THE LAYERS
I have walked through many lives
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
Stanley Kunitz.
". . . People who come to hear poetry are very generous. There's a curious relationship between the poet and his audience. Paul Celan, the great poet of the Holocaust, wrote cryptically that 'a poem is solitary and on its way.' In my interpretation, the poem is on its way in search of people. For its complete fulfillment it has to find an audience, it has to be invited into some other person's mind and heart. Once the poet lets go of his poem, it is no longer his. It belongs to anyone who wants it. It is a gift. . .
. . . I wrote 'The layers' in my late seventies to conclude a collection of sixty years of my poetry. . . Through the years I had endured the loss of several of my dearest friends, including Theodore Roethke, Mark Rothko, and - most recently - Robert Lowell. I felt I was near the end of a phase in my life and in my work. The poem began with two lines that came to me in a dream, spoken out of a dark cloud: 'Live in the layers,/not on the litter.'" Stanley Kunitz
excerpt from Fooling With Words - A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft by Bill Moyers: Perennial, An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 1999
For more Tuesday Poems, please click on the quill.
Bernadette Keating is this week's TP editor with the poem Excerpt from 15 Flower World Variations by Jerome Rothenberg.
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A friend sent me this photograph from Ireland - 'Remembering those lost, injured, uprooted in Christchurch, NZ. . . ', candles lit in Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin.
Our thoughts continue to be with our Christchurch community - and, too, with those living in darkened circumstances in so many corners of our world. As Mim wrote a few days ago, 'the wick catches - a little flame swells.' Let us focus on love and light and keep our candles burning. . .
