I'll read a poem with a central image that can be concentrated.
And this is a poem called "The Parachutist."
I think it came largely from my reading the newspaper, all two
or three years ago about that incident
where a number of sport parachutists
would drop from an airplane in cloudy weather
that was too high to notice it was over the Great Lakes.
And the parachutists all drowned.
In this poem, the central image of a parachutist
who was parachuting in winter and plunges into a lake
and is drowned is--
the central image is mainly an excuse
to hang some statements upon that image.
A sense of his reacquainting himself with his own self
or with his own life more fully, feeling the rightness of it
as he falls toward his death-- toward a death he doesn't know
is coming.
"The Parachutist."
Then the air was perfect.
And his descent to the white earth slowed.
Falling became an ability to rest,
as the released breath believes in life.
Further down it snowed, a confusion of slow
novas which his shoes touched upon,
which seemed, as he fell by, to be rising.
From every small college and rural town,
the clearest, iced blossoms of thought, but gentle.
Then the housetops of friends, who
he thought had been speaking of his arrival,
withdrew, each from another.
He saw that his friends lived in a solitude
they had not ever said aloud.
And strangely he thought this good.
The world, in fact, which in these moments he came toward,
seemed casual.
Had he been thinking this all along?
A life where he belonged, having lived with himself always,
as a secret friend.
A few may have seen him then.
In evidence, the stopped dots of children and dogs,
the sudden weave of a car.
Acquaintances circling up into the adventure they imagined.
They saw him drop down to the lake which openly awaited him.
And here the thin green ice allowed him in.
Some ran, and will light.
These would forever imagine tragedy, endless descent,
his face floating among the reeds, unrecognized,
as those who imagine the silence of a guest
to be mysterious, or wrong.