And you can figure out the syntax of that.
I thought maybe-- impulse was, therefore,
to read a few more recent poems, and then we
could break for questions.
Or you could run for the door, as it were.
[LAUGHTER]
This summer I wrote--
I was in a situation which is ostensibly provided, so if I
could write my deathless works.
And as usual, it's very hard to write
in that kind of circumstance.
[LAUGHTER]
It's like being told to go to the bathroom.
You're not coming out til you've done something.
[LAUGHTER]
I hate it.
But nonetheless, it was a curious villa.
It was about six miles down the main road from Genoa,
and that part of Italy is very steep.
You know, steep, almost cliff-like site,
with steep hill--
rocky, so that the road clings to the edge,
and below there are a few occasional villas, and then
villages, usually like little cubbies, coves.
And so this was our situation.
This villa was built, curiously, by a Bolivian family--
something like 19-- the year I was born,
it was built in 1926--
who came and stayed there simply for two years and then sold it.
But to build this thing, they built it over the railroad.
So there's a long row of tunnels underneath this villa,
and otherwise it's almost like a movie
set when you looked out at the sea.
It was a very curious circumstance.
It's now used as the Bogliasco Foundation's digs,
owned by a precarious, basically Swiss-Italian family.
They use it as a tax write-off, which
is always one way to think of these things.
"The Mediterranean."
"The cranky, low-decked freighter with orange stick-up
stern cabin you could see from the open window of this place
each day"--
I'm going to start again.
"The cranky, low-decked freighter
with orange stick-up stern cabin we
could see from the open window of this place each day
out there on proverbial ocean has moved away,
shifting the focus of that blue to an implacable distance,
now going out to a shaded, faded edge of sky
beyond all the called dreams or places.
One so wanted it to be the old time story of them waiting
till dark at last came, and then with muffled oars
they'd row into the hidden cove, climb up the adjoining cliff
and into my waiting heart.
How many times so long ago I'd see the fishermen
at nightfall row out to the darkened sea
with their long, awkward boats, oars in unison, to
what determined fate?
And if there were a world at edge of this one, there at last
they might pull ashore.
Now the sea's slurring, recurring sound, its battering,
white-capped upon the rocks, forces both free and unknown
to me, have no work but this tedious recurrence.
Dreams repeated, insistent, useless."