I want to end with a few more recent poems, one of them
I read in a class, so those who were in that class
will have to just sit through it again.
And I tend to go back to it maybe more often than I should
because it is a poem I think I was
wanting to write for so long.
And it refers, of course, to the whole fairy
story that we carry around with us if we're lucky,
called "One Story".
"Always somewhere in the story which up until now we thought
was ours.
Whoever it was that we were being then
had to wonder out into the green towering forest reaching
to the end of the world and beyond,
older than anything whoever we were being could remember,
and find there that it was no different from the story
anywhere in the forest and never be
able to tell as long as the story
was there, whether the fiery voices now far ahead now
underfoot, the eyes staring from their instant that
held the story as one breath.
The shadows offering their spread flowers
and the chill that leapt from its own turn
through the hair of the nape like a light through a forest
knew the untold story all along.
And we're waiting at the right place
as the moment arrived for whoever
it was to be led at last by the wilds of ignorance
through the forest and come before them face
to face for the first time, recognizing them with no names,
and again, surviving, seizing something alive to take
home out of the story.
But what came out of the forest was all part of the story.
Whatever died on the way or was named but no longer
recognizable, even what vanished out of the story finally,
day after day, was becoming the story.
So that when there is no more story, that will be our story.
When there is no forest, that will be our forest."