WEBVTT

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This is a poem--

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a love poem about the journey.

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Each of us has the
journey of our life.

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Some of us are lucky, more
lucky than others, but all of us

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have a journey.

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And this is about
loving the journey.

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It's called "Spirit and Soul."

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"It should have been
the family that lasted.

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Should have been my sister
and my peasant mother.

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But it was not.

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They were the affection,
not the journey.

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It could have been my
father, but he died too soon.

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Gelmetti and Gregg
and Nogami lasted.

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It was the newness of me,
and the newness after that,

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and newness again.

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It was the important love
and the serious lust.

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It was Pittsburgh that lasted.

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The iron and fog and
sooty brick houses.

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Not Aunt Mince and Pearl, but
the black-and-white winters

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with their girth and
geological length of cold.

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Streets ripped apart by ice and
emerging like wounded beasts

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when the snow finally
left in April.

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Freight trains with their steam
locomotives working at night.

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Summers the size of crusades.

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When I was a boy, I saw
downtown a large camera standing

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in front of the
William Pitt Hotel

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or pointed at Kaufmann's
Department Store.

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Usually around midnight, but
the people still going by.

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The camera's set so slow that
cars and people left no trace.

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The crowds in Rome and Tokyo
and Manhattan did not last.

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But the empty
streets of Perugia,

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my two bowls of
bean soup on Kos,

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and Pimpaporn
Charionpanith lasted.

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The plain nakedness of Anna in
Denmark remains in me forever.

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The white lilacs on Highland
Avenue when I was fourteen.

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Carrying Michiko
dead in my arms.

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It is not about the spirit.

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The spirit dances,
comes and goes.

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But the soul is nailed to us
like lentils and fatty bacon

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lodged under the ribs.

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What lasted is
what the soul ate.

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The way a child knows the world
by putting it part by part

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into his mouth.

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As I tried to gnaw
my way into the Lord,

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working to put my heart
against that heart.

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Lying in the wheat at night,
letting the rain after all

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the dry months have me."

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