WEBVTT

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This is a poem that was
inspired by Robert Hass

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after reading "Praise."

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You get the feeling
when you read him

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that you want to have
a lot of great ideas

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because his poems are
so intellectually there.

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They're beautiful.

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And so, right away,
I said, ah, I'm

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going to write a poem
explaining it all too.

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So this is called "Literature."

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"Like an exploding
flash cube in the brain,

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or that unexpected light--"
let me start again.

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Let me just say that
the end of the poem

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is about Bob Hass's book.

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All right?

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"Like an exploding
flash cube in the brain,

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or that unexpected light
arriving through clear story

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windows, the poet's subjects
aren't merely love or death,

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but a new Annunciation.

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And we are expected to
bear it and be reborn.

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The angels deliver us raw
materials from another world,

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though we know,
underneath the mineshaft,

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our dark unconscious waits.

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We pay attention to
it only in passing,

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like weather we can't control.

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Cloud seeding is no consolation.

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But carrying an umbrella
gives the bearer

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a sense of power, a prayer,
a vaulted roof over the head.

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Like the story of the
dead widow's survivors,

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combing her attic to
find a shoe box labeled,

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'pieces of string too small to
use,' we refuse to trade back

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what little we accumulate.

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The universe may only be made
of pieces of string too small

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even to be seen, snippets
the poet knots into metaphor.

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He makes, from one square
yard of city earth,

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a paradisal garden
and adds a fence.

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Genesis is just
another love story.

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The lover is
betrayed for a globe

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of fruit, which is our world.

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The gardener appears
one last time

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as a flicker in the
rearview mirror.

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Like today, this very
morning, in the subway,

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I consider jumping
to the tracks.

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But two trains approached
from opposite directions

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with a sound so
much like thunder,

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I jumped and fell so deep
into joy, they rescued me.

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Like the discovery
of electricity,

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joy is no accident.

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Life is a series
of missed chances,

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cartons of books you always
meant to read but didn't.

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A book containing one
poem about love and death,

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which might have saved you."

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He hasn't seen this yet.

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That's the end of
that friendship.