The class that I visited today was asking about title ideas,
and I was telling them that I've run out of ideas, basically.
So I'm just taking lines from old poems of mine
and making them titles of new poems to drive someone crazy,
if anyone decides to study my poem sometime, and say, oh,
what's going on?
It's like a tapestry.
[LAUGHTER]
But this title is from another poem,
and it's called "What I See Is the Light Falling All
Around Us."
"To have understood some small piece of the world more deeply
doesn't have to mean we're not as lost as before,
or so it seems this morning.
Random bees stirring among the dogwood blossoms.
A few here and there stirring differently somehow, more
like resisting stillness.
Should it come to winnowing my addictions,
I'd hold on hardest, I'm pretty sure, to mystery.
Though just yesterday, a perfect stranger was so insistent
that I looked familiar, it seemed easier, in the end,
to agree we must know each other.
To his body, a muscularity both at odds
and at one with how fragile everything else about him
I thought would be, if I could see inside.
What's the word for the kind of loneliness
that can feel like swimming unassisted
in a foreign language for the very first time?"
I don't know.
That's why I ended the poem there.
That's always a good move.
[LAUGHTER]