[APPLAUSE]
My friends, well, let's see I want
to do something else-- oh, I promised
I would read a poem called "Toward Certain
Divorce" from this other book.
This is called "Toward Certain Divorce,"
I'm told to helps to say two things before reading it.
One is that there's a he in the poem there's a she in the poem,
the he is a poet, not the writer of the poem not me, but a poet.
Two, the poem begins in driving out
into the Midwest countryside to go to the house
where these two people live.
"Toward Certain Divorce."
High beams stabbing the eyes of animals, the ruts and spilling
over shoulders Upon which my right wheels occasionally
cry I'm driving this gravel road toward you
for you just driving.
Without controversy, without a worm in my stomach
not a thought in my head.
When I pull up short in your driveway,
just to say thanks, right, and stay well,
I arrived to launder the trees upon which the poet has
shed his tears for years and to whitewash the lemon-like house.
It is the middle of the winter of the heart,
or the summer, I'm never quite sure.
Anyway the furnace is practically floating
or the two people have turned it off
because it is only winter in the heart.
Not a thought in my head for winter,
and here I am and it might as well be winter
or this is winter and summer, does it matter?
I remember getting here, the air exceptional,
because it was so clean.
And that this purity, and contour, and innocence
such as we have seen in the animals
and in the farmer when he farms, never
kept anyone in the old country.
I know well they left for shirts and ties
for their children and dresses for the girls who would
marry them to a new language.
Friendship, which seems so unpromising now,
promised them an envelope of profit.
A land at land's edge, the word itself
extending to a testament of geography.
And now you want to separate for good.
And if I were better I would stop you, wouldn't I?
By singing to spite this hunger though
you beat the bars of my harpish heart.
And can I propose the self-satisfaction
if commanded to and rise thus above you
in alteration of the solitary soul?
Which poets worth salt take as their task.
I'm afraid I have only the casual prophecy and not
the life of the word, that energy within me
though I have sworn to seek it.
Swear to me that you leave to seek it too.
That's fairly difficult but there it is.