WEBVTT

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I'm going to give you
another dense one.

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I'm sorry to be pressing you
down so hard at the beginning.

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This next poem was written
during the time of all

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of the Velvet Revolutions
in Eastern Europe,

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and it was written
because I didn't

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know how to think about
what was happening.

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I was amazingly,
stupidly happy at first

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that such large political change
could happen without bloodshed,

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was astonishing to me.

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But then when I
thought about it,

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I realized that this was a part
of the world which had seen

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so much pain and was the source
of so many disasters of the 20th

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century that such a simple
happiness seemed an inadequate

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response.

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And of course, as we have seen
in the history since 1989,

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it certainly was an
inadequate response.

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But then I couldn't
think about it,

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so finally, I had
the bright idea

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that perhaps I might try
writing a poem about it

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and perhaps, that way,
I could think about it.

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And then the mind goes, but how,
what, what's the entrance point?

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And I thought about
the idea of revision

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and what it means when
something is revised,

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what happens to the thing which
was there before when something

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is changed.

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And that made me remember a
word that I had been taught

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by an artist some years before
and always knew I would someday

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use, which is the
painter's term Bonnarding

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from the French painter,
Bonnard, who never stopped

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revising his work to the
point that on his deathbed

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he called his nephew
over to him and said,

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would you please
put a little yellow

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in the lower left hand corner
of Almond in Blossom for me?

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If you find a reproduction
of Almond in Blossom,

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you will discover that
what that yellow did

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was obliterate his signature.

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So this is History as
the Painter Bonnard.

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Because nothing
is ever finished,

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the painter would shuffle,
Bonnarding into galleries,

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museums, even the
homes of his patrons,

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with hidden palette and
brush over scribble,

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drapery, and table with
milk jug or fattened pear

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the clobbered ripening colors
of second sight, though he knew,

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with time, the pentimenti rise,
half visible, half brain swept

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fish, their plunged
shapes pocking the mind.

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Toward the end, only
revision mattered,

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to look again, more
deeply, harder, clearer,

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the one redemption
granted us, to ask.

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Thus, we say is what
we meant to say, this,

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this, as the kiss,
the sorrowful murmur,

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may cover a child's bruises,
if not retract the blow,

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while a woman in Prague
asks softly in good English

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for the camera, but who will
give us back these 20 years?

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Ah love, oh history,
forgive the squandered light

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and flung-down rags of
chances, old choices,

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drifted terribly awry.

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And world, self-portrait,
never right,

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receive this gift, shuffling,
spattered, stubborn.

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Something nameless
opens in the heart

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to touch with soft bent sable,
ground earth pigment, seed

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clear oil, the rounding
in bright fleshed present,

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if not the past.

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The kissed child puts
his hand at last back

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into his mother's, though
it is not the same,

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her fine face neither right,
nor wrong, only thoroughly his.

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So if you asked
me now, what do I

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feel about the Velvet
Revolutions in Eastern Europe?

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I could not answer,
except by that poem.

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I have no simple paraphrase.

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And yet, for me,
that poem allowed

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me to think about it
as I wished to think

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my way into the
unresolvable question of it.