This one-- this is more like the lyrical absolute.
That's what-- Charles [INAUDIBLE]
said that to me once.
And he helped me a lot.
He wrote to me-- when I was still in college,
I would write to him, and he helped me.
He tried to.
No one could help me.
I wasn't going to be helped.
I was going to help them, but no.
He said, Franz, you know, your poems are gorgeous,
but you try too hard for the lyrical absolute, he said.
It's a wonderful phrase.
And I know now what he meant.
But I like it.
And, like, it can work if it uses sort of concrete images.
Like Rene Char you don't know what they mean,
but the images are made from concrete things in the world.
And you feel in contact with them,
and you don't care whether you know what it means.
It means what it says.
It's like Dillon Thomas said somewhere--
"all I ask is that you read my poems literally."
So this one's a little closer to that,
although it's not that hard.
It's called, "Song."
I was at my mother's house at one point like a fool.
And I was looking at this wisteria
plant hanging from the roof in Sacramento, in California.
And there was a bee.
And it was raining.
There was this bee in the wisteria.
And I don't know.
And I wrote this line in my notebook.
"Wisteria rain, where is your child mother?
This must be the last bee on Earth.
So you find no more grandeur or mystery here.
Perhaps you neglected to bring any.
Heckling sparrows, vast electron cloud
of gnats on windless water, night-blue volume
in a language no one reads.
Are we tired yet?
Are you finished debating the blind
who insist that light doesn't exist and have proof of it?
Nobody's alone.
God is alone.
If you like being born, you'll love dying."