The next poem is a poem about Ohio.
I wondered about this one for a long time.
And it happens that my brother is in the audience.
He'll remember this, although I don't
know if he would have made quite the same thing out of it
that I made.
It's called "The Old WPA Swimming
Pool in Martins Ferry, Ohio".
And back there, there was-- certainly
the 30s, in the late 30s, people were trying to get jobs.
And they used to have the WPA.
I wish I had the gift to bring into the poem
the humorous response that people made to the old WPA.
And I know that at one time or another in the WPA,
Uncle Sherman and Emerson Buchanan and Uncle Willie
Lyons were somehow connected to this sort of thing.
And I think the old man was partly
connected with it at one time.
There were all sorts of jokes about it.
Maybe those jokes wouldn't make any sense to you.
You're all too young.
But it was-- in some peculiar way, it was funny.
You know, it's how to build something.
But I was very moved by that when I was a kid,
and I still am, by the people trying
to build a swimming pool.
What did it mean?
What did we need with a swimming pool
when we had a big, beautiful river
right near it, right near us?
Well, here's my attempt to understand.
"I am almost afraid to write down this thing.
I must have been, say, seven years old.
That afternoon, the families of the WPA
had come out to have a good time celebrating
a long gouge in the ground that the fierce husbands had
filled with concrete.
We knew even then the Ohio River was dying.
Most of the good men who lived along that shore
wanted to be in love and give good love
to beautiful women who weren't pretty
and to small children like me who wondered,
what the hell is this?
When people don't have quite enough to eat in August,
and the river that is supposed to be some holiness
starts dying, they swim in the earth.
Uncle Sherman, Uncle Willie, Uncle Emerson,
and my father in his way helped dig that hole in the ground.
I had seen by that time two or three holes in the ground,
and you know what they were.
[LAUGHTER]
But this one was not the usual cheap economics.
It was not the solitary scar on a poor man's face,
that respectable hole in the ground you
used to be able to buy after you died for $75 and your wages
tached for six months by the Heslop Brothers.
Brothers, dear God.
No, this hole was filled with water.
And suddenly, I flung myself into the water.
All I had on was a jockstrap and a bad bathing
suit my brother stole from a miserable football team.
[LAUGHTER]
Oh, never mind.
Jesus Christ, my father and my uncles
dug a hole in the ground, no grave for once.
It is going to be hard for you to believe,
when I rose from that water, a little girl who belonged
to somebody else, a face thin and haunted,
appeared over my left shoulder and whispered, "Take care, now.
Be patient, and live.
I have loved you all this time and didn't even know
I am alive."