OK, I think I will read some recent poems,
and then I'll maybe end up with a couple poems
from "Lucky Life."
I think this clock's keeping good time.
I'm trying to face this and all.
This is a little part of it.
It doesn't have a manuscript we're working at
and stuff like that.
When I came to Iowa, I had to go to all these shops,
buy chairs and lampshades, toasters.
Particularly toasters.
And it's really true.
I went into a Salvation Army place and tried a toaster.
And they weren't guaranteeing me.
There was a pop up, and so on, had a big fight.
So this poem is called "The Dancing."
It's a memory.
But it's really what it is.
I moved from that to a memory of my father.
He used to make music.
At a very, very ancient, probably earliest music,
the body music.
You know?
Did your father do that?
Do you do that?
Doesn't everybody's father do that?
And he would sing Ukrainian songs,
and dance around the room, and say, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]..
Just wild.
This is a memory of that, living in Pittsburgh,
on a street called Beechwood Boulevard.
The other thing about this, and a couple,
these are all short poems that I've recently written,
is that they're all sort of oriented
in a strange way to music.
It's not strange at all.
I live in a very empty house alone
for the first time since my early 20s,
and the only thing I have, the only piece of furniture
I have is a music system.
And I have nothing to do there but teach about an hour a week,
so I listen to music all day long.
In all these rotten shots, in all
this broken furniture and wrinkled ties and baseball
trophies and coffee pots, I have never
seen a post-war Philco with the automatic eye
nor heard Ravel's "Bolero" the way
I did in 1945 in that tiny living room on Beechwood
Boulevard, nor danced as I did then, my knives
all flashing, my hair all streaming,
my mother red with laughter, my father cupping his left hand
under his armpit, doing the dance of old Ukraine,
the sound of his skin half drum, half fart,
the world at last a meadow, the three
of us whirling and singing, the three
of us screaming and falling, as if we were dying,
as if we could never stop, in 1945,
in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh,
home of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away
from the other dancing in Poland and Germany.
Oh, God of mercy, oh, wild God.