The last poem is called "Country House."
And I was living in the country last year out in Oracle
and the poem is a rather bitter poem,
but the feeling out there it's really lovely country
out there.
And we live in a very small house.
But at one point in the spring after I'd been there
for quite a while, I realized that I'm
simply not a country boy.
And try as I would--
I really didn't fit into the landscape very well
and the poem was written out of that mood
of not belonging in a place.
Just one thing, the Dnieper mentioned here I'm not sure how
to pronounce it but D-N-I-E-P-E-R it's a river
in Russia.
"Country House."
"This house is old, too small to contain lives furnished
with smog, TV, divorce.
The trees I drag like errant children from the hills
are squandered in the fireplace.
The coyotes howl at nothing.
A fiction, a household in the woods.
This antique bed would rot in some garage
but for my sentiment.
Gullies without pipes, land without the small dots
of houses, cozy in tracts, waste their scars.
We are the new outlander's.
Here for rest and a taste of our father's blood.
We gorge on fresh up country air, breed
violent flowers whose incessant odor frightens and consoles.
I imagine my father in this house, child of heart
struck immigrants dreaming of hard work and a fast buck.
He stands on a street corner in a shally hat
and knickers hustling papers under a gas lamp.
Whose past does he romanticize?
The sour smell of pigs, a Russian slum, no gain in that.
Why do we love what's gone?
The innocence we enshrine in sepia of Sunday picnics
on the Dnieper is equal to our own false lives greed
and deceit.
Therefore, we live small in a country house
and send out vines.
When autumn comes, we crush the plump fruit into wine,
drowse by the fire, and pump our children
full of a past that was sweet, a future ruined
before their time."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]