I think I'll read a poem about some apple trees.
[LAUGHTER]
I live-- after living for many years
in Detroit, which is surely the ugliest and most
inhumane and violent and in many ways, the most
wonderful of American cities.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean-- I mean, boy, you can have a real love hate
relationship with Detroit.
[LAUGHS] It's really terrible.
And yet, once you get to know it and you
get to know some of the different ethnic groups
that live there and that have preserved their own identity
in very pure form, it gets to be very marvelous in Detroit.
I was in Bulgaria a couple of years
ago, where I went to a dance concert--
a dance contest in a hotel, a bunch of tradespeople
were having-- and they were all doing American dances
about two years old.
They were offering prizes for the twist
and the hully gully and stuff like that.
And they said that anybody-- any time
they want to learn Bulgarian dances,
they send someone to Detroit.
[LAUGHTER]
And they were serious, they do because many of the dances
and songs have been preserved there
better than they were at home.
All of the intellectuals there hang out
in the Greek and Arabic belly dance joints.
And all of my friends were always there, any time I had.
Well, for instance-- the first poem I read tonight,
I had to get some criticism one night,
I had to reread it at Phi Beta Kappa, so I had to--
I had to write it in a hurry and get some criticism in a rush,
so I went down to the belly dance joint.
And-- and while the girl was going around between the tables
getting her brassiere full of dollar bills,
I was going around between the tables with my poem
and people--
[LAUGHTER]
--people were saying OK, this goes down here.
Wait a minute, that's no good at all and this belongs up there
and you can certainly do something better than that.
And I never got better practical criticism in my life.
I mean, my brother was there, all his friends,
all of my friends, and this is just where everybody hangs out.
If you're in a place like that--
I mean, some of this turns up in the poem,
some of the details of that.
Nobody really pays much attention
to the belly dancer in these places,
she's just there out of piety, really.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, you ought to have a belly dancer,
so-- so you have one but nobody gets
very much interested in that.
It's much more interesting later in the evening
if there-- and especially if there aren't too many tourists
around.
Then, the kids from the island will start dancing.
I mean, a lot of the Greek boys come there
and they will do the dances from their own islands.
And these are quite wonderful, many of these boys
have won major prizes in Greece.
And-- and they're superb magnificent dancers
and things really begin to get going then.
I mean, it really gets magnificent and beautiful.
But something much better than that at this one place
we used to go to, there was an old lady who came in
and she was very wonderful-- she used
to sell peanuts and things, and she must have-- she
was born at the age of 78.
[LAUGHTER]
She was older than everybody you ever met.
And-- and she had-- had life so bad that she could--
she had just been driven from country to country.
And she had little chunks of--
she could speak in practically any language
because any place you could mention,
she'd lived there for a while before she--
before another army came romping through and chased her out.
And she was very wonderful and sometimes late at night,
she would dance and then everyone would just
simply go out of their minds with ecstasy.
And-- if you like the dancers, you either
send them drinks or you hiss I mean,
that doesn't mean disapproval that means
you think she's wonderful.
And when she ever she would dance everybody would just
simply, you just go wild.
[LAUGHS]
There was the greatest.
She was very wonderful and she was just terribly herself
and terribly different.
Well, we don't live there now, we live outside of Syracuse
and we live way out in the woods in a place
that we just plain love, we, don't have
mixed feelings about it at all.
We can't see another house and it
was-- it's an old farm that was built by a Tuscan farmer who
worked it with oxen and we still find
the oxens' hair mixed in the plaster of the house.
And oh, it's simply marvelous.
I spend my nights now instead of going to belly dance joints,
I'm running around the woods with a tape recorder taping
the owls.
[LAUGHS]
We have very, very wonderful owls and--
yeah, and I really love that old--
that the old Tuscan farmer's orchard,
which is full of the full of old, warped, twisted trees.
And I know I ought to cut them down,
I mean, they're much too big and you
get to thinking that surely the trees in one orchard all
ought to be leaning one way or something because they've all
had the same winds you would think.
But no, my trees, I mean, some are leaning this way,
some are leaning that way.
And they've got arms and legs in places
that nothing ought to have a limb.
You read some of the scientific theorists
and you discover that a tree apparently has a shape in mind
that it thinks it ought to achieve
and you cut off its leader and it sends up
a substitute leader.
It's trying to reach that ideal shape for itself.
You look at my trees and you say,
whatever got into their minds?
[LAUGHS]
What have they been smoking?
I mean--
[LAUGHTER]
What in the world is happening--
and I ought to cut them down, but I don't I
guess as you get older and more warped and twisted, you
or as you get older and notice how warped and twisted you--
you are and always have been.
You get fond of old, warped, twisted.
My neighbors out there are very rich lawyers
who have enormous spreads of land
and they have wonderful orchards,
there all the trees are all about eight feet
tall the way apple trees are supposed to be
and they stand there in perfect lines.
That look so suburban somehow that--
also I can afford to sneer at his orchard
because he lets me take the apples,
my trees don't produce anything.
[LAUGHTER]
Now, this is called "Old Apple Trees."
"Like battered old mill hands, they stand in the orchard.
Like drunk legionnaires heaving themselves up,
lurching to attention, not one of them
wobbles the same way as another.
Uniforms won't fit them, all those cramps, humps,
bulges here or limbs gone there, rain and corruption
have eaten the whole core.
They've all grown too tall, too thick, or too something.
Like men, bent too long over desks, engines, benches,
or bent under mail sacks, under loss.
They've seen too much history and bad weather,
grown around rocks into high winds, diseases.
Grown too long to be willful, too long to be changed.
Oh, I could replant, bulldoze the lot,
get nursery stock, all the latest ornamentals,
make the whole place look like a suburb.
Each limb sleek as a teeny bopper's,
pink to the very crotch.
Each trunk smoothed ideal as the fantasy life of an ad man.
We might just own the arboreal muscle beach.
[LAUGHTER]
Each tree disguised as its neighbor or each disguised
as if not its neighbor.
Each doing its own thing, like executive's children.
[LAUGHTER]
At least, I could prune.
At least, I should trim the dead wood,
fill holes where rain collects and decay starts.
Well, I should.
There's a red squirrel nests here somewhere.
I live in the hope of hearing one saw-whet owl.
Then, too, they're right about spring,
bees hum through these branches, like lascivious intentions.
The white petals drift down sift across the ground.
This air is so rich, no man should come here
except on a working pass, no man should leave here
without going to confession.
All fall apples nearly crack the boughs,
they hang here red is candles in the white oncoming snow.
Tonight, we'll drive down to the bad part of town to the New
Hungarian Bar or the Klub Polski, to the Old Hellas
where we'll eat the new spring lamb.
Drink good mavrodaphne, say, at the Laikon Bar.
Send drinks to the dancers, those meat cutters
and laborers, who move in their native dances.
The archaic forms, maybe we'll still
find our old crone selling chestnuts whose toothless gums
can spit out 15 languages, who turns there late at night
in the center of the floor.
Her ancient dry hips wheeling their slow, slow tsamikos.
We'll stomp under the tables, whistle.
We'll all hiss till even the belly dancer leaves disgraced.
We'll drive back, flushed and vacant in the first dawn.
Out of the light gray mists may rise our flowering orchard.
The rough trunks holding their formations,
like elders of Colonus, the old men of Thebes
tossing their white hair, almost whispering.
Soon, each one of us will be taken by dark powers
under this ground that drove us here, that warped us,
not one of us got it his own way.
Nothing like any one of us will be seen again forever.
Each of us held some noble shape in mind.
It seemed better that we kept alive."