This next one is, "The Woman Hanging From The Thirteenth
Floor Window."
And I wrote this poem two or three years
after I'd gone to Chicago and gone to the Chicago Indian
Center.
And it was a late afternoon when I went there in winter.
Winter is no time to be in Chicago, especially
to be Indian in Chicago.
And I remember walking through that Indian Center
and it was pretty depressing.
But what stood out with me and what haunted me,
I suppose, for two or three years
before I wrote the poem was this rocking chair.
It was the only round thing except for the people
in that place.
And so every once in a while, I would see that rocking chair
almost right here in the periphery of my vision.
And at first, there would be different people sitting in it,
an old man rocking his grandson or a couple of little girls.
And finally, this one woman became very insistent.
She was there for a long time.
And finally, one afternoon-- and I don't usually
write poems in the afternoon, but she said, that's all right,
and she made me write this poem.
And the odd thing about it is, I usually
do quite a bit of revision, and this poem,
I did hardly any revising on.
And after the poem was first out and people first
saw it, they said, you know, I heard about that story.
Or, I knew that woman.
But it was never the same place.
It was Chicago or New York or some other city.
This is called, "The Woman Hanging From The Thirteenth
Floor Window."
She is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window.
Her hands are pressed white against the concrete molding
of the tenement building.
She hangs from the 13th floor window in East Chicago
with a swirl of birds over her head.
They could be a halo or a storm of glass waiting to crush her.
She thinks she will be set free.
The woman hanging from the 13th floor window on the East side
of Chicago is not alone.
She is a woman of children, of the baby, Carlos,
and of Margaret, and of Jimmy, who is the oldest.
She is her mother's daughter and her father's son.
She is several pieces between the two husbands she has had.
She is all the women of the apartment building
who stand watching her watching themselves.
When she was young, she ate wild rice on scraped down plates
in warm wood rooms.
It was in the farther North and she was the baby then.
They rocked her.
She sees Lake Michigan lapping at the shores of herself.
It is a dizzy hole of water, and the rich
live in tall glass houses at the edge of it.
In some places, Lake Michigan speaks softly.
Here, it just sputters and butts itself against the asphalt.
She sees other buildings just like hers.
She sees other women hanging from many flawed windows,
counting their lives in the palms of their hands
and in the palms of their children's hands.
She is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window
on the Indian side of town.
Her belly is soft from her children's births.
Her worn Levis swing down below her waist and then her feet
and then her heart.
She is dangling.
The woman hanging from the 13th floor hears voices,
they come to her in the night when the lights have gone dim.
Sometimes they are little cats mewing and scratching
at the door, sometimes they are her grandmother's voice,
and sometimes they are gigantic men
of light whispering to her to get up, to get up, to get up.
That's when she wants to have another child
to hold on to in the night, to be
able to fall back into dreams.
And the woman hanging from the 13th floor window
hears other voices, some of them scream out from below
for her to jump, they would push her over.
Others cry softly from the sidewalks,
pull their children up like flowers
and gather them into their arms.
They would help her like themselves.
But she is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window
and she knows she is hanging by her own fingers, her own skin,
her own thread of indecision.
She thinks of Carlos, of Margaret, of Jimmy.
She thinks of her father and of her mother.
She thinks of all the women she has been, of all the men.
She thinks of the color of her skin and of Chicago streets
and of waterfalls and pines.
She thinks of moonlight nights and of cool spring storms.
Her mind chatters like neon and Northside bars.
She thinks of the 4:00 AM lonelinesses
that have folded her up like death,
discordant, without logical and beautiful conclusion.
Her teeth break off at the edges.
She would speak.
The woman hangs from the 13th floor window,
crying for the lost beauty of her own life.
She sees the sun falling West over the gray plane of Chicago.
She thinks she remembers listening to her own life break
loose, as she falls from the 13th floor
window on the East side of Chicago,
or as she climbs back up to claim herself again.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks.
And so when I was a kid, I used to read a lot.
I would read anything.
I would steal police detective magazines
from under my stepfather's mattress,
under his bed, and short story collections.
I didn't have any kind of discrimination.
And there was one story that I loved in which--
it drove me crazy.
It bothered me for weeks because the author left you there
in an arena with this guy who had to choose
between a beautiful woman--
they were behind these doors.
Behind one door, was a beautiful woman,
and behind the other was a hungry tiger.
And that just drove me crazy.
That's where I got the ending for that.