The last poem is quite different.
It's in three parts.
It's a poem about what was one of the great experiences
of my childhood.
It's taking a train ride from the Berkshire mountains
in Massachusetts all the way to Cincinnati, Ohio.
I took this train by myself.
I was about 14 the first time I did it.
My parents decided to give me a treat,
and they bought me a roomette, which
is a kind of intricate closet.
And you had a little couch, and that
would fall down into a bed which would take up the whole--
almost the entire space of the cabinet.
And you had to be careful to do all the moving around you want
to before you took the bed down because then you were just sort
of-- the whole thing was like wall
to wall bed which you could lie in.
And it was just at the height of the window.
And you would look out the window,
you would watch the landscape go by.
So I was maybe 14 or 15.
I was coming home from--
I was being sent home by the train from boarding school.
And I got on the train about 1 or 2 o'clock, and I cruised
around the corridors like this 15-year-old roué,
seeing if there were any boarding school girls who were
going home on the same trip.
And, no.
So I was greatly relieved that I wasn't
going to have to do anything with my fantasies
at the moment.
And I went back and tried to get served a beer in the bar car.
And I did all this Holden Caulfield routine.
And then I went into the little roomette.
It was getting late by that time.
I would read for a while.
And then you look out the window,
and the light is just beginning to turn
a sort of a little gritty gray, because the outside
of the windows is never clean, so that as it gets dusk,
you also have the feeling that the light is not only
diminishing, but it's actually being broken up
by all these particles of dust that
are on the outside of the double pane window.
And it was fantastic.
It was a beautiful kind of magic.
This landscape would go by with a perfectly rhythmical pull.
And that was underscored by the fact
that you could hear the seams in the rail--
in the rails in the track go by at a regular pace.
And if you look over with the door where you had hung a coat
or something, even it would be swinging at a regular interval.
And the whole thing was like an immensely intricate
technological cradle.
And you would lie there and fall off to sleep.
The next morning you would wake up, it was just dawn,
and you would be outside Cincinnati, Ohio.
The poem's in three short parts.
And the first of them--
a boy of about that age is going home.
In the second section, the boy is four years old,
and he's being taken by his grandparents
to a railroad yard in roundhouse.
Roundhouse like-- I guess trains are so defunct now.
Somebody might not know what a roundhouse is.
It's where the trains would go in
and it was this kind of immense locomotive lazy Susan.
And they would turn the whole thing around
and then the train would come back out,
be pointed the other way.
And it was one of the great treats for me
as a child to go over to the roundhouse
and watch them turn the trains around.
The third section, the same boy, now older,
is coming back on the train to attend
a funeral of his grandfather.
This is three short parts.
And I think that this will be the last poem.
It's called "Taking the Train Home".
One-- "Dusk grew on the window.
I listened for the click of the seams in the rails,
to come at the same speed, the telephone wires sagged and then
shot upward to the pole.
All night, I slept between the rails, a boy on a stretcher.
When I'd wake up outside Chillicothe,
I felt like a fish.
Alfalfa and cows peered in as I went by in my aquarium,
my night in glass.
Dawn flew against the window the same way
a fly swarms by itself against the heat of a bare light bulb.
Like a heart attack, I'd be home soon.
7:15, all out for Cincinnati."
Two--
"It's Sunday, and I'm only 4.
And my grandparents are taking me to Sharonville,
to the roundhouse.
Pop drives.
The part in the white crest of his hair
is like a compass needle.
Non sings.
From the backseat, I lean between them.
I can feel the soot, the cinders like black popcorn
under my feet already outgrowing their shoes.
The roundhouse ceiling is charred by sparks and grime
smears its highest windows.
Coal cars smolder on sidings while the engine turns away
from its arrival.
I was going to live in a roundhouse when I grew up,
a light house.
Every morning, the moon would steam in over the sea
and turn around.
The table would be set for breakfast
before I went to bed, my little tower of pills
beside the juice glasses.
My hair would be white like pops.
And by its light, the ship's long pods of sleep and fuel
oil, coffee beans, microscopes, brooms
with real straw, cameras, wine, machine tools, truffles, shoes.
By the light of my hair, ships would
sleep into port and germinate."
Three-- "In my dream, I'm only four again.
Pop is alive.
He walk slowly.
Emphysema.
I've eaten something metallic, something I don't understand.
I circle away from him to vomit among roadside weeds.
I force it up.
It's like gruel with roofing nails for lumps.
I love this dying man.
I look up, and he bobs over a wave in the road.
He's swimming out to sea.
I begin following.
But my legs are too short.
And death is my father, but this is
my body, which will fall apart.
I'm sleeping on the ocean.
I'm asleep on a train outside Red Lion, Ohio.
I don't know.
I can't tell.
But it seems to me that if I could watch my body sleep,
it would glow, growing its antibodies to eternal life,
growing the lives we give away when we wake."
[APPLAUSE]