WEBVTT

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Let me find a poem
that I want to--

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I want to read a number of
poems to sort of talk around--

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and it had something
to do with this--

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and get off the kind of--

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oh, these are first lines--

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get off the talking
about the subject itself.

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There was a poem
that I had wanted

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to write for quite some time.

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And that's sometimes
a good thing

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not to be able to write things.

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It means that they're in
a long gestation period.

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And they may never decide
to show themselves,

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but they've got a
life of their own.

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That's the wonderful
thing-- everything

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has a life of its own.

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And that life is our life
only if you accept it.

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If you don't accept it, if you
turn it into some abstraction,

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like a commodity, you're
diminishing yourself each time.

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And until you get into this--

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you see it happening
in our culture.

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You get to watch it
happening in the culture.

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And the culture then has
to implode, break down,

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find various ways of--

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I mean, how long
did modernism last?

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About 100 years?

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From the middle of the 18th
century to a little time

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after Napoleon.

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And it's all been
postmodern since then,

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whatever it calls itself.

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This is a poem
called, "One Story."

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And fortunately, when I wrote
the poem and gave it its title,

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I'd forgotten that my favorite
poem of Robert Graves,

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for whom I worked when
I was in my early 20s

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as a tutor in his family--

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Robert's favorite poem was--

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to mine is "To Juan at
the Winter Solstice."

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Juan was his-- that's
the English pronunciation

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of his son, born in Spain.

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And the first line
of the poem is

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there is one story and
one story only that

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will prove worth your telling.

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Well, I believe that's true.

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But this wasn't what I
was thinking about when

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I wrote the poem at all.

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"One Story."

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Always somewhere in the
story, which up until now

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we thought was ours, whoever
it was that we were being then

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had to walk, wander out into the
green towering forest, reaching

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to the end of the
world and beyond,

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older than anything, whoever
we were being, could remember.

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And find there that it was
no different from the story,

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anywhere in the forest.

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And never be able to tell, as
long as the story was there,

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whether the fiery voices
now far ahead, now

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underfoot, the eyes staring
from their instant that

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held the story as one breath.

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The shadows offering
their spread flowers,

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and the chill that
leapt from its own turn

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through the hair of the nape
like a light through a forest,

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knew the untold story all along.

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And were waiting
at the right place,

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as the moment arrived
for whoever it was,

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to be led at last by
the wilds of ignorance

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through the forest.

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And come before them face
to face for the first time.

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Recognizing them with no names
and again surviving, seizing

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something alive to take
home, out of the story.

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But what came out of the forest
was all part of the story.

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Whatever died on the
way, or was named

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but no longer recognizable.

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Even what vanished out
of the story, finally,

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day after day, was
becoming the story.

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So that when there is no more
story, that will be our story.

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When there is no forest,
that will be our forest.

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