I'm going to give you another dense one.
I'm sorry to be pressing you down so hard at the beginning.
This next poem was written during the time of all
of the Velvet Revolutions in Eastern Europe,
and it was written because I didn't
know how to think about what was happening.
I was amazingly, stupidly happy at first
that such large political change could happen without bloodshed,
was astonishing to me.
But then when I thought about it,
I realized that this was a part of the world which had seen
so much pain and was the source of so many disasters of the 20th
century that such a simple happiness seemed an inadequate
response.
And of course, as we have seen in the history since 1989,
it certainly was an inadequate response.
But then I couldn't think about it,
so finally, I had the bright idea
that perhaps I might try writing a poem about it
and perhaps, that way, I could think about it.
And then the mind goes, but how, what, what's the entrance point?
And I thought about the idea of revision
and what it means when something is revised,
what happens to the thing which was there before when something
is changed.
And that made me remember a word that I had been taught
by an artist some years before and always knew I would someday
use, which is the painter's term Bonnarding
from the French painter, Bonnard, who never stopped
revising his work to the point that on his deathbed
he called his nephew over to him and said,
would you please put a little yellow
in the lower left hand corner of Almond in Blossom for me?
If you find a reproduction of Almond in Blossom,
you will discover that what that yellow did
was obliterate his signature.
So this is History as the Painter Bonnard.
Because nothing is ever finished,
the painter would shuffle, Bonnarding into galleries,
museums, even the homes of his patrons,
with hidden palette and brush over scribble,
drapery, and table with milk jug or fattened pear
the clobbered ripening colors of second sight, though he knew,
with time, the pentimenti rise, half visible, half brain swept
fish, their plunged shapes pocking the mind.
Toward the end, only revision mattered,
to look again, more deeply, harder, clearer,
the one redemption granted us, to ask.
Thus, we say is what we meant to say, this,
this, as the kiss, the sorrowful murmur,
may cover a child's bruises, if not retract the blow,
while a woman in Prague asks softly in good English
for the camera, but who will give us back these 20 years?
Ah love, oh history, forgive the squandered light
and flung-down rags of chances, old choices,
drifted terribly awry.
And world, self-portrait, never right,
receive this gift, shuffling, spattered, stubborn.
Something nameless opens in the heart
to touch with soft bent sable, ground earth pigment, seed
clear oil, the rounding in bright fleshed present,
if not the past.
The kissed child puts his hand at last back
into his mother's, though it is not the same,
her fine face neither right, nor wrong, only thoroughly his.
So if you asked me now, what do I
feel about the Velvet Revolutions in Eastern Europe?
I could not answer, except by that poem.
I have no simple paraphrase.
And yet, for me, that poem allowed
me to think about it as I wished to think
my way into the unresolvable question of it.