This is even more embarrassing poem
because the first line makes me blush.
It's kind of-- well, I have to back up.
Last year Christmas, I went for the first time
to meet my wife's family.
And she lives in a place called Linwood, Pennsylvania.
It's just south of Philadelphia.
And we were joking and kidding around.
She has a large Irish family.
And someone said-- well, I must say that this place Linwood is
close to Marcus Hook which is a huge oil refinery.
And I blush to tell you this, but I'm only repeating
what I heard, of course.
So that's my out.
Someone said, and repeat my first two lines--
"Kiss me where it smells, she said.
So he took her to Marcus Hook."
And of course, I had to get a poem out of there.
It's a wonderful blue-collar town.
The Italians live on one side of the street,
and you have the Polish over here,
and the Blacks live over here.
And in the middle, there's this great big refinery
tower that goes up 18 stories.
And this flame shoots out of it.
And the most wonderful thing--
one of the high religious experience I had--
last New Year's Eve, everyone at New Year's ran into the streets
and were banging pots together and dancing in the streets.
And the person in charge of the tower--
this is not the poem.
I'm just telling you about the poem.
[LAUGHTER]
And the person in charge of the tower
turned the dial and the flame shot 100 feet into the air
and lit up the town brighter than sunlight.
And I thought, Wow!
What a great place to live.
[LAUGHTER]
Except that refinery, every 15 years or so, blows up.
And that occurs in the poem too.
Also, I went to the graveyard with my wife.
We're looking over, you know, gravestones of family members.
And the Italians have a custom apparently.
They put little pictures in plastic
of people who have died.
That comes in the poem too.
I tell you this so you won't be confused.
But the best thing about Marcus Hook is a few years ago,
some woman had a statue of the blessed Virgin, which
kept on bleeding all the time until there were droves
of people arriving, and they had to call the state
police so there wasn't a riot.
And people filed in and paid obeisance
to the bleeding statue.
It was the only time that Marcus Hook made it
into the National news.
Later, of course, they found out [INAUDIBLE]..
It wasn't real.
But any rate, the poem is called "The Bleeding
Virgin of Marcus Hook" I guess I have
to say the two lines again.
"Kiss me where it smells, she said.
So he took her to Marcus Hook where the great liberal torches
burn above the neighborhoods and every few years,
the refinery plants go boom.
Then the volunteer firemen scramble for their last breaths
while trying to hold up their world of collapsing wood.
Here's the room where you knelt while the town evacuated,
racing through the rosary as flames bloomed brighter
than they had, ever bloomed across the flowered wallpaper.
So you see, despite disgust, every place
has its history worth burying away, worth coming to.
On this cold day, you take me from grave to grave.
I scuff away the leaves, and you point, embarrassed,
to your relatives.
The people with weird names you didn't know.
Pictures of Italian men staring out ever
sterner as our century ends.
We'll stop in Howie's for a hoagie
before catching the train away from these thousands in prison
without knowing it.
Then point to the one clapboard house,
the town's sole short lived fame.
Inside, the pained virgin, bleeding from all her limbs.
While outside, the grim state policemen directed traffic,
beat one photographer with their nightsticks
as got up in their Sunday best.
The Black ladies oohed in line, trying
to decide if they dared to go in."