I always marvel when poets are introduced
or when I'm introduced, and people applaud.
That's really wonderful because you really
don't know what you're getting.
And to get the applause before I start,
it's always an honor for me.
I thank you for that.
I also want to thank the Poetry Center and Frances and Larry,
and all of you who have invited me here today.
You have an incredible program here.
And I want to thank Barbara for her association with this.
And I don't know all the names of all the people involved.
But you have a marvelous program here.
And I'm very grateful and honored to be here.
So let me start, OK?
I'm going to start with a poem that ran away with me.
I've gotten to the point in my writing
where I can't always determine where
the poem is going to take me.
I follow it.
And sometimes, it takes me around corners that I don't
know and don't understand.
But I follow it, and see where it's going to take me.
And it's exciting.
It's a challenge.
I have a friend who lived to be 101 years old.
Her name was Rose.
And Rose had one of the most magnificent minds of anybody
I've ever seen.
I'm hoping that I can sustain myself, not for 101 years,
but maybe as long as I'm on this planet
to have the kind of mind and alertness that she had.
One thing she told me was how the Susquehanna River
in Delaware submerged itself under the Chesapeake Bay
to become a drowned river.
Now that notion itself, it intrigued me.
The metaphor, how does a river drown.
And I thought-- I said to her, I said, Rose, this is a poem.
I want to work on this.
So I started working on the poem,
and then the poem took a turn on me.
And it moved into a Orpheus and Eurydice.
I'm wondering, how did the poem go from where I was taking it
to that wonderful Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice
to Orpheus.
And Eurydice was his wife, and she was in the underground.
And he wanted to get her, and he had to go down
to get her out of this hell.
And he did.
He loved her very much.
And he was told not to look back.
But of course, he did.
And the moment he did, he lost her.
So here, I-- is the poem.
One thing I have discovered is that James Michener
wrote a book about that area.
And I understand as some friends have told me
that if you go to Havre de Grace in Maryland,
you can actually see that happen,
how the one river, the Susquehanna,
drowns itself under the Chesapeake Bay.
"You told me, Rose, it's this river,
how the Susquehanna had submerged itself
under the Chesapeake Bay to become a drowned river.
He tends his pain each morning with a glance
at his fragile garden, a gesture toward his tender bedroom.
A look at his invisible shadow that
augurs a lament in the creasing of mirrors
nonexistent in this house but haunting his memory of himself.
There is a Who somewhere.
Can he find it?
The river you say flows powerfully under,
drowning itself to create another identity
close to its own, closer to its nature,
crest to its ambivalence and the water of its ways.
The drowning is a survival.
He goes under it intervals, looks at the clock.
Knows the day is due.
A premium must be paid.
Falters, hopes, looks for last things, a soccer shoe,
asks the vase if she's still there, if the colors are right.
If there's a survival in this texture.
Its watching of inanimate things.
The vase answers, yes, all of the above.
He has named the vase after someone
who moves about his dreams while his step stutters
on the staircase.
Where is she, this woman?
Not within his reach.
Swimming somewhere under, he wants her to rise to suffer.
His sanity depends upon it.
And she does after she has drowned.
The river is wonderful, you say.
Its energy connects to the center of the universe,
and that is why it is transformed to a greater thing.
That is why the Chesapeake smiles at hurricanes.
He wonders.
He is not a swimmer.
He cannot cope with drownings.
She surfaces, takes him under as he leaves his house,
locks his door, enters the water.
Stunned in her embrace, soon they rise.
He does his day's work at the office,
surrenders his vision to another time,
a river of the redemptive, and knows
that life regenerates itself in a single promised
moment awaiting his touch that smiles at hurricanes."
It's kind of poem you sort of have to read.
If you don't understand it, don't worry.
Some of it I don't understand either.
There's that old saying from Robert Browning
one of his poems that when he wrote it,
he and God knew what it meant.
And at that point, only God knew.
So there are times when the poem takes you
beyond yourself and whatnot.