WEBVTT

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[APPLAUSE]

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Thank you.

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Can you hear?

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It's a treat to
be here with Dana.

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You're also going to feel that
you have the wrong poet when

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you hear these things
because they do not

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correspond to the ways in
which I have been described.

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I'm going to read
from the manuscript.

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And it's not like Vita Nova.

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It's not like driftwood.

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And it's not serene.

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But it's a book
called The Seven Ages.

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And, as you would infer,
its theme is time.

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Not time as a narrative, in
which, in the first poem,

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we are a little child,
and, in the last poem,

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we are a dead person.

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This is a kind of vision of
time as a series of overlapping

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vignettes so that the
past yields to the future.

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Images of poems
of the erotic life

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are juxtaposed with poems of
childhood, and the whole of it

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organized as a kind of dream.

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I tend to read without
making intervals

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of speech between the poems.

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I don't know whether this
is a service to an audience,

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but it is the best I can do to
reproduce the impression that I

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would want you to have reading
the book, of the poems being

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in conversation
with one another.

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So I'll try to do that tonight,
even though, obviously, you're

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not going to hear
the whole of a book.

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"Moving"

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"Mist rose with a little
sound like a thud,

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which was the heart beating.

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And the sun rose,
briefly diluted.

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And after what seemed
years, it sank again.

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And twilight washed over the
shore and deepened there.

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And from out of
nowhere, lovers came,

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people who still had bodies
and hearts, who still had arms,

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legs, mouths, although
by day they might

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be housewives and businessmen.

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The same night also produced
people like ourselves.

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You are like me, whether
or not you admit it.

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Unsatisfied, meticulous,
and your hunger

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is not for experience,
but for understanding,

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as though it could be
had in the abstract.

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And it's daylight again, and
the world goes back to normal.

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The lovers smooth their hair.

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The moon resumes its
hollow existence.

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And the beach belongs
again to mysterious birds

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soon to appear on
postage stamps.

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But what of our
memories, the memories

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of those who depend on images.

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Did they count for nothing?

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The mist rose taking
back proof of love,

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without which we have only
the mirror, you and I."

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