"The Door."
"It is hard going to the door, cut so small in the wall
where the vision which echoes loneliness
brings a scent of wildflowers in the wood.
What I understood, I understand.
My mind is sometime torment, sometimes good
and filled with livelihood, and feels the ground.
But I see the door, and knew the wall, and wanted the wood,
and would get there if I could with my feet and hands
and mind.
Lady, do not banish me for digressions.
My nature is a quagmire of unresolved confessions.
Lady, I follow.
I walked away from myself.
I left the room.
I found the garden.
I knew the woman in it.
Together, we lay down.
Dead night remembers.
In December, we change, not multiplied but dispersed,
sneaked out of childhood, the ritual of dismemberment.
Mighty magic is a mother.
In her, there is another issue of fixture,
repeated form, the race renewal, the charge of the command.
The garden echoes across the room.
It is fixed in the wall like a mirror that
faces a window behind you and reflects the shadows.
May I go now?
Am I allowed to bow myself down in the ridiculous posture
of renewal, of the insistence of which I am the virtue?
Nothing for you is untoward.
Inside, you would also be tall, more tall, more beautiful.
Come toward me from the wall.
I want to be with you.
So I scream to you, who hears as the wind and changes, multiply,
invariably, changes in the mind.
Running to the door, I ran down as a clock runs down, walked
backward, stumbled, sat down hard
on the floor near the wall.
Where were you?
How absurd, how vicious.
There is nothing to do but get up.
My knees were iron.
I rusted in worship of you.
For that, one sings.
One writes the spring poem.
One goes on walking.
The lady has always moved to the next town,
and you stumble on after her.
The door in the wall leads to the garden
where in the sunlight sit the Graces
in long Victorian dresses of which my grandmother had
spoken.
History sings in their faces.
They are young, they are obtainable,
and you follow after them also in the service
of God and truth.
But the lady is indefinable.
She will be the door in the wall to the garden in sunlight.
I will go on talking forever.
I will never get there.
Oh, lady, remember me who in your service
grows older, not wiser, no more than before.
How can I die alone?
Where will I be then who am now alone?
What groans so pathetically in this room where I am alone?
I will go to the garden.
I will be a romantic.
I will sell myself in hell.
In heaven also I will be.
In my mind, I see the door.
I see the sunlight before me across the floor beckon to me
as the lady's skirt moves small beyond it."
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks.
OK, then.
Heh.
That's one of those poems that--
I don't know.
I like it.
I like it, actually.
But I feel-- was it written back about 1956 or '57.
And what I mean is simply that the--
oh, at times, I wonder in the sense that here, I--
it is true.
"Where will I be then who am now alone?
What groans so pathetically in this room where I am alone?"
Every time I read that, I think, oh, wow, aren't--
am't I a real big man after all?
Or do I have to go around whining
for sympathy in this fashion?
So anyhow, I want to read something
a little less indulgent.