I'm going to do something else.
What I want to do is read from a book-length sequence
that has preoccupied me for most of the last three or four
years.
And I'll explain some things about it.
Wouldn't everybody like to shift to the other side
and move a little bit?
This is called "The Escape into You"
and it begins as a love sequence.
In a sense in which a love sequence
can contain love, hate, sex, marriage,
divorce, and other good things.
And it expanded seemingly at times of its own volition
into areas of what used to be called social concern.
There are a couple of epigraphs to the book.
One is from a Shakespeare sonnet, two lines which
read, "Love is too young to know what conscience is yet
who knows not conscience is born of love."
And the other is a line from a poem by the late Randall
Jarrell.
A line which reads, "If I can think of it,
it isn't what I want."
Well and it doesn't end with a poem
it ends with an after-graph, I guess you might call it.
Two lines from the sayings of the fathers and the Talmud
rewrote them slightly.
So, they come out this way.
"It is not incumbent upon you to complete this task neither are
you free to desist from it."
The poems are short with one exception.
They have their own titles and they're
meant to stand alone as well as finally in some order.
And I'm not going to find too much
to say about most of them, for which I apologize in advance.
Also, I think most of you have figured out
that I read by line and not by phrase wherever possible.
And I'm going to continue that because the music of them
is important to me, with again apologies beforehand
for any difficulties that presents.
OK.
The first one I can say something about.
There are three poems in the first section,
a kind of introduction.
One is called "Homage to the Runner."
And it's based on something you know if you have run perhaps
and perhaps don't know otherwise and that is that it hurts.
The person who can win races the person who
wins in long distance competition
is a person who can stand pain the most.
It was a wonderful aesthetic credo
uttered by a former National Basketball Association
Player named Johnny Kerr.
Who set a record for most consecutive games and he
had bad legs.
Basketball is a sport that's grueling in general,
but particularly grueling on the legs and this man had bad legs.
He played taped up all the time.
After he set the record, the reporters
got a hold of him they said, how did you do it.
How do you play night after night on these bad legs.
And he said, I tell my legs lies.
Come on legs, this is your last game.
Come on legs.
And that's the way it works, I think.
If now you're exposed as a foolish romantic.
OK.
"Homage to the Runner."
The word sport in the first line is in quotation marks.
The form of this sport is pain.
Riding up into it, he hurts to win.
These are the moments when death is really possible.
When a man can fit into his enlarged heart,
all that is known or was or shall be pumping fulfills.
The love of form is a black occasion
through which some light must show
in 100 years of commitment.
By the time the body aches to end it, the poem begins.
At first in darkness, surrounded by counterfeits of leisure.
Run away, leave them to ease.
What does it matter, you wind up alone.
There is no finish, you can stop for no one.
When your wife cries, you pass a kiss.
When your sons worry, you flash a smile.
When your women wave, you ignore them.
Things which didn't once need to be explained sometimes do now.
It's not a male chauvinist poem.
The commitment it's talking about is something else.