A whole center section of this book
has a lot to do with the disintegration
and the aftermath of a very long marriage.
And my editor likes to call them "sort of love poems."
And I'll read one of these.
I've read a lot of William James over the years.
And so I think a lot about the dynamics of the imagination,
how the imagination is something lived into
and how the imagination sort of lives back into us.
And how we can be in an experience,
imagine returning to that experience,
and, even more, can imagine returning to that experience
and forgetting what it was originally like.
And therefore feeling a sense of loss,
even though we've got something back.
So this is it.
This is called "Some Voice."
This thing takes place in Venice.
And in Venice, a piazza is called a campo.
And this is this little campo.
And there's a voice.
Somebody's practicing.
Somebody's singing.
Somebody's vocalizing.
Also, my favorite site in Venice are the gondola yards.
Gondolas require a great deal of work.
They have to be scraped down and re-pitched
every six to eight weeks.
It's high intensive labor.
But they're beautiful when they're upended.
The sun strikes them.
It's quite a beautiful thing.
The title of this is, "Some Voice."
"Past the silky gondola hulls, arcaded in the boatyard,
we walked that afternoon to our favorite grubby campo,
empty, except for cats and one plain tree, with bench.
We loved it so much.
We walked just to be there, imagining
some time we'd spend the night.
The little hotel, it's frank lantern,
its dim sign dimmer by day, we'd remember just like that.
The tree's patchy shades work down your arm
as it pointed up, over there.
Locating the voice, it's open window, the soprano scales,
tipped down to us.
All life is hidden life.
Don't believe everything you hear.
To us, or not to us, her voice fell into that year,
then ten more.
Routine practice doesn't call to anyone.
It simply falls through footbridges, black holes,
and plain tree.
When we went back, the singing wasn't there for us.
We take what's given and work with that.
The rest is grace."