It's terrible.
I've gone places occasionally to read where they're not
used to having poetry readings.
And they applaud after every poem.
And of course, the applause lessens and lessens until,
finally-- till it peters out.
You feel worse for it.
Everybody feels bad.
As I said before, Steve and David and I had a falling out.
I should say Steven and I had a falling out with David.
And it was at a time when Steve's life was pretty much up
for grabs, anyway.
[LAUGHTER]
And I very seldom write poems that are about specific events.
"Rosebud" is one exception.
And this poem is an exception because I
think for the only time in my life,
I felt a moral kind of commitment
to write something about what had happened,
at least peripherally, without talking about it very directly,
and to support Steve.
Poem begins after the falling out
had happened when Steve and I, a couple of days
later, were sitting in a darkened room talking
to each other.
"A Commitment for Steve Orlen"--
"After I watched your face behind its mask of talk deaden,
then grow animate, alternating light and dark
as you bowed and drew yourself erect under the lamp
light of someone else's room in which we talked,
I was restored.
Though in the minor darkness of my heart, where I'm most alone,
I wanted to take your masculine face between my hands
and press for strength, the skull, for me,
is death and strength, merely objective in a world of sense.
Within a month, you lost your wife, and then your friend,
but not to death.
I knew their leaving had the appearance
of a judgment on your life because the friend was also
mine and gone, because I loved your wife in you or apart.
And because you wouldn't turn aside,
I tilted the lampshade down and drifted with you
on the edge of dark.
I remembered an evening with friends in a small boat
on a lake.
It was September.
The late afternoon light and wine we drank
warmed us to each other.
Our quietness then passed from the shadows of trees
close to the water.
It seemed we had drifted out over a great emptiness, silent,
held only by our composure.
I think now of those friends.
I let them go, really, only for the ease of letting go.
Now when I visit and attend their lives,
they are partly strange.
I know my hesitation seemed to judge their house.
I wanted to say, as I watched you steady yourself
in the dark, I was restored by your bearing and openness
to pain, a commitment to what you had already lost.
Our talk was personal.
I said it in another way.
But if all our losses are a form of death, a mirror in which we
see ourselves advance, I believe in
its terrible, empty reflection, its progress
from judgment toward compassion."