I'd like to read two or three poems from a brand
new manuscript called--
the manuscript called "Not Such a Bad Place to Be."
The first poem called "Corn."
It's a drought poem.
[LAUGHTER]
I've been writing drought poems by the scores lately.
What I had in mind here was a small farm, not
your large spread that's irrigated and run
by a rather well-to-do farmer, but the small farm, "Corn."
The corn cannot be patient forever.
If the clouds do not gather, if the rain
does not reach down to the raw and tender root,
the corn will die.
The stand that it takes in early summer
is mostly bluff, a good, green show for the customer.
But later if the clouds do not send moisture deep
into the raw and tender whiskers of the roots,
the corn will die.
The corn will die.
We repeat ourselves, remembering all the time
that those we most admire repeated themselves.
Under work shirts, our bellies heave inevitably
with precedent.
Yes, surely, the corn will die.
Unless the clouds gather and the rain reaches down
to the raw and tender root, the corn will die.
The corn will die, saying it, we say,
might help to blunt that final barb should the corn, in fact,
die.
Because we are those who cannot live by guile or rich
improvisation.
We must have our water straight down
from whatever it is that dumb dependent call the heavens
or the corn will die.
And so it is that our necks stiffen,
our mouths suck at seaweed with the carp.
Beyond the window encircled by wire, the corn, as if draining,
changes its color.
There are too many hours in the day.
And unless the clouds gather and the rain reaches down
to the raw and tender root, too many dog days in the year.
[APPLAUSE]
Sounds like we might have a country boy there,
or at least somebody who's spent some time in the cornfield.