I want to jump from those poems whose
decor, if you want to look at it that way,
is apparently Europe and remote, to three poems, altogether
four poems but three and then a break and then another one--
shorter poems.
And they're all poems that are much closer to hand.
There are much obviously--
much closer obviously to hand.
They're all about America and about an attempt to--
I think one of the things about America that we all share
is the feeling that we don't really believe it.
And that it's-- and this is one of the difficulties in trying
to come to grips with it imaginatively.
Because the imagination bounces off
the American way of life in some strange way.
And all of that mythology that we know
is there is something that seems to escape or exasperate.
Not finally escape but exasperate writer after writer.
Exasperated Whitman and Melville.
And it's still to be found.
And it's true of all mythology.
But in a peculiar way, it's our story.
And I think the next three that I'm going
to read also happen to do--
have to do with some mythological Western landscape
and Western in all of the senses of that word.
And the first of the three is even called "Western Country".
Some days after so long even the sun is foreign.
I watched the exiles.
Their stride stayed by their antique faith
that no one can die in exile, when all that is true
is that death is not exile.
Each no doubt knows a Western country half discovered,
which he thinks is there because he thinks he left it.
And its names are still written in the sun in his age
and he knows them.
But he will never tread their ground.
At some distances, I can no longer sleep.
My countrymen are more cruel than their stars.
And I know what moves the long files stretching
into the mountains, each man with his gun,
his feet one finger's breadth off the ground.