It's a hard thing in life, to an extent,
when your best friend is the person who you most admire.
This is a poem for Steve Orlen, who a lot of you know.
We've kind of grown up together, we've
known each other for so long now.
I'm reading my son Booth Tarkington's book,
Penrod and Sam.
That's how I feel like Steve and I are.
This particular poem, "A Commitment,"
was written at a time when Steve and his wife Gail
had separated.
And at the same time, in circumstances
which I won't go into, Steve and I
had also lost our third close friend.
And both these things, as I say within the poem,
seemed too much to bear, in a sense,
for one person within a few days.
The commitment of the poem is my commitment to him.
But more importantly, it's his commitment
to a kind of belonging in the world, a painful belonging,
a commitment to what you love and have lost.
"After I watched your face, behind its mask of talk,
deaden then go animate, alternating light and dark
as you bowed and drew yourself erect under the lamp
light of someone else's room, in which we talked,
I was restored.
Though in the minor darkness of my heart, where I'm most alone,
I wanted to take your masculine face between my hands
and press for strength.
The skull, for me, is death and strength, merely
objective in a world of sense.
Within a month, you lost your wife and friend,
but not to death.
I knew their leaving had the appearance
of a judgment in your life because the friend was also
mine and gone, because I loved your wife, in you or apart,
and because you wouldn't turn aside.
I tilted the lamp shade down and drifted with you
on the edge of dark.
I remembered an evening with friends in a small boat
on a lake.
It was September.
The late afternoon light and wine we drank
warmed us to each other.
Our quietness then passed from the shadows of trees
close to the water.
It seemed we had drifted out over a great emptiness, silent,
held only by our composure
I think now of those friends.
I let them go, really only for the ease of letting go.
Now when I visit and attend their lives,
they are partly strange.
I know my hesitations seem to judge their house.
I wanted to say, as I watched you steady yourself
in the dark, I was restored by your bearing and openness
to pain, a commitment to what you had already lost.
Our talk was personal.
I said it in another way.
But if all our losses are a mirror in which we
see ourselves advance, I believe in
its terrible, empty reflection, its progress
from judgment toward compassion.