I want to read just one more poem.
I have three sons, and this when this poem was written,
one was still at home.
He was 18, he's 19 now.
He's left.
He's a carpenter.
It's called "Words," if any of you
have any questions I guess we're all going to go over and have
cookies and wonder punches, whatever, and feel
free to come up and ask them.
And I'll feel free not to answer them if I can't.
"Words."
Another dawn, leaden and cold I am up alone,
searching again for words that will make some difference
and finding none, rather finding these,
who do not make a difference.
I hear my son waking for work--
he is late and doesn't have time for coffee or hello.
The door closes, a motor turns over,
and once more, it's only me and the gray day.
Lately, I've been running by day,
drinking by night, as though first to build a man
and then destroy him--
this for three months, and I don't find it foolish--
a man almost 50, who still knows so little of why he's alive
and would turn away from answers,
turn to the blankness that follows
my nights or the pounding of the breath,
the sweat oiling every part of me, running even from my hair.
I want to rise above nothing, not even you.
I want to love women until the love burns me alive.
I want to rock God's daughter until together, we
become one wave of the sea that brought us into being.
I want your blessing, whoever you
are who has the power to give me a name for whatever I am.
I want you to lead me to the place within me
where I am every man and woman, the trees floating
in the cold haze of January, the small beasts whose names I
have forgotten, the ache I feel to be no longer only myself.
Tonight my son will come home, his hands swollen and cracked,
his face gray with exhaustion.
He will slump before his dinner and eat.
He will say nothing of how much it
costs to be 18 and tear some small living for yourself
with only your two hands.
My wife will say nothing of the helplessness
she feels seeing her men rocking on their separate seas.
We are three people, bowing our heads to all she has given us,
to bread and wine and meat.
The windows have gone dark, but the room
is quiet in yellow light.
Nothing needs to be said.
[APPLAUSE]