WEBVTT

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This is a poem from that
time that I go back to,

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partly because of
some of the ones

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I want to read later, because
it seems kind of connected with.

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I think I've been talking rather
too much about the relation

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of our individual lives
and what, for really

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for want of a real word,
we call the natural world.

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And one can get carried
away and talk only about it

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as though it was something out
there instead of as though it

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were something in here.

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And one of the marvelous things
about those poems of Zbigniew

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Herbert's that we were
talking about today,

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is the way the one suddenly
keeps turning into the other.

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I think this happens in poetry
all the time, if you go back.

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And I think this is
something that we may be

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on the verge of rediscovering.

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I hope so.

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But, this is a poem that
I wrote, oh, 20 years ago,

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I suppose.

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And it was looking back to
a time, quite some time,

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about that, before that.

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It's called "The River of Bees."

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"In a dream, I returned
to the river of bees.

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Five orange trees by the
bridge and beside, two mills,

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my house, into whose courtyard
a blind man followed the goats

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and stood singing
of what was older.

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Soon it will be 15 years.

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He was old.

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He will have fallen
into his eyes.

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I took my eyes a long
way to the calendars,

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room after room, asking,
how shall I live?

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One of the ends is
made of streets.

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One-man processions
carry through it

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empty bottles,
their image of hope.

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It was offered to me by name.

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Once, once, and once, in the
same city I was born, asking,

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what shall I say?

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He will have fallen
into his mouth.

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Men think they are
better than grass.

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I returned to his voice,
rising like a forkful of hay.

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He was old.

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He is not real.

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Nothing is real, nor the
noise of death drawing water.

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We are the echo of the future.

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On the door it says
what to do to survive.

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But we were not born to
survive, only to live."

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