Now this is a poem that I've been
working on a very long time.
And it is, from my point of view,
it may not seem to be such an ambitious poem.
A poem and strange poem for me.
Almost always, I begin with a rhythm,
with images, with an overwhelming sense
that I must explore this.
And the process of writing the poem
is to discover what it is that got
me started to try to understand the compulsion to explore,
to write.
And in this poem, it was more that I understood
where I wanted to go and had a great difficulty in getting
there.
There have been surprises on the way
and I-- and I know it isn't complete
or it isn't finished quite, but I'm not quite sure where.
I've been working a long time and I really
want to read it very much.
A poem called intersections.
Under maples and beside watery birches,
between Eagle pond and the sheep barn, in a sand
ditch, a double line of rust.
I stride on alternate ties.
Should I tell you I'm talking about walking on the railroad?
I think you'd get it if you were seeing it,
but a double line of rust is the rails of the railroad.
I feel diffident, obviously, reading new things.
I'm sorry.
I'm going to start again.
Do I need to say-- wait, look.
Let me look through and see if there's
anything else I want to say.
I guess not.
Intersections.
Under maples and beside watery birches,
between Eagle pond and the sheep barn,
in a sand ditch, a double line of rust,
I stride on alternate ties.
Black creosoted 8 by 8's, wedged into crushed granite.
In the summer of '43, long war trains
skidded tanks, Jeeps, air frames, dynamos, searchlights
and troops to Montreal for Hitler's war.
We counted cars from the stop hay rack
at the endless crossing.
98, 99.
And my grandfather told, his voice
shaking with rage and oratory, how the mighty Boston and Maine
kept the state house in its pocket 100 years.
I walk a line that vanishes in an absence of freights,
in the solute and quiet of a bypassed place.
Walking, I make over that bunting day.
The first train came to Potter place and Gale
with fireworks, cider and speeches.
Further, I extend the long rails, Western buzz
and hum the hive of rolling stock, the 1,000 card
perspective of Ohio, Dakota, Nebraska
where men who left these maples, banished by narrow valleys
and by stones, rode rails toward gold.
On this blue day, beneath the high jets
glint of swooped aluminum, pulling its feathery contrail
westward, I see the jet die into junk
and the highway vanish like the railroad.
Goldenrod breaks through asphalt to clear old dirt for pine.
I walk in a present, continually vanishing at the striding
point of intersection.
Horizontal track by which our wars, presidents and metals
assemble the Earth for ruin.
And the other, a vertical track joining dead to unborn,
track of divinity and death, denied each day 10,000 times
by every utterance of commerce, by the dump's waste that chokes
the pickerel, , by the hymn unsung by the cement vault
enclosing the bodies coffin.
Ridden again only in meditation and in dream.
A tree grows upward only as far as it grows downward.
And the whole maple resembles the tree
reflected in Eagle pond.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.