The Power of the Word; 104; Voices of Memory

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... This program is made possible by grants from the Schumann Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and by the financial support of viewers like you, the Power of the Word with Bill Moyers. Glassboro State College in rural New Jersey.

Poets from across the country gather to read their work and to share their experiences with the waiting and enthusiastic audience. For some of the poets it's their first time to meet, but for two, this is a reunion of good friends, one the teacher, the other his pupil. Lee Young Lee is a Chinese American poet who recently published his first book of poetry to why to claim. But I never thought I could write it, I thought poetry was some high and mighty thing of the angels, but end of the ancient dead in China, but later on I met Gerald Stern at the University of Pittsburgh. I read his poetry and I suddenly realized that poetry could be written by living human beings. Gerald Stern is the author of six books of poetry and teaches at the famed writer's workshop at the University of Iowa. Sometimes I start just technically, musically, in the beginning of the poem, and I write lines down, and I don't know why I'm writing them down, or where it's going.

And finally, as if the poem itself is a puzzle that will give me a secret, that will give me a secret about life itself. Two friends, two poets, joined by affection for one another, and the conviction that the poet's job is to remember. I'm Bill Moyers, although I left these texts as long ago, it's still home. My parents are there and old friends, and I return so often I take for granted the freedom and ease of reaching my native soil. Not until I meet someone who can't go home again, do I try to imagine what it must be like to be an exile forever, and how vital memory then becomes to finding out and holding on to one's identity. I kept thinking of this as I listened to Lee Young Lee confront through poetry, his brilliant, loving, but dominating father, himself a stranger in a far land. And following Gerald Stern's wild and grief-stained images into the past, was like tracking a great wounded bear across the rocks and through the trees back to its cave.

For Jerry Stern, the abominations of this century have made exiles of us all, and memory, memory is the only way home. Gerald Stern and Lee Young Lee. There's a place in Chicago, great place where you get noodles and this barbecued meat, and it's a Chinese deli, it's wonderful, it's greasy, Jerry Stern and I ate there once. On a good day you go in there, and there are Cambodians, and Vietnamese, and Africans, and Black Americans, and Native Americans. It's like heaven. I think I was in there one day, and heaven would be like this. Jesus, or Joshua, or Laozi, whoever it is would walk through, and it's hello, hello, excuse the grease. It's very greasy, excuse the grease, excuse our construction, it would be like a Presbyterian nightmare. I just defined heaven, a Presbyterian's nightmare.

I'm kidding, my father was a Presbyterian minister. You don't know it, but I'm arguing with him, I have nothing against Presbyterians. Poets are endlessly arguing with the dead. Lee Young Lee lives in Chicago, but his thoughts return often to the China of his family's origin. His grandfather was the first president of the Republic of China. His father was a Chinese scholar, the personal physician to Mao Zedong, and a political prisoner in Indonesia. After a herring escape in years of Exodus, the family made their way to America. My father was a political fugitive, and we traveled throughout India, China, and Southeast Asia. We were changing our names, we were always out of money, we were always hiding in this and that, and I blamed it on my parents. I kept wondering, why can't we have a normal life?

But through it all, my father was reading to us from the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. And so I came to really love that group of books, especially the Book of Exodus, because the wanderings of children in Israel had, you know, I felt as if those were stories about us. It is a book about the importance of history, the importance of memory, to remember, occurs. I think in the Old Testament, remember that injunction occurs over a hundred times. Thou shalt not kill occurs only once. So that, to remember, is very important. I don't know what that means, except that it's very important. This poem is called Namanic, and Namanic is a mental strategy used to remember things. Namanic.

I was tired, so I lay down. My lids grew heavy, so I slept. Slander memory, stay with me. I was cold once, so my father took off his blue sweater. He wrapped me in it, and I never gave it back. It is the sweater he wore to America, this one, which I've grown into, whose sleeves are too long, whose elbows have thinned, who outlives its rightful owner. Flamboyant blue in daylight, poor blue by daylight. It is black in the folds. A serious man who devised complex systems of numbers and rhymes to aid him in remembering, a man who forgot nothing, my father would be ashamed of me. Not because I'm forgetful, but because there is no order to my memory. A heap of details, uncatalogged illogical.

For instance, God was lonely, so he made me. My father loved me, so he spanked me. It hurt him to do so. He did it daily. The earth is flat. Those who fall off don't return. The earth is round. All things reveal themselves to men only gradually. I won't last. Memory is sweet. Even when it's painful, memory is sweet. Once I was cold, so my father took off his blue sweater. Early on, my father impressed upon his children, the importance of the memory. He loved mnemonic devices, strategies to remember things.

He was reading books about how to strengthen your memory. A book that he loved most was an obscure text called the adherenium. It's written in Latin. He understood Hebrew, Latin, Greek, whatever. In this text, this is the way he told it to me, I never read this text. One of the tricks you can use to better your memory. For instance, if you need to remember how formula and math are something. You would walk into a room, a favorite room. You'd memorize the interior of the room, and then you emblazoned in your memory in the image of the room, in your head, parts of the formula. So that all you have to do is recall the room, and then, supposedly, these parts of the formula will come back to you.

It never works for me. He could probably stand here and look at your faces and get your names and get maybe 50% of you correctly matched. He had a wonderful memory. But I could never do that. He's always back handing me. This poem is called This Room And Everything In It. It's about memories, about my own failures in memory. It's a love poem for my wife, who is not here today. This room and everything in it. Lie still now while I prepare for my future. Certain hard days ahead when I'll need what I know so clearly this moment. I am making use of the one thing I learned of all the things my father tried to teach me, the art of memory. I am letting this room and everything in it stand for my ideas about love and love's difficulties. I'll let your love cries, those spacious notes of a moment ago stand for distance.

Your scent, that scent of spice and a wound, I'll let stand for mystery. Your sunken belly is the daily cup of milk I drank as a boy before morning prayer. The sun on the face of the wall is gone. The face I can't see, my soul, and so on. Each thing standing for a separate idea and those ideas forming the constellation of my greater idea. And one day, when I need to tell myself something intelligent about love, I'll close my eyes and recall this room and everything in it. My body is a strangement, this desire perfection. Your closed eyes are my extinction. Now I've forgotten my idea. The book on the windowsill riffled by wind, the even numbered pages are the past, the odd numbered pages the future.

The sun is God, your body is milk, useless, useless. Your cries are song, my body's not me, no good, my idea has evaporated. Your hair is time, your thighs are song. It had something to do with death. It had something to do with love. In my household, my father read to us constantly from the King James Bible, and he recited, he had a classical Chinese education which meant he memorized 300 poems from the Tang Dynasty, and he would recite them to us. And he would make us recite back. And of course, my memory was so bad I could never do very well. But I learned to love poetry, and I remember hearing him read from the pulpit, from Psalms or the Proverbs, and I would think, my God, that's incredible, that's power. Do you find yourself now writing poems to try to move him, to try to persuade him, to try to? Yeah, I'm afraid to say at this age, I'm still my father's son.

I still do things to impress him, to move him. He was, for me, a huge character. He made it obvious early on that he was the template by which all his sons and his daughter were to measure our lives by. He made that obvious to us. He was always setting himself up as a goal for us. He wasn't modest about that. He always impressed upon us that we were supposed to speak seven languages like him. I only speak two, you know, Mandarin, Chinese, and English. He always told us we should be able to translate Kierkegaard, we should be able to translate from Psalms. A few years ago, I actually thought that I was going to study Hebrew and translate the Psalms, and then I realized that was merely a quarrel with, I was still having with my dead father. Yeah, so he was a huge figure.

Did you ever feel devastated by him as some sons do by a strong father? No, you know, that's the one thing. My mother said to me one time that she pointed to me and said, you are the stone on which your father's patience broke. So I realized that she was talking about a great deal of strength that I got from both my mother and father. Did you ever argue with him when he was alive? When he was alive, I never argued with him until the last year of our life together before he died. I think I was moving away from home. I was away from home a lot. And suddenly dawned on me that average Americans don't live the way we were living, you know, constant subjugation and fear and awe. And there's a lot of love and tenderness between us, but I would characterize our relationship as awe. For instance, it was obvious to me at some point after he died that for years I wasn't praying to a god I was praying to him. I seem to have two fathers. One was intensely angry, powerful, physically powerful.

He used to do this trick. He would take a block of pine. Then he would take a 16-penny nail. He would wrap a piece of cloth on the head of the nail. And he would hold it between his fingers like this. The nail sticking out. He would take the pine like this. And he would say, watch now. And he would drive the nail into the block. And he'd pull it out and he'd now touch that. And it'd be hot from the friction. I remember that. The sound of that nail going in and just squeaking out. It sounded like it was screaming out of that wood. And he would say, touch that. And we got into an argument once. He was quite ill at the time. And he was lying in bed. And there I was, this brash young man arguing with this sick father. And he said, go get me a block of wood in the nail. So I went and got it and I thought, geez, you know. So he drove the thing in and he gave it to me. He was, when you can pull that out, you come and talk to me.

And I thought, it's funny. He was a man of supreme intellectual gifts. And this is what I had reduced him to. We were speaking in grunts. You do that. But then he was an infinitely tender man. I remember, you know, moments him combing my mother's hair and just accept tenderness. I think in this poem that I try to reconcile the two seemed like the two founders I had. It's called The Gift. To pull the metal splinter from my palm, my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the blade. Before the story ended, he had removed the iron sliver I thought I'd die from. I can't remember the tale, but hear his voice still a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands two measures of tenderness he laid against my face,

the flames of discipline he raised above my head. Had you entered that afternoon, you would have thought you saw a man planting something in a boy's palm, a silver tear, a tiny flame. Had you followed that boy, you would have arrived here where I bend over my wife's right hand. Look how I shave her thumbnail down so carefully she feels no pain. Watch as I lift the splinter out. I was seven when my father took my hand like this and I did not hold that shard between my fingers and think metal that will bury me, christen it, little assassin, or going deep for my heart. And I did not lift up my wound and cry, death visited here. I did what a child does when he's given something to keep. I kissed my father. I wrote it because I woke up, I was with my wife in a hotel one day and I woke up and I heard her sobbing

and I looked for her, she was in the bathroom, she was sitting on the edge of the bathtub and she was sobbing and holding her hand. I noticed that her hand was bleeding and then I looked and there was a splinter under her thumbnail. My father was dead at the time and when I bent down to remove the splinter I realized that I had learned that tenderness from my father. You said somewhere that you had really discovered most about your father when you opened his Bible after his death. Yeah, I inherited all his books and I opened his Bible one day and began reading it and also reading the Marginale, all the things he had written in the margins of the book.

It was like I was experiencing his mind at work and I realized he was a fierce mind, he was questioning those things. I mean he taught us when he was teaching us, he was so sure, he never questioned anything. Everything came out of his mouth, everything was spit out in these hard, pithy statements. And then when I opened his Bible I realized there were questions and there were underlinings and references to other books. I realized he was a mind that was struggling to come to terms with his own belief and it really gave me another dimension. I grasped another dimension about him and I also realized that basically I didn't know him and it was both of our faults. He put up a huge front, a front of a man who would not be questioned, he would always be right, he would always be sure. And I suppose that comes from his experience of imprisonment and wandering, he wanted his children to have faith and belief in him.

He didn't want us to be afraid, so he had to keep up that front. But by the same token it didn't make me ever feel like I had a human being for a father, he was always right next to God. Every day we were told you have to be quiet, there was an hour each day or we had to be very quiet because he was praying in his study. And I remember thinking, geez, he's in there convening with this being who's like no being that I know and for an hour we had to observe this silence and we had to tiptoe around him. That's the way it was in our house. There was so much tenderness that comes through in your poems about him. Oh yeah, he's an infinitely tender man. That's interesting because there's a moment in one of your poems when I catch a sense of at least possible sensuality and eroticism in your father. Maybe I'm wrong but it's the poem early in the morning and the relationship between your mother and your father.

Would you read that? Sure. Early in the morning. While the long grain is softening in the water, gurgling over a low stove flame, before the salted winter vegetable is sliced for breakfast before the birds, my mother glides in ivory comb through her hair, heavy and black as calligraphers ink. She sits at the foot of the bed. My father watches, listens for the music of comb against hair. My mother coms, pulls her hair back tight, rolls it around two fingers, pins it in a bun to the back of her head. For half a hundred years she has done this. My father likes to see it like this. He says it is kempt but I know it is because of the way my mother's hair falls when he pulls the pins out easily like the curtains when they untie them in the evening. Have you come to a moment when you can let go of your father as a subject?

I don't think I have settled that old quarrel but I think for the good of my own writing I have had to force myself to look beyond him. What about your children? It hasn't been until recently, until they are older than I begin writing poems about them. What would you tell them about their ancestral forces? They will be thoroughly American. They are growing up in a household where both Chinese and English is spoken. At this point they only speak English but they understand Chinese. They walk into a room and there is Chinese opera going on and they will sit down and watch these crazy antics on the television. So they are already growing up dislocated. I think because they walk into the world and the oldest one is beginning to ask me. I am Chinese and I am half regular. So he is already crazy with this stuff.

My oldest son loves to hear stories. He says to me, tell me the Sukarno story. My father was a political prisoner under Sukarno. I make up these stories and Sukarno is the evil guy and my father is the hero. I have run out of all the princes and dark wood stories. I make up these stories about Sukarno. My son says, tell me the Sukarno stories. I run out of stories. That is what this poem is about. A story. Sad is the man who is asked for a story and can't come up with one. His five year old son waits in his lap. Not the same story, Papa. A new one. The man rubs his chin, scratches his ear. In a room full of books in a world of stories he can recall not one. And soon he thinks the boy will give up on his father.

Already the man lives far ahead. He sees the day this boy will go. Don't go. Hear the alligator story. The angel's story. Once more. You love the spider's story. You laugh at the spider. Let me tell it. But the boy is packing his shirts. He's looking for his keys. Are you a God, the man's screams, that I sit mute before you? Am I a God that I should never disappoint? But the boy is here. Please, Papa, a story. It is an emotional rather than logical equation and earthly rather than heavenly one, which posits that a boy's supplications and the father's love add up to silence. Your father, you think he would accept you as a poet? Would he be satisfied with your ambition to write? Would he say, no, you've got to be more than that.

I don't know. I think that's my father. There's the answer to your question. Nothing I do is going to be good enough for him. So everything I write, I hate a week later. I find that hard to understand. Even my poet friends tell me, oh yeah, I hate the poems in my first book too. But I like the poems I'm writing now. I hate the poems I'm working on. As I'm writing them, I'm realizing this is not ecclesiastical. But I realize I have a duty to finish those poems and I want to shape them. And that they're going to help me get to the next poem. I mean, what's the duty? Why do I do it? What it is, it's a love of a state of being. I think when a person is in deep prayer, all of that being's attention is focused on God. When a person is in love, all of that being's attention is focused on the lover. I think in writing, poetry, all of the being's attention is focused on some inner voice. I don't mean to sound mystical, but it really is a voice.

And all of the attention is turned toward that voice. And that's such an exhilarating state to be in. As poem is called Eating Together. In the steamer is the trout, seasoned with slivers of ginger, two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil. We shall eat it with rice for lunch, brothers, sister, my mother, who will taste the sweetest meat of the head, holding it between her fingers deftly, the way my father did weeks ago. Then he laid down to sleep like a snow-covered road winding through pines older than him, without any travelers and lonely for no one. Thank you. Gerald Stern, like Lee Young Lee, is a poet of memory. Following on his Jewish heritage, he brings forth a remarkable feeling for life from neglected places and the earth's vulnerable creatures.

You're not always a Jew or a Black or a Native American or Japanese or Chinese or Slovenian when you write your poem. Sometimes you're writing about an itchy back or a headache or fear of death. All people fear death. Sometimes you put on that mantle and you're very Jewish and you're very Chinese or whatever. Particularly, are you very whatever? And in this poem I was very whatever. It's a poem called Great Fruit, and I'm reading it because I have to do some food poem. Because my confrairs and concerts are all reading food poems. And it's a poem which is a brookah. A brookah is a Hebrew word. It means a blessing, you said, before a meal. And the Hebrew, it is always a certain form. It goes.

And then which means blessed art thou, O Lord, our God. And then the whatever you're blessing. And then the whatever you're blessing. And then the whatever you're blessing. And then the whatever you're blessing. So rest comfortably. And what I'm blessing finally is a weed. And a female weed I just discovered. And I hope the rabbis will forgive me for this, wherever they are. I'm eating breakfast, even if it means standing in front of the sink and tearing at the grapefruit. Even if I'm leaning over to keep the juices away from my chest and stomach. And even if a spider is hanging from my ear. And a wild flea is crawling down my leg. My window was wavy and dirty. There is a wavy tree outside with pitiful leaves in front of the rusty fence. And there is a patch of useless rhubarb. The leaves bent over. The stalks too large and bitter for eating. And there is some lettuce and spinach too old for picking beside the rhubarb.

This is the way the saints age. Only they dug for fizzles. The feel of thorns in the throat. It was a blessing. My pity, it knows no bounds. There is a thin tomato plant inside a rolled up piece of wire. The worms are already there. The birds are bored. And time I'll stand beside the rolled up fence with tears of gratitude in my eyes. I'll hold a puny pinch tomato in my open hand. I'll hold it to my lips. I'll hold it to my lips. Like a wiz�. Your love. I'll hold it to my lips. Her cold hand with uh shrimp as much as he knows. Her name's Mamie. O'er the wing of the tomato. meat on it, it would last one. It would taste like 애. which I loved. The tit. Fortunately,

this ketchup I love the Florida cut in two. I bend my head forward. My chin is in the air. I hold my right hand off to the side. The pinky is waving. I am back again at the sink. O loneliness, I stand at the sink. My garden is dry and blooming. I love my lettuce. I love my cornflowers. The sun is doing it all. The sun and a little dirt. And a little water. I lie on the ground out there. There is one yard between the house and the tree. I am more calm there. Looking back at this window. Looking up a little at the sky. A blue passageway with smears of white and gray. A bird crossing from berm to berm. From ditch to ditch. Another one. A wild highway. A wild skyway. A flock of little ones to make me feel gay. They fly down the through way. I move my eyes back and forth to see them appear and disappear. I stretch my neck a kind of exercise. A sky. My breakfast is over.

My lunch is over. The wind has stopped. It is the hour of deepest thought. Now I brood. I grimace. How quickly the day goes. How full it is of sunshine and wind. How many smells there are. How gorgeous is the distant sound of dogs and engines. Blessed art thou, Lord of the falling leaf. Lord of the cloud. Blessed art thou, O grapefruit king of the universe. Blessed art thou, my sink. O blessed art thou, thou milkweed queen of the sky. Burst her of seeds. Who bringeth forth juice from the earth. I was a some critic set of you that you write about the darkest drama in the midst of tricycles and kittens. Yeah. The tricycle and the kitten is there. I mean, that's the life I lead. I'm always tripping over tricycles. And kittens, you know, I lead a disconnected, a scattered life.

I mean, I'm here, I'm there. And there's, there seems always to be kittens and tricycles in it. I dream of a pure place. You understand? Like everybody else. An unencumbered study with every book in its place. And that compressive button and up comes this poem or that poem or this story. It never has happened. And I now am content that it never will happen in my life. For me. But you keep your eyes open. You see things I would never think of as becoming poems. Read me this one, cow worship. Cow worship. Oh yeah, cow worship. I love cows. I love the cows best when they were a few feet away from my dining room window and my pine floor. When they reach into Kiss Me with their wet mouths and their white noses. I love them when they walk over the garbage cans and across the cellar doors. Over the sidewalk and through the metal chairs and the birdseed. Let me reach out through the thin curtains and feel the warm air of May. It is a temperature of the whole galaxy.

All the bright clouds and clusters. Beasts and heroes. Hearing singers and isolated thinkers at pasture. Cow worship. I was living in Pennsylvania. And I would literally go from my house with my wife. We drive up by three or four miles away. I got to pet the cows. That's what I did in the evening. To me that was the sweetest thing in the world. Sweetest thing. Such unthreatening creatures occupy your poems like cows, fleas. Some people wouldn't think that fleas are. Mosquitos, moles. You know, I remember opossums. Dogs who are not in a threatening place. I never thought of that way built. And it's absolutely accurate. There are not wolves. Not that I don't love wolves. We all adore and are mystified by wolves. They're not tigers. Hiding is eagles. No eagles.

But they're not creatures that automobile companies are likely to name new styles after you. The opossums. They should though. Can you see, you know, Christ is coming up with the opossums, you know. But if you ever thought about why that is so. They're creatures. And they're creatures that are somewhat helpless. They're at the mercy of other people. Dead deer. Opossums around. They're at the mercy of other people. Maybe I identify with them. Maybe I have a dual role. I don't like them so that I am as a human being, as a Jew, as for many years economically on the outside, at someone else's mercy. Is that why we have pets to show that we do have kinders or mercy or even a little justice in us? Sometimes easier to love a pet than it is. It sure is. Of course, many of us remember the stiff Englishmen who loves us better, even the German, the Nazi, who loved animals, but didn't pay a lot of attention of the right sort to humans.

This is a poem called Bering an Animal, Bering an Animal on the way to New York. Don't flinch when you come across a dead animal lying on the road. You're being shown the secret of life. Drive slowly over the brown flesh. You are helping to bury it. If you are the last mourner, there will be no caress at all from the crushed limbs. And you will have to slide over the dark spot, imagining the first suffering all by yourself. Shreds of spirit and little ghost fragments will be spread out for two miles above the white highway. Slow down with your radio off and your window open to hear the twittering as you go by. I say slow down with your radio off

and your window open, and nobody drives really in the summertime with his window open and anywhere because we all have air conditioning. And I'm one of the few monsters of the past that I've used. I mean, I know if I lived in Arizona or Texas, I'd have to give up. But the thing is to be, again, still in the midst of all this noise and all this energy and all this civility and all this anger to stop for a minute, to stop. Turn your radio off, which is kind of an archaic answer. Turn your television off, turn everything off, and every religion and every work of art you've got to stop to listen. You've got to stop to listen. To a dead animal in this case. In this case, to a dead animal. Sometimes, of course, I disguise them, so to speak, as animals, but they're people I'm talking about. The dog.

What I was doing with my white teeth exposed like that on the side of the road, I don't know. And I don't know why I lay beside the sewer so that lover of dead things would come back with his pencil sharpened and his piece of white paper. I was there for a good two hours, whistling dirges, streaking a little, terrifying hearts with my whimpering cries before I died by pulling one leg up and stiffening. There's a look we have, with the hair of the chin curled in mid-air. There's a look with the belly stopped and the midst of its greed. The lover of dead things stoop to feel me. His hand is shaking. I know his mouth is open and his glasses are slipping. I think his pencil must be jerking and the terror of smell and sight is overtaking him. I know he has that terrified, far away look that death brings. He is contemplating. I want him to touch my forehead once and rub my muzzle before he lifts me up

and throws me into that little valley. I hope he doesn't use his shoe for fear of touching me. I know or used to know the grass is down there. I think I knew a hundred smells. I hope the dog's way doesn't overtake him. One quick push barely that and the mind freed something else. Some other thing to take its place. Great heart, great human heart. Keep loving me as you lift me. Give me your tears, great loving stranger. Remember the death of dogs. Forgive the yapping, forgive the shitting. Let there be pity, give me your pity. How could there be enough? I have given my life for this. Emotion is ruined me. Oh lover, I've exchanged my wildness. Little tricks with a mouth and feet with a tail. My tongue is a parrot. I am a rampant horse. I am a lion. I wait for the cookie. I snap my teeth as you have taught me. Oh distant and brilliant and lonely. Let me read a happy poem about an animal.

It's a short poem. At least when I wrote it, I thought it was happy. It was a cold winter. I was living near Rob'sville, Pennsylvania, along the Delaware River. My wife used to always put a ball of fat out in the black bird street to a little poison in it to attract the birds. I wrote this poem about that. It was really though about a Jew who lived underground as most Jews do or used to. It's the mole. The mole is our sign. At least it's my sign. Some people have gray wolves. You know, mine is a blind mole, I guess. I called my children up and I said,

I've written a happy poem. And I made them sit down and listen to this poem and I will share it with you now. There's a bird pecking at the fat. There's a dead tree covered with snow. There's a truck dropping cinders on the slippery highway. There's life in my backyard. Black wings beating on the branches, greedy eyes watching, mouths screaming and fighting over the greasy ball. There's a mull singing hallelujah. Close the rotten doors. Let everyone go blind. Let everyone be buried in his own litter. I was living near there once and my wife came rushing in and said, I've found a wonderful place for you. It's your site. It's a ruined burned out barrack in Camp Kilmer. And of course, you cannot legislate a poem for another being. But she did that for me. So for her, I read this poem.

It's called on the far edge of Kilmer. I'm sitting again on the steps of the burned out barrack. I come here like Proust or Adam Cadman every night to watch the sun leave. I like the broken center blocks and the bicycle tires. I like the exposed fuse system. I like the color the chart takes in the clear light. I climb over everything and stop before every grotesque relic. I walk through the tarp paper and glass. I lean against the lilacs. And my left hand is a bottle of tango. And my right hand are the old weeds and power lines. I'm watching the glory go down. I'm taking the things seriously. I'm standing between the wall and the white sky. I'm holding open the burnt door.

There you were in the poem Kilmer. Yeah. At the old barracks before that blackened door. Why does that ruin appeal to you? I don't altogether know the answer. And if I did, I would probably stop writing. I'm attracted to the pockets, to the secret places, to the places of escape, to the places that are ignored. Somehow, ruins give me the light in a crazy way, as long as maybe it's a way of restoring. Maybe it's an act of restoration. We're not defining the holiness in the thing that existed. Holiness? The holiness, the soul of the thing. I'm sure that barracks has been cleaned up and repaired and there's something else there. For a moment, maybe it became its true self. Maybe that's what that thing really was. Maybe that's what our fancy buildings really are, underneath of these two-by-fords, and the wallboard of the plaster,

and cleaned up a little bit of skin put on it for show, for civilization. Maybe it's a question of the relationship of civilization with the other. Uncivilization. Maybe there was a secret joy also in encountering the destruction, a kind of brotherhood of destruction, and saying, this is what it really is. This is what all things finally come to. I'm alive. It's a victory to be there and to describe it. It's a victory to have gone through it and to survive. And there's a certain narrative, a certain sadness, and seeing the narrative of a thing from beginning to end, and just to describe its existence. You're alive, but you never stop reminding us in one way or the other of people who are not, those who have suffered and perished in the past. That's what I take from your poem on behaving like a Jew. I wrote this poem, living in East in Pennsylvania.

I remember the occasion for the poem. I was driving my wife to the hospital in Eastern for a very minor operation. And while I was there, I was, look, there were the greasy, the greasy readers digest. I put gloves on, picked up one of them and started to read an article by Charles Lindbergh, who wasn't my hero. He was my hero because of his cat and his flight to Europe. And he wasn't my hero because he listened very seriously to fat man garing and mad man Hitler. And well, I could go on explaining the poem, but I see it will get us nowhere. So let me just read it to you. It's called behaving like a Jew. When I got there, the dead of possum looked like an enormous baby sleeping on the road. It took me only a few seconds just seeing him there

with a hole in his back and the wind blowing through his air to get back again into my animal sorrow. I'm sick of the country, the blood stained bumpers, the stiff hairs sticking out of the grills, the slimy highways, the heavy birds refusing to move. I'm sick of the spirit of Lindbergh over everything that joy and death, that philosophical understanding of carnage, that concentration on the species. I'm going to be unappeased at the possum's death. I'm going to behave like a Jew and touch his face and stare into his eyes and pull him off the road. I'm not going to stand in a wet ditch with the toyotas and the Chevy's passing over me at 60 miles an hour and praise the beauty and the balance and lose myself in the immortal livestream when my hands are still a little shaky

from his stiffness in his bulk and my eyes are still weak and misty from his round belly and his curved fingers and his black whiskers and his little dancing feet. Why did you call that poem on behaving like a Jew? I was moved by the possum itself and as I looked at his body with a bloated stomach and the hairy face somehow that possum became a representative Jew. But I don't remember if I gave it a title later, if I didn't start writing that poem and didn't realize until I was halfway through or most of the way through that it was the Jewish experience I was writing about. I thought the youngsters got it yesterday. That when you saw that possum, you saw a weak creature run over by a powerful vehicle

or killed by a willful machine. In this case it was a gun. And here were the Jews run over by a powerful machine. Shot by guns. Shot by guns. So it was an act of total identifying. What do you mean when you say, I'm going to behave like a Jew now? Maybe I'm claiming something for Jews that shouldn't be claimed for them, but for all people, all good people, all thinking people, all feeling people. Maybe I'm claiming feeling for the Jew and maybe in, you know, and there are many unfeeling Jews, there are many unfeeling Gentiles. I'm sensitive about arroganting that to them, but at that point in that poem, I was claiming feeling, tenderness, energy, love, memory, memory. This is a poem about Pittsburgh and ancestral memories thereof. In the poem, because it's really a poem about my mother and father dancing and laughing, in the poem, my father jumps around the room

making, forgive me for this, farting sounds in a kind of Ukrainian dance. And I could imitate his Ukrainian. I will. It went something like this. And he'd make these fantastic noises. The poem is called The Dancing. In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots, I have never seen a post-war filko with the automatic eye. Nor heard Revel's ballerow the way I did in 1945 in that tiny living room on Beachwood Boulevard. Nor danced as I did then, my knives all flashing,

my hair all streaming, my mother read with laughter, my father cupping his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin, half drum, half fart, the world that last a meadow, the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us screaming and falling, as if we were dying, as if we could never stop. In 1945, in Pittsburgh, beautiful, filthy Pittsburgh, home of the evil melons, 5,000 miles away from the other dancing, in Poland and Germany, oh God of mercy, oh wild God. At the end of the dancing, you say, as if we could never stop in 1945, in Pittsburgh, beautiful, filthy Pittsburgh, home of the evil melons,

5,000 miles away from the other dancing, in Poland and Germany. What was the other dancing? The concentration camps, the destruction of the Jews. The incident Jews dancing on those open graves. It's a gory word there. Because, in part, the dancing was those Jews dancing in the, you know, forgive me in the showers, and at the end of gallows, and as they were shot, and as they were tortured, that's a kind of hideous dancing, a higher on it was buzz dancing. It also was a victorious dancing, as you unindicate coming itself from a Jewish, or not just a Jewish tradition. And then, of course, on the last line, I take the turn I do. I had no idea, when I wrote that poem, that I was doing it right about anything else, but my father playing his instrument, and us three of us dancing around our little apartment in Pittsburgh, I didn't know it was going to take that turn. That was a gift, a terrible gift, a sad gift, a good gift.

It was given me when I wrote, and suddenly that happened. Oh, wild God. You end. Oh, God of mercy. Oh, God of mercy. Oh, wild God. And, well, I call him the God of mercy, and there's irony there, even, because, and because, well, what mercy was shown, I call him wild God. And it's a way of almost forgiving him, because he's wild, because he's on another mission, because he wasn't paying enough attention, because he said, I'll be back in a minute, because I got to do this wonderful thing. I've created a universe over here. He's wild, and he's unconnected, and he didn't pay enough attention, and that horrible thing happened. I was being ironic, and not ironic, when I called him God of mercy, because he is a God of mercy. I was being ironic, but mostly praiseworthy, is that praising, when I called him, oh, wild God, was an act of forgiveness.

I didn't realize until you asked me, my poetry is a kind of religion for me. It really is. It's a way of seeking redemption, not so much for myself, and not for others, maybe more for myself, but just on the page. It is, finally, that's what it's about. A way of understanding things, so that things can be reconciled, explained, justified, redeemed. I guess that's what it's about for me. So I guess it's serious business. I wrote a poem about a tree called The Nettle Tree, which I'd like to read to you, and after I didn't realize this when I wrote the poem, and I know this will be hard for you to believe, but when I got done writing the poem, I realized there was no such tree as a nettle tree. There is no nettle tree, or there isn't any nettle tree. Both are true. Mine was the nettle tree, the nettle tree.

It grew beside the garage, and on the river, and I protected it from all destroyers. I loved the hanging branches, and the trunk that grew like a pole. I loved the little crown that waved like a feather. I sat for hours watching the birds come in to eat the berries. I read my homework there. I wanted to stay forever sleeping and dreaming. I put my head on the trunk to hear my sounds. It was my connection for years, half hanging in the wind, half leaning, half standing. It was my only link. It was my luxury. This program has been made possible by grants

from the Schumann Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and by the financial support of viewers like you. For a transcript of this program, send $4.2, the Power of the Word, Journal Graphics, 267 Broadway, New York, New York, 1007. This is PBS. With Bill Moyers as our guide, the Power of the Word celebrates the wonder of our language and the creativity of today's leading poets. You may order one or all six episodes of the Power of the Word on Home video cassette.

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