And this last poem is called The Time Wars.
And it's about that sound of escaping time
that you start to hear at a certain point in your life.
And what do you do about it?
And in a way, you're fighting the time wars.
However, you sort of construe the battle with time.
And so this poem is seven stanzas,
and each stanza has some kind of representation of time in it.
Yeah.
So it's about how time passes, and the things that we
do in order to try to make it into eternity;
into luminous moments.
"The Time Wars."
"It was the winter we ate a lot of oatmeal to stay warm.
We lived on 17th and G streets."
I was living in Washington DC by the [INAUDIBLE]
when it [INAUDIBLE].
"It was the winter we ate a lot of oatmeal to stay warm."
And I was reading the letters of Virginia Woolf.
The letters of Virginia Woolf are extremely
discouraging to read because she's always
like having huge depressions and migraines,
and going to bed for three days.
And she's always finishing a book too, you know.
So you say what is wrong here?
She's suffering, she's suffering, she's suffering,
and I finished a book Friday.
"So the time wars.
It was the winter we ate a lot of oatmeal to stay warm.
We lived on 17th and G streets.
Kath called it the G spot.
At night in the bathtub, I read the collected letters
of Virginia Woolf trying to keep the pages of 20th century prose
from getting wet, reading the guest lists for her dinner
parties as she knocked out book after book
between her shattering depressions.
Sometimes I would meet Richard at the Chinese place
for dinner.
And one, two, three hours would vanish like our food.
We would stand outside the Great Wall adjusting our scarves
in a pastoral moment of urban separation,
watching the cabs whiz by in the dark.
The Vietnam War monument was just five blocks away.
On Saturday, you would always see a vet or two
in their windbreakers and baseball caps,
heads down, crying in the shrubs.
A little POW buttons and various insignia
attached to their clothing like they
were advertising something.
We ourselves were fighting the time wars.
All of us could feel it speeding up, rapidly
escaping like the hiss from a leaky balloon.
We were trying to plug it, to slow it down, to decelerate,
but none of us was having much success.
One day in February, Kath brought in some roses
and said here, the sun came 93 million miles
to make these flowers that I killed for you.
And I said, Kathleen, my talents are not
capacious enough to properly exaggerate your virtues.
And we both burst out laughing and time
stopped right over our heads like a little red car.
On June 14, 1940, Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal: Windy
day.
I am the hare, far ahead of my critics, the hounds.
Something endearing about the mixture
of weather report and vanity.
Something lonely about this image of success.
We ourselves aren't thinking about the future anymore.
What we want is to calm time down to get time
in a good mood, to make time feel wanted.
We just want to give time many homemade gifts covered
with fingerprints and kisses."