This is from The Blues Don't Change.
I'll read two poems from The Blues Don't Change.
One is a poem, I guess, you could say about death,
which I don't really believe in.
That's complicated, so I won't go into all of that.
But you reach a point in your life
when people that you know, your loved ones, parents,
people that you only halfway know,
they start disappearing on you.
I guess when you're in your teens and in your 20s,
you don't really think much about those transitions.
And you reach a certain age when it looks as if everyone
is starting to disappear.
In fact, what happens with celebrities that you're
trying to keep up with is that, months, maybe sometimes two
years can go by, and you say, oh is he dead?
Now I wondered what had happened to him.
It happens so much, you can't keep up with who's here
and who isn't here.
So one day I came to this building
where I worked in California, and there was a woman up there
who worked with textiles, and she's in the hallway crying.
And I ask her what had happened.
She said her mother had died.
And I offer my condolences.
She says, you don't understand, it was six months ago,
and it just now hit me because we never got along.
And I thought about this.
I said, I'll write a poem for you, Jean.
And, of course, in writing the poem for Jean,
writing a poem to try to understand my own feeling
about a lot of these things because in my own life,
these disappearances are taking place.
I really am convinced that the best--
I shouldn't say the best, but the most interesting poetry
takes place between two people or between one person and maybe
a very small group of people, and is not
written for posterity and is not written
with the idea of somebody looking over
your shoulder saying, that's a great poem, that kind of thing,
but when you're really trying to talk to somebody.
And when people are really communicating at gut level,
in powerful "rites of passage type" situations,
I've noticed that ordinary conversation turns to poetry.
So in this, in directing the poem to this textile artist,
the imagery took care of itself.
You don't sit around and say, oh, that's right,
you have to get imagery in and metaphors in.
They just occur.
"How The Rainbow Works" for Jean Cook
on learning of her mother's death.
Mostly we occupy ocular zones, clinging only
to what we think we can see.
We can't see wind or waves of thought, electrical fields
or storms of atoms dancing; only what they do or make
us believe.
Look on all of life as color--
vibratile movement, heart-centered,
from invisibility to the merely visible.
Never mind what happens when one of us dies.
Where are you before you even get born?
Where am I and all the unseeable souls we love at this moment,
or loathed before birth?
Where are we right now?
Everything that either happened either never did or always
will with variations.
Let's put it another way.
Nothing ever happened that wasn't dreamed,
that wasn't sketched from the start with artful surprises.
Think of the dreamer as God, a painter, a ham, to be sure,
but a divine old master, whose medium is light
and who sidesteps tedium by leaving room
both inside and outside this picture
for subjects and scenery to wing it.
Look on death as living color, too, the dyeing of fabric,
submersion into a temporary sea, a spectruming beyond the reach
of sensual range which, like time, is chained to change;
the strange notion that everything we've ever
done or been up until now is past history, is gone away,
is bleached, bereft, perfect, leaving
the scene clean to freshen with pigment and space and leftover
light."