I know you're as thirsty as I am and I'm sorry.
It's a dry spell.
I'm going to read three journey poems.
Because of the nature of my method,
I have absolutely no choice over my subject matter.
I simply have to take what comes and go with it.
I try to tap my subconscious or some nearby realms,
and whatever comes up, I work with.
So, very often, what comes up is a journey poem.
I don't know why exactly.
I suppose that it's universal.
I suppose that man has always had
the feeling if he could go somewhere else,
he could be someone else.
And this is something we want.
I suppose it's the reason for much
of the romance behind space travel and that sort of thing.
Very often, my work is cast in the form of journey poem.
We no longer believe in the fountain of youth,
but I think we still look for it sometimes.
I think it would be far away.
The first of these poems is for my son, Brad.
It has absolutely nothing to do with him
it's just that he prefers it to all my poetry,
and I always dedicate it to him.
I think the setting is roughly an area in Kentucky,
where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi River,
if you know that area around Paducah.
It's kind of swampy place.
And I spent a summer there once and I think
that's kind of in this poem.
This poem always seems to me to be terribly wet.
It's called "The Crossing.
For Brad."
"The journey is always return.
What I cannot leave behind, I take with me.
My hands, like dry vines torn from a wall.
The memory of strangers, the smell of wet sidewalks,
worn into the soles of my shoes.
Just after dawn, the river exposes its wound,
and I cross a bridge in love with its own reflection.
A few lights are still on in houses downriver.
A rowboat half sunk in the mud is calling for help.
Even from this distance, I can tell
the trees are crippled with age.
I am full of other places and tired,
like birds who return in the spring.
I stumble through jonquils the color
of flesh, past holy places where lovers and children have
made nests in the matted grass.
There are flying flags in the city
of flags, so many at half mast.
So many in my honor.
They keep up appearances.
I enter the city through a gate as old as smoke
and have returned to my own people.
Those beside whom this river passes always,
will they forgive me the distance?
Those without eyes who count days by fingering notches on
sticks.
Those who grow thin in silence, who do not permit their clothes
to touch their bodies.
Who have only their names to guide them.
I walk among them.
They bow two by two with their arms around one another.
The signs say, keep moving.
The flowers are stone faces covered with moss.
I had no idea the dead lived so well."