This is a poem called Meditation at Lagunitas.
What happened was, I was talking to a friend who
was trying to tell me about contemporary French language
philosophy.
And in the course of it, he told me that--
mentioned that words like tree were abstract words.
And I always thought words like justice
were abstract words, but not words like tree.
And then he said, well, all words are abstract.
I mean, they're not the thing.
And I realized that I was horrified by the idea anyway.
So this poem is Meditation at Lagunitas.
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this, it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea for example, that each particular
erases the luminous clarity of a general idea.
That the clown-faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch, is by his presence
some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light.
Or the other notion that, because there is in this world
no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry
corresponds.
A word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night.
And in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief.
A tone almost querulous.
After a while, I understood that talking this way,
everything dissolves.
Justice, pine, hair, woman, you and the eye.
There was a woman I made love with,
and I remembered how holding her small shoulders in my hands
sometimes, I felt a violent wonder
at her presence, like a thirst for salt.
From my childhood river, with its island willow.
Silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange silver
fish called pumpkin seed.
It hardly had to do with her.
Longing we say, because desire is full of endless distances.
I must have been the same to her,
but I remember so much the way her hands dismantled bread.
The thing her father said that hurt her.
What she dreamed.
There are moments when the body is as numinous as words.
Days that are the good flesh continuing, such tenderness.
Those afternoons and evenings saying, blackberry, blackberry,
blackberry.