I'd like, mostly I guess, to be reading poems
from Kicking the Leaves.
And a number of the poems are kind of long,
so I want to separate the long ones with shorter
ones, different ones.
I am going to read some new poems, poems that are probably
not quite finished, but I think finished enough to read.
But first now I want to read the title poem
from Kicking the Leaves called, oddly enough,
"Kicking the Leaves."
[LAUGHING]
It's a poem in--
I always have to look-- it's a poem in seven parts.
And this is a poem that began, what now, four years ago--
no, five years ago this autumn--
there are dates and ages in it, including my own, all of which
are five years off now.
It began five years ago in Ann Arbor,
in my last year in Ann Arbor when
I knew that the following summer I was going back
to New Hampshire to the farm.
And I guess that knowledge started
me thinking about places where I had lived--
the poem is full of place names, towns.
It is a farewell to Ann Arbor, in part,
and a going to New Hampshire--
I'm going to wait a second until you can sit, if you can,
if you want to.
"Kicking the Leaves" "Kicking the leaves, October, as we
walk home together from the game, in Ann Arbor, on a day
the color of soot, rain in the air.
I kick at the leaves of maples, reds of seventy different
shades, yellow like old paper--
and poplar leaves, fragile and pale, and elm
leaves flags of a doomed race.
I kick at the leaves, making a sound
I remember as the leaves swirl upward from my boot,
and flutter.
And I remember Octobers walking to school in Connecticut,
wearing corduroy knickers that swished
with a sound like leaves, and a Sunday buying a cup of cider
at a roadside stand on a dirt road in New Hampshire.
And kicking the leaves autumn 1955 in Massachusetts,
knowing my father would die when the leaves were gone.
Two-- Each fall in New Hampshire,
on the farm where my mother grew up,
a girl in the country, my grandfather and grandmother
finished the autumn work, taking the last vegetables
in from the cold fields, canning,
storing roots and vegetables in a cellar under the kitchen.
Then my grandfather rake leaves against the house
as the final chore of autumn.
One November I drove up from college to see them.
We pulled big rakes, as we did when we hayed in the summer,
pulling the leaves against the granite
foundations around the house, on every side of the house,
and then, to keep them in place, we cut spruce boughs
and laid them across the leaves, green on red,
until the house was tucked up, ready for snow
that would freeze the leaves in tight, like a stiff skirt.
Then we puffed through the shed door,
taking off boots and overcoats, slapping our hands,
and sat in the kitchen, rocking, and drank black coffee
my grandmother made, three of us sitting together,
silent, in gray November."
We still do it, by the way.
The leaves are around the house right now.
"Part three-- One Saturday when I was little, before the war,
my father came home at noon from his half day at the office
and wore his bait sweater, black on red, with the crossed hockey
sticks on it, and raked beside me in the backyard,
and tumbled in the leaves with me, laughing,
and carried me laughing, my hair full of leaves,
to the kitchen window where my mother could see us, and smile,
and motion to set me down, afraid
I would fall and be hurt.
Four-- Kicking the leaves today as we walk home together
from the game, among crowds of people
with their bright pennants, as many and bright as leaves.
My daughter's hair is the red-yellow color
of birch leaves, and she is tall like a birch,
growing up, 15, growing older.
And my son, flamboyant as maple, 20, visits from college
and walks ahead of us, his step springing,
impatient to travel the woods of the Earth.
Now I watch them, from a pile of leaves
beside this clapboard house in Ann Arbor,
across from the school where they learned to read,
as their shapes grow small with distance, waving.
And I know that I diminish, not them,
as I go first into the leaves, taking
the step they will follow, October's and years from now.
Five-- This year the poems came back when the leaves fell.
Kicking the leaves I heard the leaves tell stories,
remembering, and therefore looking ahead, and building
the house of dying.
I looked up into the maples and found them,
the vowels of bright desire--
I thought they had gone forever.
While the bird sang, I love you, I
love you, and shook its black head from side
to side, and its red eye with no lid, through years of winter,
cold as the taste of chicken wire, the music of cinder
block.
Six-- Kicking the leaves I uncover the lids of graves,
my grandfather died at 77 in March when the sap was running,
and I remember my father, 20 years ago,
coughing himself to death at 52, in the house in the suburbs.
Oh how we flung leaves in the air,
how they tumbled and fluttered around us
like slowly cascading water when we walked together
in Hamden before the war, when Johnson's pond had not
surrendered to houses.
The two of us hand in hand, and in the wet air,
the smell of leaves burning, and in six years I will be 52.
Seven-- Now in fall, I leap and fall
to feel the leaves crush under my body,
to feel my body buoyant in the ocean of leaves,
the night of them, night heaving like death and leaves,
rocking like the ocean.
Oh this delicious falling into the arms of leaves,
into the soft laps of leaves!
Face down, I swim into the leaves, feathery,
breathing the acrid odor of maple, swooping, in long glides
to the bottom of October--
where the farm lies curled against winter,
and soup steams its breath of onion and carrot
onto damp curtains and windows.
And past the windows I see the tall bare maple trunks
and branches, the oak with its few brown weathery remnant
leaves, and the spruce trees, holding their green.
Now I leap and fall, exultant, recovering from death,
on account of death, in accord with the dead,
the smell and taste of leaves again,
and the pleasure, the only long pleasure, of taking a place
in the story of leaves."
[APPLAUSE]