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Then about a year later,
a similar thing happened

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and I was in a fury.

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I don't grieve very well.

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And I used to be an
athlete of sorts,

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and I know what to do when
one can't do anything else.

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So I went down to
the Y, and I started

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to do the ridiculous things
that people go to the Y do.

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And there was a man
who shined shoes

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at the Y whose name was
Buck, who had been in jail

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and had traveled all over
the world and was in his 60s.

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And he liked me.

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We kind of nodded at one
another periodically.

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We didn't talk very much, and
I didn't talk to anybody else

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at the Y. And he had some
pictures of some great

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champions, Joe Louis, Sugar
Ray, Beau Jack, Kid Gavilán.

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And he said something
to me that allowed

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me to finish a poem which
I was struggling over.

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So I owe the last three
lines to this man.

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In addition, the poem is not
structured in the same way

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as I had originally intended it.

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Some of you perhaps
know the work

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of a man named W.E.B Du Bois.

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He wrote many books, but the one
he's probably most widely known

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for is a collection of essays
called The Souls of Black Folk.

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And in that, he
has an essay called

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"The Passing of the First Born."

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And for some reason while
I was writing this poem,

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it jumped into my head and I
thought about it very deeply.

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The other day, about
two weeks ago, a man

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called me on the telephone,
I'd never heard from before,

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about my book
Debridement and he said,

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"thanks very much for
writing that book I think

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it's a wonderful book, and
I'm just glad you wrote it"

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and hung the phone up.

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And he told me that he was
from Worcester, Massachusetts

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and taught in a place
called Clark University.

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And it just so
happens that Du Bois

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had gotten a letter from
Clark University in 1926,

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very similar to the letter
which is cited in this poem.

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And I was very moved by the
fact that poets function

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in certain frequencies.

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And there are times when
you need to be picked up,

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and they pick you
up unknowingly.

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And he had picked
me up because I

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had gotten a terrible review
on Debridement about--

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the book was about
hate and so on.

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And it's important
that people let

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you know that they
are alert to what

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you do as a kind of
collective responsibility.

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And the only way that you can
pay it back is to pass it on.

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Anyway, this poem
is "Deathwatch."

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One of the reasons why
I'm talking so much

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is because I have to
get over that last poem.

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It's hard for me
to read that poem.

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"Deathwatch."

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"Twitching in the
cactus hospital

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gown, a loon on
hairpin wings, she

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tells me how her episiotomy
is perfectly sewn

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and doesn't hurt while she
sits in a pile of blood,

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which once cleaned the placenta
my third son should be in.

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She tells me how early
he is, and how strong,

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like his father, and long,
like a black-stemmed Easter

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rose in a white hand.

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Just under five pounds, you
live there, a collapsed balloon

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doll, burst in your
15th hour, with the face

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of your black father, his
fingers, his toes, and eight

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voodoo adrenaline holes in your
pinwheeled hair-lined chest.

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You witness your parents sign
the autopsy and disposal papers

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shrunken to duplicate in
black ink on white paper,

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like the country
you were born in,

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unreal, asleep,
silent, almost alive.

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This is a dedication to
our memory of three sons--

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two dead, one alive.

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A reminder of a letter to Du
Bois from a student at Cornell,

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on behalf of his
whole history class.

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The class is confronted
with the question

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and no one, not
even the professor,

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is sure of the answer.

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'Will you please tell us whether
or not it is true that Negroes

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are not able to cry?'

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America needs a killing.

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America needs killing.

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Survivors will be human."

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Let me explain those
last three lines

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because they've
been misinterpreted,

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vastly so, in fact.

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I've got a couple
of letters about it.

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A man wrote me who was a
chairman of the Philosophy

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Department at Fresno
State College after I'd

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given a reading there and said
didn't I know about numbers?

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Wasn't my mathematics a little
better than he thought it was?

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And I did not realize that
Blacks were outnumbered

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and that they had no National
Guard and no police force

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and didn't he think that I
shouldn't advocate revolution.

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And I was of course
amused as I always

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am when I get imperceptive
letters from people

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of authority who
should know better.

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And I thought about answering,
and then I decided it was

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probably best if I didn't.

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I wasn't about to change
his mind by some facts.

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The point is, in that
poem, the last three lines

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refer to something which
has already happened.

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And that what is asked for
is the humanizing process

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of the risk of
pain and survival,

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and the possibility
of annihilation.

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And that gives you
the kind of ethos

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whereby you can live your life.

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