And then here comes a good poem.
It's about Gothic, Illinois.
Illinois is one of my favorite states.
I spent a year there at something
called the Center for Advanced Study in 1970 and I hated it.
But I had some very good friends there,
and I wrote a couple of pretty good poems.
And what's cited here in this particular poem happened
on the third day I was there living in faculty housing.
And I was told I was very fortunate to be
living in faculty housing.
This happened on the third day and there
was a stanza in the first part of the original, which
I cut because I think, I thought it was weak.
But there's an epigraph to the poem
which I'd like to read to you.
And the epigraph reads as follows--
it came from a letter that a friend wrote to me.
Three things hinder: to see the good to be done
and to neglect it, to hesitate when the occasion presents
itself, to know evil and follow it.
And the poem is called "Homage to the New World."
"Surrounded by scientists in a faculty house,
the trees wet with hot rain, grass thickening
under the trees, welcomers come-- ones and twos,
gifts of shoehorns, soap, combs, half a subscription
to the courier, some news about changing plates,
the nearest market, how to pick up the trash, a gallon of milk
twice a week, OK?
On the third day here, a friend came in the night
to announce a phone call and a message
and heard the shell go in and the rifle cocking,
our next door animal vet neighbor, and cried out,
don't shoot.
And walked away to remember the phone and the message,
the crickets and the rifle cocking, grass and hot rain.
I write in the night air of the music of Coltrane,
the disk of his voice in this contralto heart my wife.
So what, kind of blue, these fatherless whites
come to consciousness with the history of the gun.
The new world, if misery had a voice,
would be a rifle cocking."