Let me find a poem that I want to--
I want to read a number of poems to sort of talk around--
and it had something to do with this--
and get off the kind of--
oh, these are first lines--
get off the talking about the subject itself.
There was a poem that I had wanted
to write for quite some time.
And that's sometimes a good thing
not to be able to write things.
It means that they're in a long gestation period.
And they may never decide to show themselves,
but they've got a life of their own.
That's the wonderful thing-- everything
has a life of its own.
And that life is our life only if you accept it.
If you don't accept it, if you turn it into some abstraction,
like a commodity, you're diminishing yourself each time.
And until you get into this--
you see it happening in our culture.
You get to watch it happening in the culture.
And the culture then has to implode, break down,
find various ways of--
I mean, how long did modernism last?
About 100 years?
From the middle of the 18th century to a little time
after Napoleon.
And it's all been postmodern since then,
whatever it calls itself.
This is a poem called, "One Story."
And fortunately, when I wrote the poem and gave it its title,
I'd forgotten that my favorite poem of Robert Graves,
for whom I worked when I was in my early 20s
as a tutor in his family--
Robert's favorite poem was--
to mine is "To Juan at the Winter Solstice."
Juan was his-- that's the English pronunciation
of his son, born in Spain.
And the first line of the poem is
there is one story and one story only that
will prove worth your telling.
Well, I believe that's true.
But this wasn't what I was thinking about when
I wrote the poem at all.
"One Story."
Always somewhere in the story, which up until now
we thought was ours, whoever it was that we were being then
had to walk, wander out into the green towering forest, reaching
to the end of the world and beyond,
older than anything, whoever we were being, could remember.
And find there that it was no different from the story,
anywhere in the forest.
And never be able to tell, as long as the story was there,
whether the fiery voices now far ahead, now
underfoot, the eyes staring from their instant that
held the story as one breath.
The shadows offering their spread flowers,
and the chill that leapt from its own turn
through the hair of the nape like a light through a forest,
knew the untold story all along.
And were waiting at the right place,
as the moment arrived for whoever it was,
to be led at last by the wilds of ignorance
through the forest.
And come before them face to face for the first time.
Recognizing them with no names and again surviving, seizing
something alive to take home, out of the story.
But what came out of the forest was all part of the story.
Whatever died on the way, or was named
but no longer recognizable.
Even what vanished out of the story, finally,
day after day, was becoming the story.
So that when there is no more story, that will be our story.
When there is no forest, that will be our forest.