[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Can you hear?
It's a treat to be here with Dana.
You're also going to feel that you have the wrong poet when
you hear these things because they do not
correspond to the ways in which I have been described.
I'm going to read from the manuscript.
And it's not like Vita Nova.
It's not like driftwood.
And it's not serene.
But it's a book called The Seven Ages.
And, as you would infer, its theme is time.
Not time as a narrative, in which, in the first poem,
we are a little child, and, in the last poem,
we are a dead person.
This is a kind of vision of time as a series of overlapping
vignettes so that the past yields to the future.
Images of poems of the erotic life
are juxtaposed with poems of childhood, and the whole of it
organized as a kind of dream.
I tend to read without making intervals
of speech between the poems.
I don't know whether this is a service to an audience,
but it is the best I can do to reproduce the impression that I
would want you to have reading the book, of the poems being
in conversation with one another.
So I'll try to do that tonight, even though, obviously, you're
not going to hear the whole of a book.
"Moving"
"Mist rose with a little sound like a thud,
which was the heart beating.
And the sun rose, briefly diluted.
And after what seemed years, it sank again.
And twilight washed over the shore and deepened there.
And from out of nowhere, lovers came,
people who still had bodies and hearts, who still had arms,
legs, mouths, although by day they might
be housewives and businessmen.
The same night also produced people like ourselves.
You are like me, whether or not you admit it.
Unsatisfied, meticulous, and your hunger
is not for experience, but for understanding,
as though it could be had in the abstract.
And it's daylight again, and the world goes back to normal.
The lovers smooth their hair.
The moon resumes its hollow existence.
And the beach belongs again to mysterious birds
soon to appear on postage stamps.
But what of our memories, the memories
of those who depend on images.
Did they count for nothing?
The mist rose taking back proof of love,
without which we have only the mirror, you and I."