I'm going to read a number of poems tonight that have
strong patterns of repetition.
And the poems I think of them in two general categories.
I think we repeat things, we return to things
because we want to preserve them, because we love them
we want to hold on to them and memory.
And in that sense, the principle of repetition
is a principle of desired possession and possessiveness,
holding on.
But some things we repeat because we're trapped by them--
they were characteristics we have that we can't escape,
they were memories that trouble us that we'd
like to forget but we can't, they
keep coming back in our minds.
To the extent that we are free, we choose what to repeat.
To the extent that we're trapped by our own personalities,
we're compelled to repeat certain things.
So I'm going to read two kinds of poems both, as I say,
with patterns of repetition.
But one pattern of repetition shows and freely-willed repeats
and returns and the other I think you'll sense is patterns
of obsessive repetitions as if they cannot be escaped.
"Remaining Blue."
"I am vanishing into my own life.
The bland early light and the blue milk glass
belongs anywhere.
I have lost my grip on the hatreds that defined me,
the old sorrow seeking sexual revelation, fantastic
how the usual becomes me.
Repeating the change that has ceased to take place here
in the same house, at the same table set with blueberries,
with the same loves asking only to be what already they are,
what can I bring you that these merging days have not yet
brought?
A new rug woven with blue flowers like the sage outside,
a bluebird house for the garden, the same clay furrows,
and the same slope of the repeating hill.
Blue, I am vanishing into blue.
I am son, husband, and father still
as they were, the same animal circling
through his day sleeping back into his genesis,
gathering myself again to go on in the same blue stride
under the sun.
I am no one.
I am everyone before me.
I go on in my children's lives as they
vanish into the same blue air that unfolds me and keeps me
and tells you again, that you can find me only in yourself
day by blue day."