I'll read a poem called "Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock."
The title comes from those Japanese series
of poems and pictures called "oxherding pictures" where
somebody goes in search of an ox which,
at the end, when he finds the ox it
may be just a blank white circle that he
finds because in some way he's been pursuing the absolute.
But this poem is not pursuing the absolute, but rather
the art.
And the 10 parts of the poem can be thought of as 10 moments
in climbing this mountain.
"I can support it no longer.
Laughing ruefully at myself for all I claim to have suffered,
I get up.
Damned nightmarer.
It is New Hampshire out here.
It is nearly the dawn.
The song of the whippoorwill stops and the dimension
of depth seizes everything.
The song of a peabody bird goes overhead
like a needle pushed five times through the air.
It enters the leaves and comes out little changed.
The air is so still that as they go off
through the trees the love songs of birds
do not get any fainter.
The last memory I have is of a flower which cannot be touched,
through the bloom of which, all day, fly crazed, missing bees.
As I climb sweat gets up my nostrils.
For an instant I think I am at the sea.
One summer off Cap Ferrat we watched a black seagull
straining for the dawn.
We stood in the surf.
Grasshoppers splash up where I step.
The mountain laurel crashes at my thighs.
There is something joyous in the elegies of birds.
They seem caught up in a formal delight,
though the mourning dove whistles of despair.
But at last in the thousand elegies
the dead rise in our hearts.
On the brink of our happiness we stop like someone
on a drunk starting to weep.
I kneel at a pool.
I look through my face at the bacteria
I think I see crawling through the moss.
My face sees me.
The water stirs.
The face, looking preoccupied, gets knocked from its bones.
I weighed eleven pounds at birth having stayed
on two extra weeks in the womb.
Tempted by room and fresh air I came out
big as a policeman, blue-faced with narrow red eyes.
It was eight days before the doctor
would scare my mother with me.
Turning and craning in the vines I
can make out through the leaves the old, shimmering
nothingness, the sky.
Green, scaly moosewoods ascend, tenants of the shaken paradise.
At every wind last night's rain comes
splattering from the leaves.
It drops in flurries and lies there, the footsteps
of some running start.
From a rock, a waterfall, a single trickle
like a strand of wire, breaks into beads halfway down.
I know the birds fly off, but the hug of the earth
wraps with moss their graves and the giant boulder.
In the forest I discover a flower.
The invisible life of the thing goes up
in flames that are invisible, like cellophane burning
in the sunlight.
It burns up.
Its drift is to be nothing.
In its covertness it has a way of uttering itself
in place of itself.
Its blossoms claim to float in the Empyrean.
A wrathful presence on the blur of the ground.
The appeal to heaven breaks off.
The petals begin to fall in self-forgiveness.
It is a flower.
On this mountainside it is dying."