But now I'm going to read a couple
of more recent poems though published
and so part of the past.
I was hiding out in a cabin a couple of years ago,
trying to get some writing done in an uninterrupted way
and I was only appearing in the evening.
And a person I knew asked me what I did for breakfast?
And I said, well, I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
And he gave me a piercing look and said, alone?
So thinking over the implications of his question,
I wrote the next morning the first draft
of a poem called "Oatmeal."
There's a word in here that everybody knows,
but perhaps not everybody knows.
Amnion, the sac in which the fetus lives in the womb.
"I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
Its consistency as such that it is
better for your mental health if somebody eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion
to have breakfast with.
Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal
with an imaginary companion.
Nevertheless, yesterday morning I
ate my oatmeal porridge as he called it with John Keats.
Keats said I was absolutely right to invite
him due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness,
hint of slime, and unusual willingness to disintegrate,
oatmeal must never be eaten alone.
He said that in his opinion, however,
it is perfectly OK to eat it with an imaginary companion.
And he himself had enjoyed memorable porridge
with Edmund Spenser and John Milton.
Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion
is not as wholesome as Keats claimed,
still you can learn something from it.
Yesterday morning, for instance, he
told me about writing the "Ode to a Nightingale."
He told me about writing the "Ode to a Nightingale."
He had a heck of a time finishing it.
Those were his words.
Oi 'ad a 'eck of a toime, he said,
speaking through his porridge.
He wrote it quickly on scraps of paper which he then
stuck in his pocket.
And the trouble was when he got home he couldn't figure out
the order of the stanzas.
And he and a friend spread the papers on a table
and they made some sense of them.
But he isn't sure to this day if they got it right.
An entire stanza may have slipped
into the lining of his jacket through a hole in the pocket.
He still wonders about the sense of drift between some
of the stanzas and the way certain lines go
into the configuration of a Moslem at prayer,
then raise themselves up and peer about, then lay themselves
down slightly off the mark causing the poem
to move forward with God's reckless wobble.
He said that someone told them that later in life Wordsworth
heard about the scraps of paper on the table
and tried shuffling some stanzas of his own
but only made matters worse.
I would not have known about any of this
if I-- but for my reluctance to eat oatmeal alone.
When breakfast was over, John recited "To Autumn."
He recited it slowly with much feeling
and he articulated the words lovingly,
and his odd accent sounded sweet.
He didn't offer the story of writing "To Autumn."
I doubt if there is much of one, but he
did say the sight of a just harvested oat field
got him started.
And two of the lines, "for summer
has o'er brimmed their clammy cells,"
and "thou watchest to the last oozings, hours by hours"
came to him while eating oatmeal alone.
I can see him drawing a spoon through the stuff,
staring into the glimmering furrows muttering.
And it occurs to me maybe there is no sublime, only
the shining of the amnion's tatters.
For supper tonight, I'm going to have a baked potato
leftover from lunch.
I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery,
and simultaneously gummy and crumbly
and therefore I'm going to invite
Patrick Kavanagh to join me."