This one is a poem called "Grey Sweaters," which
is dedicated to James Laughlin, who many of you
will have heard when he was here,
I believe, not very long ago.
Oh.
I thought I had brought a poem of his
that this poem sort of responds to,
but what I did bring instead was a bad copy of a poem of mine.
The thing is that he wrote a poem, a very beautiful poem.
I like it a lot.
A recent poem of his, about an old grey sweater of his,
and what he would like done with it.
And that he does not want to give it away,
but he'd like it tacked up to an oak tree in the woods.
I can't really even paraphrase the poem.
It's so beautiful, I don't want to ruin it.
After I had read his poem, which I'm
sure you'll see around before too long,
I had a dream which related to his poem.
And I wrote this poem out of the dream,
and I hope that it sort of stands on its own.
It's got to now, since I've launched into talking about it,
and then found that I didn't have his.
Well, it's got to.
As a matter of fact, I wrote this poem
without further reference to his poem.
And only after I stuck it in the mail and sent it off to him,
after typing it up, did I reread his poem.
And I had sort of made a mistake about his,
because he didn't say that his was lost.
He was giving directions for what
to do with his gray sweater when he's dead, actually.
But in my dream and in the poem, it was a question of where is
that old grey sweater of mine, and is it part of me?
So this is mine, and it's called Grey Sweaters.
Plural.
You want your old grey sweater lost or given away.
You need it for life and death.
Your lines are cast to pull it back around you.
Last night, I dreamed one.
A sweater, I mean.
Found in the woods.
Knit by an oriole.
Once I had.
Have you seen one, ever?
An orioles nest, woven of silvery milkweed silk,
and weathered light as a spindrift timber,
tempered ten saltwater seasons.
I wore it, the perfect chatelaine at my waist,
till it slipped off and was lost again in orchard leaves.
The sweater I dreamed was like that.
I meant, waking, to offer it as a replacement.
It would stretch to fit you.
But then I recalled that indeed you
had conjured yours already into a poem.
It and your need for it are the knit and purl
of the poem's rows, re-raveled.