This is a poem--
a love poem about the journey.
Each of us has the journey of our life.
Some of us are lucky, more lucky than others, but all of us
have a journey.
And this is about loving the journey.
It's called "Spirit and Soul."
"It should have been the family that lasted.
Should have been my sister and my peasant mother.
But it was not.
They were the affection, not the journey.
It could have been my father, but he died too soon.
Gelmetti and Gregg and Nogami lasted.
It was the newness of me, and the newness after that,
and newness again.
It was the important love and the serious lust.
It was Pittsburgh that lasted.
The iron and fog and sooty brick houses.
Not Aunt Mince and Pearl, but the black-and-white winters
with their girth and geological length of cold.
Streets ripped apart by ice and emerging like wounded beasts
when the snow finally left in April.
Freight trains with their steam locomotives working at night.
Summers the size of crusades.
When I was a boy, I saw downtown a large camera standing
in front of the William Pitt Hotel
or pointed at Kaufmann's Department Store.
Usually around midnight, but the people still going by.
The camera's set so slow that cars and people left no trace.
The crowds in Rome and Tokyo and Manhattan did not last.
But the empty streets of Perugia,
my two bowls of bean soup on Kos,
and Pimpaporn Charionpanith lasted.
The plain nakedness of Anna in Denmark remains in me forever.
The white lilacs on Highland Avenue when I was fourteen.
Carrying Michiko dead in my arms.
It is not about the spirit.
The spirit dances, comes and goes.
But the soul is nailed to us like lentils and fatty bacon
lodged under the ribs.
What lasted is what the soul ate.
The way a child knows the world by putting it part by part
into his mouth.
As I tried to gnaw my way into the Lord,
working to put my heart against that heart.
Lying in the wheat at night, letting the rain after all
the dry months have me."