Now, this takes it in a different direction.
I'm going back to the poem for Tom McGrath, who
was a great radical American poet
with an enormous vocabulary, a fantastic command of forms,
and a great heart.
So the first thing I'm going to read
is some little lyric that he told me once,
and then I go into the next section.
The next section begins nevertheless.
So first his little ditty I think there's a tune for this
but I don't know what it is.
It's going to be cold, colder than a witch's tit,
colder than a barrel of penguin shit,
colder than the hair on a polar bear's ass,
colder than the heart of the ruling class.
And he laughs shaking his head.
Nevertheless, on the green swords
of the park and the democratic summer air,
we gather for an internal combustion picnic
before the fireworks begin on the fourth.
We call up our rattling, groaning histories,
our fled time.
We mark the anniversaries of our families
in the several great realms of the new world.
We say again the phrases and tales we have best remembered.
The young mother so close that they nursed each other's babies
in the old neighborhood.
Sunday dinners in the old kitchen, the lawsuit,
those bills for dad's illness, sister's great performance,
but then she gave it up.
Our causes, our coffee clashes, the good works on this street
are that, good persons, old world always becoming
new, new world also.
Our five act dramas are Chevrolet births and Ford
divorces.
We hear a kind of poem in the noise of the highway,
in the ocean waves, in the sound of the shouts in the backfire
or a gun within the whispering of the wind in the leaves.
A poem about the same rain falling
on tin roofs and penthouse terraces,
on small farm crops and country clubs, about our flying
first jobs and our Tylenol retirements, the pennons
and etymons of gladness and despair,
the little pieces of the story of it all
that are our own stories, even saddening ones that remind us
of the paths down which we've come hurrying or hesitating,
hustling, advancing, fleeing, wandering.
Our chosen mothers and fathers if we can find them helping us
along or not.
Some people knocked down by life, others knocked open.
APPLAUSE
You ready?
Yeah.
I was going along real good.
Then you did something and just took me off, man.
That's the whole idea.
Yeah I know.
I know.
I can understand that.
So maybe I'll just switch it up and do something.