A friend, a fine young poet--
that's how I got to know him-- but a friend
named Bruce Cohen asked me to read a poem.
It's sort of a difficult poem, but I think I'll try it anyway.
It's a very talky kind of meditative poem
with very little imagery in it.
So you just have to allow it to unwind, I guess, and follow it.
It's called "Exile."
And what the poem is involved with
is something that I think almost everyone goes through,
and that is the times when we need to withdraw
from the world in some way.
We find ourselves distant from almost everything.
And it's a psychic need, one that often
confuses other people, I think.
And I know it confuses me when I go through it, because I
can't do for other people what they want of me.
But a necessary one.
"Exile."
And there's an epigraph to it from Richard Howard's writing,
of all things, and you can understand this.
"The exile that belongs to oneself, the interior exile."
"We must have some statement from it,
for now we are keeping smaller ones, circumspect,
as when a man in the midst of self-argument
turns bitterly aside.
The countenance lost in itself will languish a while,
as if memory were a buoyancy stunned, and then sank.
He begins a descent, as into experience--
his inner space, or solitude.
Nothing so private as this resting place.
From it the heart rises, a red wet planet
contracting in space as if in pain or opposition to itself.
Meanwhile we, in a weak external light, infer second-thought;
or if unsure we assume his sudden distancing
complementary to our own.
Thus friendship like the moon releases its pull
and we slide back into our own lives.
Wrongly inspired by the indifference we assume,
is it possible our lives, sustained
at last only by deep concentration
and by the conversations we fear might be running down,
can be understood?
Formerly we noticed experience.
It did not accurately repeat, but our latest responses
are now generalized.
Eventually we choose exile and self-descent.
If that inner universe, objective
and in distant accord, affords some patience sometimes
we see a man emerge, wholly himself.
Or ourselves choose love, a kind of concealment
so private we can hardly speak."