Now this last poem in this group comes out
of a correspondence I've had over several years with a man
in prison in New York State.
And the poem is conceived as letters to me
from this prisoner, extending over several years,
beginning when we barely knew each other.
It's in five parts.
One.
Other prisoners you've written to
must have told you stories like mine,
how when they were 10 or 11, their fathers began
to drink too much, how, when the beatings grew too heavy,
they ran loose all night.
I'm willing to admit that my brothers, as wild as I was,
turned out all right.
I don't compare their daily killings on the market
now with the one killing on my hands.
All I ask you to see is how much more
hate I had to keep in check than you had to or have to now,
how good feelings, when they come to you,
come mostly from the heart, unforced, not from the will.
If I could write well, I'd write a book
on the subject of unequal chances, unequal tests
and trials, and not mention myself at all.
The subject must interest you too.
Why else would you want to write me, a stranger and a prisoner?
I'm glad you do in spite of the days
when a bad taste rises in my throat
as I think how little anger you have to swallow,
waking each day in the sunlit, carpeted
room I imagine you waking in.
It's a full day's work for me not to envy your lack of envy
for any man as you look down on your garden.
In my best daydream, I see myself down there,
talking with your friends, nodding and laughing.
I'm cheering on a friendly game of croquet, and want to join in
but don't, afraid that the mallet in my hands
might turn out dangerous, a missed shot stirring up
something dark from the bottom that for years had
been slowly settling because I'd been holding my life still.
Two.
Now that they're sleeping, their radios still till dawn,
I'm alone with the thin wedge of stars
visible from the high window.
I have time to name all the clusters I can,
trying to move with them as they shift west over land
I want to know more of, old free states and slave,
Indian settlements, abandoned mining camps.
The more I learn, the more I feel wasted here,
and the lonelier, angry at the many,
not angered by their ignorance, and angry at myself for vanity.
Why should they want to study when the only student they know
is far more sullen than they are and aging
faster, gray as a ghost, the thinnest shadow
in the land of shadows.
Three.
Yesterday, wind seemed to be blowing out
through the open gate of the garden I try to believe in,
the one I carry with me.
I could almost smell the trees blossoming.
And it seemed that nothing here could hurt me.
Whatever happened would leave me strong, whatever time did,
or the guards.
And the guard seemed human, even the worst ones,
more afraid than cruel.
So if today the wind carries no garden smell,
should I believe I dreamed it any more
than I dream the world, the slums and mudflats, the pear
tree I once took pears from?
Among the hours of hate, I can clear a space for simple sorrow
to breathe in.
When I find, in a guard's face, nothing I want to find,
I must imagine what he might have been,
the boy on the street on summer evenings,
playing hard at hide and go seek,
cheering as a friend scrambles across the lawn to the home
tree to free the prisoners.
Four.
The world locks us away and forgets.
But we never forget the world.
And if you can come on diploma day,
you can watch the few men in the study program
receive their scrolls in the visiting room.
Students of earth crust and epics,
foreign policy, light refraction, Roman history,
the food chain.
You can see them in the Honors block,
watching the evening news.
You'd be surprised how few laugh when the president says
that America will ignore the world court for the next two
years, how many feel ashamed for him
as they walk back to their cells to daydream,
in the hour before bed, that their crime is undone,
that a woman is lying on the cot with them,
and the cot is a blanket under the stars.
Last month, I sent you my thoughts on Jefferson.
This month I'm reading Russian thinkers.
I love the way they resist regret and look ahead,
as Jefferson does, to a new order with justice
for all, no masters and no slaves, no wars or colonies.
Were they studied today by those with power
in Moscow or Washington, more countries would be free now
and appeals wouldn't be piling up in the mail rooms.
I imagine a clerk in a hall of the great powers sorting
the letters into piles.
This pile from those unwilling to take
the long view about hardship in the provinces,
about vital interests.
This pile from those who'd send the wrong signal
to the enemy, who'd make us appear weak by backing down.
No need for me to reread your words to make me
wonder what your life is like and hope, if you need help,
that help is coming, rumbling through the night
by the truckload.
Meanwhile, I can tell from here how the letters in the Great
Hall are hauled off by the truckload to be burned,
how the smoke near the dump is so thick
the neighbors complain in letters to the authorities.
Five.
I'll be all right when I get out of here if I don't look back
the wonder who I might have been had I never been locked away
and don't live fast trying to make the years up.
Even here, I've done what I could, with books,
to climb above the wall and guard towers
and look out over the trees I can't touch,
down through the house windows and screen doors.
I can almost see the people sitting down to eat,
the happy ones easy to believe in
and the sad ones no more comforted by their paintings
than I am by my iron bed or my steel sink and toilet bowl.
And when the guards yell at me to come down,
I don't allow my anger to flare out
as I strain to catch the talk in the dining room.
And if the cries of the boy I was rise to my lookout,
I don't look back on his beatings and lament,
I climb higher, so high even the sobs of the grown man
for the boy can't reach me.
Like the sailors in the story with wax stuffed in their ears,
not like the hero, I sail by.
And my ship isn't turned towards home.
The future must contain what I haven't
seen in a place I've never visited if it's holding
something good in store for me.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE CONTINUES]
I'm not crying at my own poetry, just my nose is running,
that's all.
That's the only long poem I'm going to read.