This one is called The Journalist.
One.
In the old photograph I'm holding my nose
and my friend Stutz has a finger down his throat.
We're 16 in Cedar Falls.
It's all still a joke.
In my mind, I'm back there.
The blonde who used me like a dirty rag
is gone in a red convertible.
The top is down.
She sits beside the Greek from out of town,
his hair slicked down with bergamot.
I don't care, I do care that she cruises the streets
of Little America without me.
I take a last drag off my Lucky, pull my cap low
and take the old road to the fairgrounds.
I'm 16.
What do I know about love and passion,
I think, as I watch the circus set up, watch as the elephants
pitch and sway, heads and trunk swinging wildly.
When the yellow leaves stir and spin around me,
I walk back to the river and skim stones
across the clear gold water of early evening
till the 7:18 whistle blows.
Then, as if on command, I start running from childhood,
from the hometown that keeps me a boy when I want to be a man.
Manhood, a dream, an illusion, I think,
as I lay down the photograph and stand still in the anemic glow
of the darkroom lights, my body giving off the formaldehyde
smell of the unknown.
Two.
In Vietnam in 1966, I stood among the gathering crowd
as the Buddhist nun doused her robe with gasoline.
As an American, I couldn't understand,
and as I stood there I imagined myself moving through the crowd
to stop her, but I didn't.
I held my camera in position, then it happened so quickly:
her assistant stepped forward with a match.
Flames rose up the nun's robe and covered her face,
then her charred body slowly fell to the ground.
That year in Vietnam, I threw my life in the air
like a silver baton.
I could catch it with my eyes closed, till one night it
sailed into black space like a wish and disappeared.
Or was it me who vanished, sucking the hard rock
candy of the future,
sure that a man's life is art, that mine had to be?
But tonight I'm 53, I've drunk my way
to the bottom of that river of my youth,
and I'm lying there like a fat carp,
belly down in the muck and nothing, not the blonde,
the red car, or the smell of new money can get me up again.
I lay out the photographs of the nun.
I remember how her assistant spoke
to the crowd, how no one acknowledged
her, how we stood another two or 3 minutes till I put
my hand in my pocket, brought out the matchbook,
and threw it to the nun's side.
I stare at the last photograph, the nun's heart that would not
burn, the assistant, her hands stretched toward me
with a matchbook in it.
What is left out?
A man in me, stepping forward, tearing off a match,
striking it, and touching it to the nun's heart?
I throw the photographs in the metal wastebasket,
then take the heart from a glass container of formaldehyde.
I light a match.
Still, the heart won't burn.
I put the fire out, close my eyes,
and see myself running, holding a lump wrapped
in a handkerchief.
I think someone will stop me or try to, but no one does.
I open my eyes, take the heart and hold it against my own.
When I was 16 I was the dutiful son,
I washed my hands, helped my mother set the table,
got my hair, my shoes shined.
I tip the Black man, a cowboy, a dime.
I didn't excel, but I knew I could be heroic if I had to.
I'd set the sharp end of the compass down on black paper,
and with a pencil end I was drawing the circle that
would contain me, everything I wanted,
everything I'd settle for, life and all its imitations.
That day in Hue, I had the chance to step from the circle
and I took it, but when I turned back everything inside
it was burning.
My past was gone, I was gone, but the boy was still there.
He watched the flames take the nun, he took her heart,
he was running, I was bound, he said to himself: I'm free,
but it was a lie.
I put the heart back in the container,
hear the heavy footsteps of my wife,
the blonde, who is gray now, who is clumping up
the stairs in her rubber boots like some female Santa Claus.
In the heavy canvas bag slung over her shoulder
all the smashed toys of my life.
Wait, I say, as I stand with my shoulder against the door,
wait, you haven't heard the best part yet,
a boy is running away from home.
He's lost his cap, he's wearing the icy wind like an overcoat,
he can't go back, he won't go back.
He never left.
[Applause]
Thanks for that.
That was the last poem that I wrote
for the manuscript, what's happened lately
though the last two I wrote I thought really good,
and I told my editor well, I'll give you one of them.
And then last week I thought well, I'll send the other one
and I keep adding this stuff I keep thinking,
well, I'll just make the book stronger,
and it's getting out of control.
Now, thought some sort of neurosis now.
It's add on so that when the book comes out
it'll be 350 pages, largest book of poetry ever written.
Talked to this philosopher who said the volumes are so slim,
what do you expect?
It's your life's work in 60 pages.
Expect some opus, I'm just giving myself
a small break here.