I think what I'll do is begin frankly the freshness
and pleasure of this wee book that Charles
and Chax Press has just literally physically put together.
I'd like to read it and then see what time's left.
I've brought a watch - a clock, actually.
I set the alarm.
[INAUDIBLE] it's not quite that dramatic.
But at my age, I know that I could be here all night
if I'm not careful.
So this then "Yesterdays," which it
eases me to say a little something,
not so much about how I wrote this deathless poem per se.
But this poem was curiously provoked by an invitation
to choose a particular work of art
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
and to write something, a poem.
And it's in response to it.
So that was fairly daunting.
I recognize-- you know, they send you
a book with a pretty rangy sense of their holdings.
And there was a self-portrait of Alex Katz's that
really got to me.
He was wearing a kind of high-crowned felt hat.
And he has this almost enigmatic look.
He doesn't look hostile, but he certainly
doesn't look as though he's wanting to get quickly engaged
with conversation.
And I noted that the painting was dated.
His painting of this image was 1962 to 1963.
So I thought that I would do some sort of self-portrait,
in turn, which is called "Yesterdays."
"Sixty-two, sixty-three I most remember as time WC Williams
dies, and we are back from a hard two years in Guatemala,
where the meager provision of being schoolmaster for the kids
of the patrones of two coffee plantations has managed neither
life nor money.
Leslie dies in horror of bank giving way as she,
and her sister and their friends tunnel in to make a cubby.
We live in an old cement brick farmhouse
already inside the city limits of Albuquerque.
For that has all really happened.
And we go to Vancouver, where--
thanks to friends Warren and Ellen Tallman,
I get a job teaching at the University of British Columbia.
It's all a curious dream, a rush to get out of the country
before the sad invasion of the Bay of Pigs,
that bleak use of power.
One of my British colleagues has converted the assets of himself
and his wife to gold bullion and keeps the ingots
in a sturdy suitcase pushed under their bed.
I love the young, at least I think I do--
in their freshness, their attempt
to find ways into Canada from the western reaches.
Otherwise, the local country seems like a faded Edwardian
sitcom.
A stunned, stoned woman runs one Saturday night up and down
the floors at the hydroelectric building on Pender
with the RCMP in hot pursuit--
where otherwise, we stood in long, patient lines
extending often several blocks up the street.
We were waiting to get our hands stamped
and to be given a 12 pack of Molsons.
I think, I dream, I write the final few chapters
of The Island, the despairs gathering at the end.
I read Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America,
but I'm too uptight to enjoy his quiet, bright wit.
Then, that summer, there is the great Vancouver Poetry
Festival.
Ellen comes back from India, Olson
from Gloucester, beloved Robert Duncan from Stinson Beach.
Denise reads "Hypocrite Women" to the Burnaby ladies.
And Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Margaret Avison
are there too, along with a veritable host of the young.
But it's autumn again.
I've quit my job.
And we head back to Albuquerque.
And I teach again at the University.
And sometime, just about then, I must have seen myself--
as others see, or saw me--
even like in a mirror, but could not quite accept either
their reassuring friendship or their equally-locating anger.
Selfish, empty, I kept at it.
38 years later, I seem to myself still much the same,
even if I am happier, I think, and older.
When I think of where I've come from
or even try to measure as any kind of distance
those places, all the various people and all the ways
in which I remember them, so that even the skin I touched or
was myself fact of, inside, could see through
like a hole in the wall or listen to,
it must have been, to what was going on
in there, even if I was still too dumb to know anything.
When I think of the miles and miles of roads, of meals,
of telephone wires, even, or even of water poured out
in endless streams down streaks of black sky,
or the dirt roads washed clean, or myriad, salty tears.
And suddenly, it's spring again--
or it was.
Even when I think again of all those I treated so poorly--
names, places-- they're waiting uselessly for me in the rain.
And I never came.
I was never really there at all.
I was moving so confusedly, so fast, so driven--
like a car along some lonely highway
passing, passing other cars.
And I try to think of things, of what's happened,
of what a life is and was.
My life, well, I wonder what it meant--
the sad days passing; the continuing, echoing deaths;
all the painful, belligerent news;
and the dog still waiting to be fed;
the closeness of you sleeping; voices; presences of children,
of our own grown children; the shining, bright sun;
the smell of the air just now; each physical moment passing,
passing.
It's what it always is or ever was--
just then, just there."