A while ago, I visited the Bedford Correctional Center,
and there's some famous people there.
Remember Pamela Smart?
Remember all this-- there was like a ring of women
who had younger men.
And they were plotting with the younger man
to kill their husbands?
(MULTIPLE VOICES) Uh-huh.
OK, so they're there.
She's there.
But, also, some of you, who are older,
might remember the Brink's robbery,
in Nyack, New York, where two police officers, and a Brink's
security guard, were killed.
And there are some women, formerly of the Weather
Underground, who are in this jail,
including the woman mentioned this poem, named Julia.
This was the first time I had gone--
this was a while ago-- first time
I had gone to speak in a prison.
And you come bounding in saying, hey, I'm
going to teach you poetry.
But there's a whole other reality there
that you have to look into before you can really
have a discussion with them.
So this is what happened there.
And we were talking about form.
And I tried all kinds of things to do this.
I didn't want to do rhyme.
I didn't want to do a shorter form
because I know it was going to be a longer poem.
And so it wound up being, just, blank verse,
just iambic, blank verse.
And it helped me a lot.
"I'm sure I know the very moment when the room became its walls,
became the clawed, unyielding door,
became the backhand slap of windows, smeared opaque,
with, merely, all their million breaths.
I come with only words, a ray in gust of light.
The hex, I hope, would daze the weary inmates for the hour
and disappear the latches on their lives.
The front of any room is such a scrubbed and twitchy place,
especially when I am armed with just my thrashing passions,
while an audience of strangers thinks me strange.
I'm calmed by other voices in the air,
but, asked to share a thing about themselves,
not one revealed her joy or mused
upon a place that once was home.
Instead, they spoke in clock.
'Got 30 more of them in here,' or, 'had to whoop some ass.
They added five.'
One sniffed until I met her blaring eyes.
'I just did 13 years.
That's half the way.'
The legendary one, who'd been unarmed,
had driven getaway in '81.
Three people, two of them in blue, had bled to gone.
But now her shout commanded space.
'Ha, how many years for me?
The rest of them.'
And all the women laughed, so I laughed too.
At first, not realizing, Julia meant
that she was in the place she'd always be.
And all the awkward cackling meant she wouldn't be alone.
The sisterhood had vowed that every one of them
would learn to tend a spewing wound and mimic glee.
Two.
When quiet dropped as if a whip had cracked, they held my eyes.
And their implicit dare was red and human in the room.
The gaunt and haunted butch, who never
stopped the drag of fingers through her harshly-scissored
net, wanted to know if all my pretty lines could resurrect
the movement of a mouth that knew her body long
before its fall.
And then a blue-black diva, petulant and comically aloof--
who looked as if some hard miscommunication had resulted
in her being plopped among these filthy-mouthed, unkept,
much lesser-classer folk--
insisted I unearth a rhyme to finally twist
the record back to right.
And Julia, who had driven murderers
away from what they kill, now owned the room
and saw no reason to renounce her reign.
'Go on and read your poems now,' she barked,
'because you know enough about us.
Right?'
Another inmate raised her hand and seemed to want to speak,
but then she dropped that hand, instead,
to veil a ruined mouth.
Her back was bended almost twice.
I think she knew that it would only straighten when she died,
and that she'd die-- right there in Bedford,
with her mourners-- squalling, from a single throat.
Her whole, collapsing body was the time,
and any poem I could write for her would just
have kept on ending.
'Listen, now,' I said.
'I'll read you what I have.'
But all the lines were this--
'I cannot shatter clocks.'
Three.
The line was this--
"I cannot shatter clocks.'
And in the middle of that line, somewhere
inside the reel of that, a woman screamed and screamed.
She wasn't in the room with us.
I thought that she was down a hallway, far enough away.
Her screaming shouldn't have rocked our walls the way
it did, but no one seemed to notice.
No one raised their head or looked
in the direction of the door.
There were no startled glances--
quizzical, alarmed-- all during the time
the woman failed to pull in any breaths,
or bellow just one word that I could understand.
I scanned the room and thought of running down
the hall myself to see if I could help,
but all I had were poems.
And I didn't want to see her anguished face or all the blood
I knew she must be drowning in.
'What's happening?' I asked. 'What's going on?
Should we get out?'
The woman, who was halfway done at 13 years,
had pity, finally, and simply said, 'we can't go home.
Until we've done our time-- for some of us, until we die--
we can't go home.
No matter what has happened here, or happened there,
we have to hear it here, and tough it out.'
And then I knew that they had understood the words
that the screaming woman buried deep.
'You've got to let me go.
My mom is dead.
I need to go back home.
My mom is dead.
Have mercy on my soul.
My mom is dead.
Unlock the goddamn cage.
My mom is dead.
Motherfucker, listen.
My mom is dead.'
Each time she heard the air, we heard the clock.
[FINGERS SNAPPING]