I was set upon by a woman a few years ago in Ohio
after a poetry reading.
A dog trainer who talked to me for hours in her car.
It was one of those meetings of the soul, where
one meets a person that one feels immediately close to.
And the other person feels much like stone.
Not so close to the other person.
I was the stone person.
The van smelled of dogs.
And more and more I felt for the person,
and I felt for myself at the same time
as I heard of the pedigrees of each of the dogs
that, at some point, she told me about,
homeless people in Springfield, Ohio,
and how a bus came from Dayton to pick them up
and to take them to a homeless shelter there.
And I began to feel good about myself just hearing that.
And she mentioned St. Vincent de Paul.
And I thought that's the club St. Vincent de Paul.
I know that's absurd.
But I think I've romanticized the poor all my life
as many people have.
Not when I was poor myself.
But at other times, I feel good thinking
about starving people, poor people, all people who
are weaker than me.
It's just natural to me.
I always liked hanging around people who were uglier than me.
And occasionally, I'd walk around,
I'd see myself in the windows with certain people.
And I'd realize I'm kind of a sturdy looking guy.
I'd better start hanging out with some uglier people.
So this is about the romanticization of the poor.
It's called The Romance of the Poor.
The poor people in Springfield go to Dayton
to be miserable in style.
They can hug themselves when they lie side
by side on the iron cots.
They can luxuriate in one red bean held under the tongue.
For them, a discarded refrigerator crate
tipped on its side and lined with plastic bags
is the green shore of an island, and a palace's velvet halls.
Every morning, they check out of the club St. Vincent de Paul,
and they clump in the warm gusts that scowl up from the sewers.
They can strip the aluminum from gutters
as their mothers harvested eggs from boxes of straw.
Against that snow that is all edge,
they can wobble and careen from bumper
to light pole dancing with a parking meter
before diving into the hydrant under the fire escape.
Deliriously happy, they lift the sweetest and heaviest wine
and sink down where the muddle is
warm across from the cafeteria
and that other richest trough, kingdom of heaven on Earth,
emerald dumpster of the pizzeria.
What does it matter if I heap treasure
from the stick people, far off and helpless, fluttering
of brown coats?
Their lives are not my life.
I come as a tourist to their woe.
But I remember how quickly dark fell 20 years ago thumbing
from Greensboro to Boulder.
I carried one change of clothes, a notebook,
and a little more than $7.
And I thought I could live by the grace of hippies
and priests, or failing that, prey
on park squirrels and the ducks from municipal ponds.
I did not have to go that way.
I could have gone on wrestling those big sacks of fertilizer
from the co-op storage bins to the beds of pickup trucks,
or bludgeoning ice from the front steps of the Coliseum.
But I had to get it straight from the flat road and the mouth
of the blue norther.
There is a high ledge under every overpass where you can
sleep if it is not too cold.
One morning, I woke there beside a short man, a carny,
and ex-con reared in the Tennessee Industrial School
and a dozen foster homes.
We talked a stupid dream of burglary.
We committed the crime of brotherhood.
Then, hungry and stiff, we trudged up the ramp
to a truck stop, where he meant to convince
me to knife a man for $300 locked in a drawer.
He said, we could get away.
We could take any of those semis idling
outside that place like great buffaloes
blowing clouds and clearing their throats.
But I've taken nothing.
I've gotten away clean to Illinois.
Tonight, the stakes frown up at me through the odor of blood.
And the poor need no help from poems to lump down the alley
and up into the van.
They glide to Dayton.
They check into the club St. Vincent de Paul.
Whatever it is, it is not much that makes
a man more than a scrap of paper torn out of a notebook
and thrown from the window of a bus.
But it is more than nothing.
If he holds himself straight up and does not
take the life next to his own, give him that much.
Leave him his joy.
Another really cheery poem now that I think of it.