I want to read you a few relatively new ones
to start with.
The first one has to do with my daughter
and it's called, "The Writer."
It's a-- the ideal date of this poem would be 1966 say.
When we were living in a great ark of a house in Portland,
Connecticut, and my daughter who was forever writing then
as she is forever writing now, sat in a-- in the best room
in the house, the sunniest room of the second floor doing
short stories and poems and ultimately, a novel.
"The Writer."
"In her room at the prow of the house where
light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
my daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing from her shut door
a commotion of typewriter keys like a chain hauled
over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff of her life is a great cargo
and some of it heavy.
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses as if to reject my thought
and it's easy figure.
A stillness greatens in which the whole house seems
to be thinking, and then she is at it again
with a bunched clamor of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling which
was trapped in that very room, two years ago.
How we stole in, lifted a sash and retreated
not to affright it.
And how for a helpless hour through the crack of the door,
we watched the sleek, wild, dark, and iridescent creature
batter against the brilliance, drop
like a glove to the hard floor or the desk-top.
And wait then, humped and bloody,
for the wits to try it again.
And how our spirits rose when suddenly sure
it lifted off from a chair back, beating
a smooth course for the right window,
and clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling, of life or death,
as I had forgotten.
I wish what I wished you before, but harder."