I was born in Rome, New York.
And I'm not going to give you a complete financial history
like Nixon used to do.
No.
I was born in Rome, New York.
And I went to school in Geneva, New York.
And then this place Paris.
And one time, I was talking with someone.
And I said Rome, Geneva, Paris.
And they thought of it as this European health spa education.
It was not so.
This poem is entitled The Story 'Sunset.'
The protagonist of this is someone
in Germany in the 1930s.
There is no dancing around it.
And the deadly words go forward as if you looked too long
into the stagnant pool.
New divisions arise catching you by the voyage once made
in the mind.
The house across the street snowed in as much as you are,
even as you begin another voyage to it.
Red horizon.
There is a small marine view.
And the potato field hammers the difficulty
of pouring defeated things into the affair.
Berlin's economy.
A fire divides the two fields.
I had two daughters.
They were the backbone of my paintings.
They gave me ideas.
They had the great power of extinguishing a thing,
so that one sees it.
They helped divide me from myself.
Once a bus outside the Hague suggested a somber mood.
So I painted them there on the bus.
I had no way of knowing I would work with mauve, but I did.
And with mauve, I inaugurated a domain.
Early this morning, I looked at the horizon.
There were rain clouds over it.
The past seemed made up.
A car stopped in front of the house.
A neighbor ran to it.
Sometimes I think these facts are deafening
because they're certain.
And the past is deafening.
The stars were like panes.