This is a poem that was inspired by Robert Hass
after reading "Praise."
You get the feeling when you read him
that you want to have a lot of great ideas
because his poems are so intellectually there.
They're beautiful.
And so, right away, I said, ah, I'm
going to write a poem explaining it all too.
So this is called "Literature."
"Like an exploding flash cube in the brain,
or that unexpected light--" let me start again.
Let me just say that the end of the poem
is about Bob Hass's book.
All right?
"Like an exploding flash cube in the brain,
or that unexpected light arriving through clear story
windows, the poet's subjects aren't merely love or death,
but a new Annunciation.
And we are expected to bear it and be reborn.
The angels deliver us raw materials from another world,
though we know, underneath the mineshaft,
our dark unconscious waits.
We pay attention to it only in passing,
like weather we can't control.
Cloud seeding is no consolation.
But carrying an umbrella gives the bearer
a sense of power, a prayer, a vaulted roof over the head.
Like the story of the dead widow's survivors,
combing her attic to find a shoe box labeled,
'pieces of string too small to use,' we refuse to trade back
what little we accumulate.
The universe may only be made of pieces of string too small
even to be seen, snippets the poet knots into metaphor.
He makes, from one square yard of city earth,
a paradisal garden and adds a fence.
Genesis is just another love story.
The lover is betrayed for a globe
of fruit, which is our world.
The gardener appears one last time
as a flicker in the rearview mirror.
Like today, this very morning, in the subway,
I consider jumping to the tracks.
But two trains approached from opposite directions
with a sound so much like thunder,
I jumped and fell so deep into joy, they rescued me.
Like the discovery of electricity,
joy is no accident.
Life is a series of missed chances,
cartons of books you always meant to read but didn't.
A book containing one poem about love and death,
which might have saved you."
He hasn't seen this yet.
That's the end of that friendship.