Feel like we should give you a chance to say something.
In 1989, I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York City
and saw Anselm Kiefer's show there.
He's a painter who uses a lot of straw, and human hair,
and charred remains of books in installation pieces.
And I was very struck by what I saw,
and this poem comes from that.
It's called "Straw on Canvas."
In the gallery, we are being asked
to go back to where the body won't let you,
to where the body detached from the lovely city won't let you,
won't let you.
Questions like, oh, distant figure in gold, oh hitherto
unknown culture revealed, why is there women's hair
all over the floor.
In the painting, the crypt-like vault
recalls the structure proposed as a memorial
to German soldiers in Berlin.
Empty, to be sure, like being left with your heart but not
an apartment.
Is it true when the will is silenced
in life, as it can be for a moment in art, there is terror?
The ballerina takes off her shoes
inside a man who does not want to love.
He has a dream in which his head is the monstrous head
of the child who cannot be loved.
We are not going to be able to live.
If this is a conversation we never want to finish,
we are not going to be able to live.
What do we know in our consideration of mourning
when we stop looking at the monument?
That all experiments in psychology
lead us back to the hands.
The next sequence begins, this train
we call summer, this sparrow we call home, and continues
where we sit, clearly reading what we wish for a while.