WEBVTT

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It's a hard thing in
life, to an extent,

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when your best friend is the
person who you most admire.

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This is a poem for Steve
Orlen, who a lot of you know.

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We've kind of grown
up together, we've

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known each other
for so long now.

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I'm reading my son
Booth Tarkington's book,

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Penrod and Sam.

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That's how I feel
like Steve and I are.

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This particular
poem, "A Commitment,"

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was written at a time when
Steve and his wife Gail

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had separated.

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And at the same time,
in circumstances

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which I won't go
into, Steve and I

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had also lost our
third close friend.

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And both these things,
as I say within the poem,

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seemed too much to
bear, in a sense,

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for one person
within a few days.

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The commitment of the poem
is my commitment to him.

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But more importantly,
it's his commitment

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to a kind of belonging in the
world, a painful belonging,

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a commitment to what
you love and have lost.

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"After I watched your face,
behind its mask of talk,

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deaden then go animate,
alternating light and dark

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as you bowed and drew
yourself erect under the lamp

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light of someone else's
room, in which we talked,

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I was restored.

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Though in the minor darkness of
my heart, where I'm most alone,

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I wanted to take your
masculine face between my hands

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and press for strength.

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The skull, for me, is
death and strength, merely

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objective in a world of sense.

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Within a month, you lost
your wife and friend,

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but not to death.

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I knew their leaving
had the appearance

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of a judgment in your life
because the friend was also

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mine and gone, because I loved
your wife, in you or apart,

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and because you
wouldn't turn aside.

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I tilted the lamp shade
down and drifted with you

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on the edge of dark.

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I remembered an evening
with friends in a small boat

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on a lake.

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It was September.

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The late afternoon
light and wine we drank

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warmed us to each other.

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Our quietness then passed
from the shadows of trees

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close to the water.

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It seemed we had drifted out
over a great emptiness, silent,

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held only by our composure

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I think now of those friends.

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I let them go, really only
for the ease of letting go.

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Now when I visit and
attend their lives,

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they are partly strange.

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I know my hesitations
seem to judge their house.

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I wanted to say, as I
watched you steady yourself

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in the dark, I was restored
by your bearing and openness

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to pain, a commitment to
what you had already lost.

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Our talk was personal.

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I said it in another way.

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But if all our losses
are a mirror in which we

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see ourselves
advance, I believe in

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its terrible, empty
reflection, its progress

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from judgment toward compassion.

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