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I think what I'll do is
begin frankly the freshness

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and pleasure of this
wee book that Charles

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and Chax Press has just literally
physically put together.

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I'd like to read it and
then see what time's left.

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I've brought a watch
- a clock, actually.

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I set the alarm.

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[INAUDIBLE] it's not quite
that dramatic.

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But at my age, I know that
I could be here all night

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if I'm not careful.

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So this then
"Yesterdays," which it

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eases me to say a
little something,

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not so much about how I wrote
this deathless poem per se.

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But this poem was curiously
provoked by an invitation

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to choose a
particular work of art

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at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York

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and to write something, a poem.

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And it's in response to it.

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So that was fairly daunting.

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I recognize-- you
know, they send you

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a book with a pretty rangy
sense of their holdings.

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And there was a self-portrait
of Alex Katz's that

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really got to me.

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He was wearing a kind of
high-crowned felt hat.

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And he has this
almost enigmatic look.

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He doesn't look hostile,
but he certainly

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doesn't look as though he's
wanting to get quickly engaged

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with conversation.

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And I noted that the
painting was dated.

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His painting of this
image was 1962 to 1963.

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So I thought that I would do
some sort of self-portrait,

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in turn, which is
called "Yesterdays."

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"Sixty-two, sixty-three I most
remember as time WC Williams

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dies, and we are back from a
hard two years in Guatemala,

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where the meager provision of
being schoolmaster for the kids

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of the patrones of two coffee
plantations has managed neither

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life nor money.

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Leslie dies in horror of
bank giving way as she,

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and her sister and their friends
tunnel in to make a cubby.

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We live in an old
cement brick farmhouse

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already inside the city
limits of Albuquerque.

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For that has all
really happened.

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And we go to Vancouver, where--

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thanks to friends
Warren and Ellen Tallman,

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I get a job teaching at the
University of British Columbia.

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It's all a curious dream, a
rush to get out of the country

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before the sad invasion
of the Bay of Pigs,

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that bleak use of power.

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One of my British colleagues has
converted the assets of himself

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and his wife to gold
bullion and keeps the ingots

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in a sturdy suitcase
pushed under their bed.

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I love the young, at
least I think I do--

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in their freshness,
their attempt

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to find ways into Canada
from the western reaches.

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Otherwise, the local country
seems like a faded Edwardian

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sitcom.

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A stunned, stoned woman runs
one Saturday night up and down

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the floors at the hydroelectric
building on Pender

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with the RCMP in hot pursuit--

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where otherwise, we stood
in long, patient lines

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extending often several
blocks up the street.

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We were waiting to
get our hands stamped

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and to be given a
12 pack of Molsons.

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I think, I dream, I write
the final few chapters

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of The Island, the despairs
gathering at the end.

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I read Richard Brautigan's
Trout Fishing in America,

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but I'm too uptight to
enjoy his quiet, bright wit.

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Then, that summer, there is
the great Vancouver Poetry

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Festival.

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Ellen comes back
from India, Olson

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from Gloucester, beloved Robert
Duncan from Stinson Beach.

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Denise reads "Hypocrite
Women" to the Burnaby ladies.

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And Gary Snyder, Philip
Whalen, and Margaret Avison

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are there too, along with a
veritable host of the young.

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But it's autumn again.

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I've quit my job.

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And we head back to Albuquerque.

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And I teach again
at the University.

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And sometime, just about then,
I must have seen myself--

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as others see, or saw me--

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even like in a mirror, but
could not quite accept either

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their reassuring friendship or
their equally-locating anger.

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Selfish, empty, I kept at it.

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38 years later, I seem to
myself still much the same,

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even if I am happier,
I think, and older.

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When I think of
where I've come from

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or even try to measure
as any kind of distance

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those places, all the various
people and all the ways

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in which I remember them, so
that even the skin I touched or

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was myself fact of,
inside, could see through

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like a hole in the
wall or listen to,

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it must have been,
to what was going on

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in there, even if I was still
too dumb to know anything.

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When I think of the miles
and miles of roads, of meals,

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of telephone wires, even,
or even of water poured out

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in endless streams down
streaks of black sky,

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or the dirt roads washed
clean, or myriad, salty tears.

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And suddenly, it's
spring again--

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or it was.

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Even when I think again of all
those I treated so poorly--

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names, places-- they're waiting
uselessly for me in the rain.

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And I never came.

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I was never really there at all.

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I was moving so confusedly,
so fast, so driven--

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like a car along
some lonely highway

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passing, passing other cars.

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And I try to think of
things, of what's happened,

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of what a life is and was.

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My life, well, I
wonder what it meant--

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the sad days passing; the
continuing, echoing deaths;

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all the painful,
belligerent news;

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and the dog still
waiting to be fed;

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the closeness of you sleeping;
voices; presences of children,

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of our own grown children;
the shining, bright sun;

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the smell of the air just now;
each physical moment passing,

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passing.

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It's what it always
is or ever was--

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just then, just there."

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