So there are 39 of these in a sequence.
Having worked on them carefully, hoping
for echoes and resonances, I decided
I needed to do something very different with the material.
I didn't feel done with it.
And so I read through all of those sentences
in those 39 poems, ignoring the titles,
and came to the conclusion that there were nine themes
among the 195 sentences.
And I numbered all the sentences from the first poem
to the last.
One through nine depending on which theme they fell under.
And then, in order, I swept through
and collected all the sentences for the first theme,
all the sentences for the second,
and so forth so that their relationships were by chance.
I did not try to rearrange them to make
sort of more sense out of the meditations that occurred.
I was just curious to see what would happen.
So the themes are consciousness, on I and you,
on setting, on death, on hope.
I'm going to read two of these.
They are varied length.
A couple of them are pretty long.
I'm going to read two of the shorter ones.
And in the seven or eight that I just read,
you'll hear some of the sentences coming back
in new places.
"On Nostalgia."
"Instead, after patient looking, a face
emerges incompletely from the worn surface of a fresco.
Resurrection.
A phenomenon of memory.
Remember to show your work, we were told when tested.
A ladder.
Each rung, the future of the rung below until nothing.
A face shivers on the surface of a pan of water.
The future that dwells on us without our knowing.
The scrim of facing memory.
An eternity recollected.
A face containing many other faces.
Is it no one?
Blown sand.
The data of memory.
How often in a loved one's face you awaken in ruin.
An image taken from the past to give what's temporary.
This moment, a memorable face.
On nostalgia."