This one or two things from anywhere
is a street into the night.
This section by the way, is the most recent,
one of all my most recent poems are concentrated here
in this section, I wrote them in the Soviet Union.
I was a lecturer at the Moscow State University
in the spring term this year.
And I spent some four very exciting months
in the Soviet Union.
I lecture just once a week in American literature
to a group of graduate students and faculty,
numbering about 125.
All of whom could deal easily in English.
And the rest of the time, I wandered about Moscow
and got to know the city very well,
it's a most interesting place.
I traveled in April to middle Asia
and spent two weeks in Samarkand, Tashkent, Dushanbe.
Certainly one of the most interesting places
in the world.
This section grows out of the Russian experience,
anywhere is a street into the night is the title of it.
And the first poem in that section
is called crows in a winter composition.
My close neighbors at Moscow were crows.
I had a window overlooking a little courtyard
and in the courtyard there were trucks,
one red truck I fell almost violently
in love with that truck.
But it was how--
most of the time I was there covered with snow
and it never moved, never moved, I never
found out where the truck went.
It didn't go anywhere, but I never found out
where it was supposed to go.
But anyway, that's another story and a slightly better one.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
One of the things that interested me most
about the courtyard, which was just off my window
was the fact that early in the morning,
crows would come spiraling down and they
very strange creatures, they called like crows.
But they didn't look like crows, not any that I had seen.
They were-- well, some of you have
seen European crows, their gray colored, black and gray,
the distinctive markings, and their very large.
Crows in a winter composition.
This morning the snow, the soft distances beyond the trees
in which nothing appeared, nothing appeared.
The several silences imposed one upon another
were unintelligible.
I was there for ill at ease when the crows came down,
whirling down, and calling into the yard below.
And stood in a mindless manner on the gray luminous crust.
All together definite composed in the bright enmity
of my regard, in the hard nature of crows.