Then I thought I would try to write some short poems.
And being completely unchecked and unbridled,
I wrote 50 of the mothers.
[LAUGHING]
They're in a book called China Trace,
and I'd like to read 10 or 12 of them.
They're all 12 lines or less for two reasons.
One, because the first one I wrote was 12 lines
and I said no more.
And the second reason is because Ezra Pound once said,
as I've told people constantly.
[LAUGHS] I keep repeating this story that the Chinese once
said, if you can't say what you have to say in 12 lines
you better change your profession.
That's a great half truth.
But anyhow.
First one I'd like to read is called
"Snow," something of which I'm sure you're all
very familiar with around here.
But I wrote it in August, which seemed the only fair time
to write a poem called "Snow," so it was just
as hot then as it is here now.
In fact, it hasn't anything whatsoever to do with snow.
It has to do with salvation, and regeneration, and--
I can never remember that word.
Resurrection.
Thank you.
[LAUGHING]
That's the third time today I've forgotten a word.
There is something going on, don't you know.
Jesus.
And the impossibility of that is the point of the whole book.
"Snow."
"If we, as we are, are dust, and dust, as it will, rises,
then we will rise.
And we congregate in the wind, in the cloud,
and be their issue.
Things in a fall, in a world of fall,
and slip through the spiked branches
and snapped joints of the evergreens.
White ants, white ants and the little ribs."