Well, the rest of the reading I want
to devote to poems most of which have not
been published at all and none of which
have been published in a book.
And I think I hope I don't know what
the theme of that collection is, really it's not finished.
But I know some of the poems that we
have to be pivotal poems in it and most of the ones
that I'll read will be that.
I mean, giving what I hope is due
allowance to your exhaustion and mine.
The first of them is--
they're at least as different again from the poems
of The Lice as The Lice was from The Moving Target,
and they differ quite a lot among themselves.
But the first of them that I'm going to read
is a poem I can't think of anything particular
to say about to make it clearer, it's
called "The Different Stars."
It's a poem in the second person as "Lemuel's Blessing"
and some of those others were.
I could never have come to the present without you, remember
that, from whatever stage we may again
watch it appear with its lines clear pain having, gone
from there.
So that we may well wonder looking back on us here
what tormented us, what great difficulty invisible in a time
that by then looks simple and is irrevocable,
pain having come from there.
My love, I tend to think of division as the only evil
when perhaps it is merely my own.
But unties one day the veins, one the arteries.
The prize is less as it receives then as it loses.
It breaks the compasses.
Cannot be led or followed.
Cannot choose what to carry into grief.
Even unbinds, will unbind, unbinds
our hands, pages of the same story.
What is it they say can turn even this into wisdom?
And what is wisdom if it is not now
in the loss that has not left this place?
Oh, if we knew what we needed, if we even knew,
the stars would look to us to guide them