This poem, "Lucky Life"--
we used to go down to the seashore once a year.
Our place was Long Beach Island.
Everybody has their summer place.
You know, you go to the cabin or the boat.
I used to, for years--
nobody knew it, my wife didn't--
I hated the seashore.
When I'd go down there, it was terrible Dirty quarters,
crowded up there.
It's crowded and noisy and sandy, and I hated the ocean.
I hated everything about it.
But I got into the habit of writing a seashore
poem every year.
So I have four or five seashore poems.
And I wrote four or five in one week
once to get it all over with.
And--
[LAUGHTER]
--it's really awful.
This is one of those poems.
And there's, unfortunately, some things here
that are not common knowledge.
There's a reference to a city, but it can
be any city you want, right?
It's called Phillipsburg New Jersey.
But it could be any--
more or less any city.
It has trees and streets.
And I mention a statue of Christopher Columbus.
My god, there's one everywhere, isn't there,
you know, trying to con you before he killed the Indians,
you know.
"Lucky Life," it's called.
"Lucky life isn't one long string of horrors,
there are moments of peace and pleasure
as I lie in between the blows.
Lucky I don't have to wake up in Phillipsburg, New Jersey,
on the hill overlooking Union Square or the hill
overlooking Kuebler Brewery or the hill
overlooking Saints Philip and James
but have my own hills and my own vistas to come back to.
Each year I go down to the island,
I add one more year to the darkness.
And though I sit up with my dear friends
trying to separate the one year from the other, this one
from the last, that one from the former, another from another,
after a while, they all get lumped together-- the year
we walked to Holgate, the year our shoes got washed away,
the year it rained, the year my tooth brought misery to us all.
This year was a crisis.
I knew it when we pulled the car onto the sand
and looked for the key.
I knew it when we walked up the outside steps
and opened the hot icebox and began the struggle
with swollen drawers, and I knew it when we laid out the sheets
and separated the clothes into piles,
and I knew it when we made our first rush onto the beach,
and I knew it when we finally sat on the porch
with coffee cups shaking in our hands.
My dream is I'm walking through Phillipsburg, New Jersey,
and I'm lost on South Main Street.
I'm trying to tell by memory which statue of Christopher
Columbus I have to look for, the one with him
slumped over and lost in weariness or the one
with him vaguely guiding the way with a cross and globe
in one hand and a compass in the other.
My dream is I'm in the Eagle Hotel on Chamber Street,
sitting at the oak bar, listening
to two obese veterans discussing Hawaii in 1942
and reading the funny signs over the bottles.
My dream is I sleep upstairs over the honey locust
and sit on the side porch overlooking the stone
culvert with a whole new set of friends,
mostly old and humorless.
Dear waves, what will you do for me this year?
Will you drown out my scream?
Will you let me rise through the fog?
Will you fill me with that old salt feeling?
Will you let me take my long steps in the cold sand?
Will you let me lie on the white bedspread
and study the black clouds with the blue holes in them?
Will you let me see the rusty trees and the old monoplanes
one more year?
Will you still let me draw my sacred figures
and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind?
Lucky life is like this.
Lucky there's an ocean to come to.
Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.
Lucky the waves are cold enough to wash out the meanness.
Lucky you can be purified over and over again.
Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone.
Lucky life is like that.
Lucky life.
Oh, lucky life.
Oh, lucky, lucky life.
Lucky life.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much.
We'll have that stuff out there.
What's it called?
Punch and cookies, and we can say hello.
Whose watch am I about to steal?
No, I can do it.
It's so [INAUDIBLE].
I'll see you later, right?