Probably read all together 5 poems from that book,
which is called The Moving Target.
And one of the reasons I don't want to read anything earlier
is because The Moving Target was a break with everything
that I'd written before that, and it would
be hard to make any balance.
So there seems to be some thematic structure
that runs through that book that I was unaware of when
I was writing those poems, may have been simply
the preoccupation of the years in which they
were being written.
But there's the thing of attachment and departure
and the readiness for it and the recognitions that go with it.
And the next poem, which is more specifically
about that than those other two poems,
though they were about it to the poem called "Finally."
My dread, my ignorance, my self it is time.
Your eminence prowls the palms of my hands like sweat.
Do not now if I rise to welcome you, make off
like roads into the deep night.
The dogs are dead at last, the locks
toothless, the habits out of reach.
I will not be false to you tonight.
Come, no longer unthinkable.
Let us share understanding like a family name.
Bring integrity as a gift something
which I have lost, which you found on the way.
I will lay it beside us, the old knife,
while we reach our conclusion.
Come, as a man who hears a sound the gate opens the window
and puts out the light the better
to see out into the dark.
Look, I put it out.