So a poem I wrote a couple of year ago--
this is in two parts, one of which takes place in Kent
in England and the other takes place in Monterey, California.
When I went back to England last couple of years ago,
this aunt who'd done a good deal of bringing up
of me-- that's an awkward phrase-- who brought me up
seemed very frail.
And the first part is sitting in her garden.
And when I came back to this country,
just before I went to a folk music festival in Monterey,
I heard that she'd had a massive heart attack.
And so I naturally expected that she would die as a result.
And the second part is me thinking about this.
Actually, she didn't die.
And she is still alive, and she recovered remarkably.
So in the sense, I've written an elegy for somebody who
didn't die, which is very nice.
[LAUGHTER]
And the last few lines of the poem
come from a direct quotation from a poem
by Sir Walter Raleigh to Queen Elizabeth.
He seems to be--
"The Ocean to Cynthia", the poem is called.
And he seems to be characterizing
Elizabeth I as a kind of a principle of fertility.
Well, I thought if Raleigh could characterize
Elizabeth I of all people as a principle of fertility,
then I could use Raleigh's lines about my aunt.
[LAUGHTER]
They're beautiful lines.
The poem is called "Breaking Ground."
Part 1, Kent.
"Lank potato, darkening cabbage, tattered raspberry cadence,
but the flower beds so crammed there is no room for weeds.
Fiercely aflame all August.
When I sniff at the bergamot, the fruity sage smell
is like a flower sweating.
She's too old now to dig, too old to move that barrel
of cuttings by the shed.
Some nephew can move it.
Barrel of cuttings of grass is not yet
hay, fresh green of redundant branch,
and nasturtium only rusted a little at edges of hot yellow.
Going down to Earth, that's what I can't accept.
Her kind hand, her gray eyes, her voice,
intonations I've known all my life.
To be lost, forgotten in an indiscriminate mulch,
a humus of no color."
Two-- Monterey.
"Looking down on the stage from side bleachers, my mind heavy.
October and high fog, Joan Baez singing,
Let it Be, during which a break comes in the sky.
And in the crowd below, detail after detail
comes alive a repeated movement of stretching arms, people all
over taking off their coats and shirts.
Patches of flesh color start out from the khaki
and gray background.
What flashes of warm skin, what a blooming
of body, firm and everlasting petals.
Let it be.
It comes to me at last that when she dies,
she loses, indeed, that sweet character, loses all self
and is dispersed.
But dispersal means spreading abroad.
She is not still contained in the one person.
She is distributed through fair warm flesh of strangers.
Some have her touch, some her eyes, some her voice, never
to be forgotten, renewed again and again throughout one
great garden which is always here.
She is gone.
She is lost.
She is found.
She is ever fair."