But they're an odd relation to that sense of,
that flow of people conceived as a public.
I mean I'm not sure that the private life isn't very
like that, the way you look out at a public life,
there's something streaming in you too that
strange, and changing, and seems unidentifiable somehow.
In a way, it's just not what people
mistake an artistic relation to the world for,
I mean, it's often thought of as a self-obsession,
but to the extent that it's a self-absorption,
it's an absorption into something such
that you lose the sense of self, it seems to me partly.
I mean, when you look at Cocteau's movie
or say that the poet in that is savaged, right?
This guy is utterly self-centered and in the most
conventional sense.
I mean a guy who says, the public loves me,
and then his wiser friend says, the public is alone.
Nice and nasty reply.
One thing in Gerald Stern's house right
now, I don't know why that segue happened exactly,
except that he has this wonderful book from Umberto
Saba, in which Saba is trying to describe poets
and you can tell that he's not sure he has a taste for them
either entirely, I mean he said once at a meal, "I was sitting,
I heard a critic describe--
praise a poet, Montale, to another poet who was seated
at the table, and we were just at the pasta," he said.
Italian.
And he said, "And this poet proceeded to poke out
the critic's eye with a fork."
His indignation is more that they were just at the pasta,
than anything else.
He says, "With this fortunately thwarted act,
the young and slightly drunk Ungaretti demonstrated how much
of a poet he was, and how irremediable infantile they
are."
I don't know, I'm not sure.
Scenes from a Death.
This is a poem, to which you just heard an allusion out of.
It mostly owes its occasions and even much of its refrain
language to the Platonic account of the death of Socrates.
The Platonic line that is cited at the beginning
goes, I wrapped my face in my cloak and wept for myself.
The women had been sent away so there would be no scenes,
but when their friend had actually
drunk the cup of poison, then the men broke down like women
and they wept.
The death of earth is to become water, and the death of water
is to become air, and the death of air is to become fire,
and reversely, Heraclitus says.
I say the death of us is to become a plane appeared
in the water, and a sail in the air, the lichen on the crag
was a gold version of the greens you could see upright
in the oncoming sea, the tide was timed just right,
and in our eyes the brown and the blue things bloomed.
"The universe is transformation." says the stoic,
in a mystic moment.
Life is only an opinion.
It's philosophy he loves, not poetry,
which he adjudges ornamental.
What he does deem necessary though is just
exactly what I'd swear a poet does,
make for yourself a definition or description of the thing
which is presented you, so as to see distinctly what kind
of thing it is in its substance, in its nudity,
in its completeness, tell yourself
its proper name, and the names of the things
of which it's been compounded, and the others into which it
will resolve.
Look at things, so as to see what kind of universe this is.
The day somebody dies, you want never to go to sleep,
you want the day in which he was alive never to end,
this darkness fall, or does the movie house of our mentality
just open, and it's a sense of inside spread.
Doesn't darkness escape from us?
To comprehend the world as a whole,
take it or leave it in other words, so we can fall asleep.
Some weird bird worried the dormant EEG,
small hours in the scullery.
The darkness rose, it didn't fall to keep us all in mind,
where we can't tell branch from branch, or time from time,
but dot by dot we needle our way back into the sky,
we reconstruct the-- count them--
88 constellatory big ideas starring animals first,
then a hunter whose weaponry sparkles,
then the mind bends down to its abode
and puts a chained woman near a winged horse.
Now we have a story again, one we can live under,
because lines lead to points, because points lead to lines.
We thought the big was strong, the little weak,
but couldn't stop the bird from screaming or the knight
from shaking in that brainstorm's beak.
The women had been sent away, so there would be no scenes;
when their friend had actually drunk the cup of poison,
then the men broke down like women and they wept.
It rains all day, and small birds
tremble in the cliffside tree that's called a mountain ash,
its leaves are feathery as ironed filings,
radiant around a field of force, the birds sit there in all
that shivering, and shiver.
Easiest to call it weather, tree with wind trouble,
ran with rain, but nature's nowhere without weather, nowhere
outside ripples of relation, shifting,
shimmering, showering, still, the air
is parted, then departed.
Seaming soaks the fabric of it, the physical fact,
where I'd always loved the thought of God,
without material, he has no act.
The cars approach and then get swallowed up in wet hedge,
shine transmogrified to hiss.
The hedge grows fast and faster, on this diet of wet traffic
deepening an eye and ear.
The kids arrived by air from several thousand miles away.
They wore their Walkman even when they slept.
They made a mental map of airwaves: "You get KISS here,"
said the 12-year-old.
I said, "I fear it's not the same."
"You should have sent them somewhere else,"
said the Bulgarian.
"He isn't famous," I said kidward, "for his tact."
"He's not a lot of things," the eight-year-old replied,
"You should have thought of that, before you married him."
I wanted them to tell the children everything, the ins
and outs, the ups and downs, beginning with it,
wasn't want the thought that got me married?
What was it Angelus Silesius was said to have remarked?
The eye I see God through is the same eye
through which God sees me.
It shakes the ground of human beings.
Ultimately what is underlying us?
Stretch of ordinary landscape can
become a luxury, the grains of greens,
the ripples off the headland, ground as figure's emanation.
The women had been sent away, so there would be no scenes,
but when their friend had actually
drunk the cup of poison, then the men broke down like women
and they wept.
In time, the saying that, "Is you there in the mirror?"
turned to, "This is me," for who can bear the proper, this is I,
when is embarrassed almost, putting oneself
in the nominative, there where it is not entirely
the objective's opposite.
The mirror is the marriage, or the language is.
We put ourselves in it, it put ourselves in it.
We put itself in it.
It put ourselves in us.
"Tell me what I'll have to do," he asked the man who bore
the cup.
"You drink it, you walk around until your legs feel heavy,
then lie down.
You'll feel the coldness in your feet, and then your groin,
and when it reaches to your chest it will be over."
"Only wait, there's time, don't do it yet,"
the friends began to beg.
He answered, "No, it's better I face up to this at once."
His floatings, fluttering, these scraps
of utter delicacy, petal tissue, white with sunlight in them,
filled to the cells with definition, all they are
is pairs of pure appearance, little flappers
in the grasses of a summer.
What comes over us to see such butterflies,
where no bulldozing yet has drowned their soundings out,
comes over us as something monstrous.
It's a tenderness, the kind I felt abroad
in nations, seeing all the human variations
on a theme of vulnerability.
"Can't you tell us anything else?"
asked Crito.
But the cold had risen to the face,
and frozen every answering away.
When Crito saw it, then he closed his mouth and eyes.
And so, we owe god an animal became
the final words of Socrates.