I spent three years at the University of Pittsburgh,
half of each of those years.
And there's very much a Pittsburgh style of poetry.
Possibly I'm being unkind when I call it a point-and-aim style
of poetry.
It is April, I am cold, we were at the Pit tavern
drinking, that kind of thing.
At its best, it's just wonderful,
but there's definitely a style.
And I thought I would sit down to try to write
a few poems in that style.
I did not succeed, so you're not going to hear that.
But what I ended up with instead were some poems
about the kinds of people who live in Pittsburgh,
a very revved up, highly charged, blue collar
artist for whom everything is exactly the same level.
So you would hear them discussing
Proust in the bleachers before a hockey match, for instance.
It was a wonderful thing to discover.
This is a poem called, "Lines Written in a Pittsburgh
Skyscraper."
And it talks a little bit about the students
who're like that in Pittsburgh.
And it takes place in a skyscraper right
at the edge of a ghetto area.
I was at eye level with a saint atop a church
across the street.
And I noticed that the church had the saint facing away
from the ghetto, which I thought was very telling.
And he was facing towards all the athletic stadia, also.
"It has taken me three years to come to this view.
I know now that the body is a river whose bones and muscles
and organs are flowing.
I have watched the shapes in the molded Alleghany, contained and
onrushing, blow bridge after bridge vertebra
to the Ohio, a brown river that still powers the mind, lying
long in the trestle arms of this city who sentences hard labor.
Eye level atop a church across the street, St. Benedict
the Moor stands open armed and giant,
his back turned to the fuming of a ghetto, where some evenings
the brightest vision is the flash of a street
lamp on a jogger's white Nikes.
My students are the children of coal miners
who watched the ground swallow their fathers each day,
sometimes even digesting the trapped men,
turning their bones back into lime, into coal.
It is the oldest fear: that Earth may recall you.
Along the top of Mount Washington
lies a stole of color unnatural to sky, twilight's blue collar.
But the mountains are a fishing village--
steep, hearty, and solid.
At night, the lights and stars from my window
make the cityscape an Ethiopian bride.
As cars bolt around a curve of street lamps,
their shadows flash from under them like sprung souls.
And the river, churning its wet, whispery thighs,
the river pouring blood dark under the bridges.
In the river, I find my astonished limbs and all
the stateless gels within me--
carnal, mute, holy-- flowing unburdened
toward a distant shore."