I'll read two more poems, poems not from that
sequence, another one with water in it.
I wanted to write a poem of nostalgia,
but I'm not sure if that's possible-- well, I
guess it is possible, but I wasn't able to do it.
And one of the things that I found out
is that if you look hard at any memory or anything in the past
that you want to be nostalgic about,
you can't be nostalgic about it anymore.
I mean, once you look at it hard you see all kinds of things
that you had conveniently forgotten.
"The Waterfall"
Meeting after 20 years apart, I ask my friend to give me back
myself at 19, but he can't or won't.
Sunny, he says, and quick to speak your mind.
Then he asks if he has aged, if he
looks the same, who had always seemed so satisfied past need,
past harm.
At every stop we stare at each other,
returning to the other's face as though it were a wind rocked
pond we hope will clear.
And slowly as we spiral up the mountain looking for landmarks,
the road a narrow shelf on the wooded slopes,
I realize he's terrified of me.
And since he cannot yet know who I am, began to see myself,
as I was then, implacable.
But that's not the word he flung at me
beside the shaded pool, the blanket smoothed,
the picnic barely opened.
That was years ago.
Now, we have the usual pleasantries, trade
photographs, his family and mine, they are fixed,
improbable faces.
Eventually we find the general store, the left turn fork,
the hidden waterfall still battering the rocks,
and the ease of recognition makes me old.
Standing close enough to feel the spray,
looking up at the falls, its powerful, inexhaustible rush
of water, I think that art has ruined my life, fraught as it
is with what's exceptional.
But that's not true.
At the start, at 19, I wanted it all, every exhilaration,
every grief.
Acquisitive was what he said
How could I have hurt him?
Such a new candle just lit, burning, burning.
[APPLAUSE]