.
The momentary carolers complete their Christmas Eves
and quickly disappear into their houses on each lighted street.
Each car is put away in each garage.
Each husband home from work to celebrate.
Has closed his house around him, like a cage
and wedged the tree until the tree stood straight.
Tonight, you lie in Whitneyville again.
Near where you live and near the woods or farms which
Eli Whitney settled with the men who worked at mass producing
firearms.
The Main Street, which was nothing after all,
except a school, a stable, and two stores,
was improvised and individual, picking its way alone
until the wars.
Now Whitneyville is like the other places, ranch houses
stretching flat beyond the square, same stores,
and movies, same composite faces speaking
the language of the public air.
Old houses of brown shingle still
surround this graveyard where you wept when you were 10
and helped to set a coffin in the ground.
You left a friend from school behind you then and now return,
a man of 52.
Talk to the boy.
Tell him about the years when Whitneyville quadrupled
and how you and all his friends went on to make careers,
had cars as long as hay racks, boarded planes
for Rome and Paris where the pace was slow
and took the time to think how yearly gains, profit and volume
made the business grow.
The things you had to miss, you said last week--
or thought you had to--
take your breath away.
You propped yourself on pillows where your cheek was hollow,
stumbled lightly with new gray.
This love is jail.
Another sets us free.
Tonight, the houses and their noise
distort the thin rewards of solidarity.
The houses leaned together for support.
The noises fail and lights go on upstairs.
The men and women are undressing now to go to sleep.
They put their clothes on chairs to take them up again.
I think of how, all over Whitneyville
when midnight comes, they lie together and are quieted,
to sleep as children sleep who suck their thumbs,
cramped in the narrow rumple of each bed.
They will not have unpleasant thoughts tonight.
They make their houses jails and they
will take no risk of freedom for the appetite or knowledge of it
when they are awake.
The lights go out and it is Christmas day.
The stones are white, the grass is black and deep.
I will go back and leave you here
to stay where the dark houses hardened into sleep.