This is not a poem about me.
It's written in first person, but it ain't me.
It's me if I were somebody else.
[LAUGHTER]
That's not the title.
The title's not that good.
Me if I were somebody else is a good title.
[LAUGHTER]
It's ungrammatical.
It's wonderful.
It's like, "They Feed They Lion,"
which the Library of Congress calls, "They Feed the Lion."
[LAUGHTER]
They're trying to make me an English poet.
It's called "I Could Believe."
Let's see.
Is there anything-- there are a lot of references
to the Spanish Civil War.
The Ebro is a river in Spain where the Republican side
suffered a terrible defeat.
Prospect Park is a park in Brooklyn.
The Free Press is a Detroit newspaper.
Washington Boulevard is the fanciest street
in Detroit, where I grew up, with all the fancy shops.
There used to be.
I don't know.
I don't know what it's like now.
It's called "I Could Believe."
"I could come to believe almost anything--
even my soul, which is my unlit cigar.
Even the Earth that huddled all these years to my bones.
Waiting for the little of me it would claim.
I could believe my sons would grow
into tall lean booted men driving cattle trucks to Monday
markets.
And my mother would climb into the stars, hand over hand,
a woman of imagination and stamina
among the airy spaces of broken clouds.
And I, middle-aged and heavy, would buy my suits
by the dozen--
vested ones, and wear a watch chain
stretched across my middle.
Even with none of that, alone and naked at the club,
laid out to be rubbed down, I would groan orders
to a t-shirted half-wit.
I came home from Spain bitter and wounded,
opened a small portrait shop in an office building in Detroit,
hired an alcoholic cameraman, and married
a homely woman good with books.
It is 1943, and young girls wait in line
for the white lights blinding them, drop their blouses
and shoulder straps, and smile for the men
scrambling on Pacific atolls.
I have bought a second shop on Washington Boulevard.
When I can't stand it, I drive out
past the lights to the small factories where
the bearings for tanks and half tracks are ground, and park,
and smoke in silence on the shoulder of US 24--
7,000 miles from my lost Spain.
A lifetime from the Ebro, where seven men I came to need
went under in a small boat.
And I crossed alone to a burnt shore and kept running.
Someone said, it was Prospect Park in the summer--
except for the dying.
Except for the dying, this would be heaven.
And I, 37 years old, would be a man I could talk to,
or a body falling away to the dust of Spain,
a white face becoming water.
A name no one names.
A scramble of sounds, hiccups in the striking
of teeth against teeth.
Except for the dying, I would be dead--
my face born forever on an inside page of the Detroit Free
Press.
Except for the dying, I could believe."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.