And my last poem is the poem which perhaps needs explaining.
A good poem shouldn't need explaining we're told.
I really agree with that.
Maybe this is just too private.
The title is "The Missing Letters."
And all I'll say is that they're not
letters you put in the mailbox.
They're in this case, capital letters.
Letters that are written.
And the poem is about the loss of transcendence
in the modern world and to whatever degree
it has occurred in each of us.
Then there's a quotation, which I
have above from Leon Bloy, the French writer and mystic.
Most of us no longer believe enough to be able to blaspheme.
The missing letters.
Trees like yells on a lunch break
are screaming revolt all across the page
of the articulate country.
Here in the fall they're bleak headlines.
Make it all very clear.
No separate peace can amount to much.
The animal kingdom's come.
Bodies writhing in the gray bark groan.
Figures of hell from a Renaissance engraving.
For many people, hell has already begun.
When I was a child yelling I could beat my friends
in a race around the block.
I must have looked like one of those upper branches,
gaping, tents in a hurry, clean-limbed.
Ours was a young race, the world the place
where each of us knelt. In the winner's circle nothing
was missing.
Now with this cottonwood aimed like an insult at the sun,
I sit fastened to this chair and shake my head,
satisfied the tree has room for generations among the nouns
and verbs.
The whole alphabet living together in the ancestral bark.
I feel my heart grow naked with only the letter l
on one wooden elbow asleep.
The world is a zoo and all the capital letters have escaped.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]