I'll switch over now to this other long poem,
which is in your programme.
This is a theme that I realize I've
been dealing with more or less all my poetic life.
Because the act of writing a poem, or the creative act,
I suppose, with any artist, is a little bit like God's act
and started work.
You can be a very pompous artist about this
and really think that you're starting a very great world.
Or you can be a very humble artist.
But that has nothing to do with the wonderful sense which
I think the artist has when he gets going.
But he's really got this thing by the tail,
and he's going to do it all himself.
And it's going to be his world.
Well, if you think of this thesis or this feeling
in relation to Genesis, why then you as the poet
sit up or set yourself up like God
and set to create your world in seven days,
as God did in Genesis.
So this is how I got started on this particular poem.
I thought, well, by golly, I'll write a poem for seven days.
And then at the end of seven days
it'll just be the way it was back in Genesis.
Well, as you will see, it didn't always
come out as I wanted it to.
But here is a poem in a lot of fragmentary--
in a lot of pieces just following the Genesis pattern.
Introduction-- "on the last day of the old world,
I stretched out my bones like a fossil fathoms
down and bade times' leavings cover
me layer on layer and Death sweep
over, over me in her sea gown.
On the first day of the new world,
I stood on a porch on a hill in the dark with a pencil
and backlit with light in the east
and took my pencil with me into the light and set to brood.
On first looking at Crotched Mountain, New Hampshire.
"Take from my thoughts those shells Paleozoic.
No petrified foraminifer yet am I.
Leave all the siftings stiffen in their sea beds.
To live in the past, says this old saw, is to die.
Let a sun now be born.
Let a mountain be folded.
And now let the sun climb up it and queerly peer over at me
as I birth and eyes open to a new landscape there,
a new seer here.
I call these pines pines, this ivy poison.
I call all those small birds finches, that big one crow.
But what will I call that mountain?
Crotched?
Absurd.
Yet Crotched it is, I say so, and I know it.
Praise be to me, not God, him I haven't spoke yet,
to this new day.
May I now breakfast beget.
On first knowing God.
At breakfast, I had French toast.
I nomenclate thee French toast.
And drank several cups of coffee.
This would soon be arithmetic.
And came back to my bathroom and emptied my new bowels
and said to the pines, who is God?
The wind is up, the pines noisy but recondite.
An ant crawled up my shirt.
I took off my shirt and baked and looked at Mount Crotched
and dozed.
Who was to tell me, tell me?
Not the leaves, not the pines, not the sun, not the ant.
Had I made nothing would speak to me?
I went to the finch in the leaves and said,
someone must say.
But he flew away.
How'd I do, Robin?
You on a stump.
But the robin zipped to the underbrush,
and a hush fell on the brush.
And I understood as I stood bare to the waist on a stone
that the robin had known.
The stone upheld me.
To my porch then did I walk and did to the mountain
cry, God, God am I.
The second day.
On the second day of creation, I rose again with the sun
and walked up and down the Earth.
I, the One.
But I heard the pert jay and saw the drooped birch
and stubbed the stone.
Whose was this church?
So I came cold to my cabin and lighted a Sterno can and drank
tea at my desk, idle, a man.
And I knew then how soon begetting turns to begot,
and wondered who, from the first day, would choose God's lot.
Lament.
But who is he, said the God, said the man, who is choosing?
The bird and the poem take shape, and the act of shaping
is a dying into the shaping, the bird's God shriveling to a bird,
the poem's to a poem.
From the heavens, the Earth's begetters, Gods and poets,
straggle down to that Earth, makers unmade,
and knock at the Earth's doors and go to their trade.
And their trade, said the God, said the man, the God part done,
is to live by their bondage to what was once
their sun, watching the days sift down to the great sea bed,
waiting, those dead Gods to be dead.
The Third Day.
There was no third sunrise.
Crotched was smoked up.
I stayed inside at the fire, pared
my toenails, looked at the veins in my legs,
felt the bones' nearness.
The cabin was dark, the chairs sulky, gray the windows.
The whole had the look of a party that
didn't come off because somebody put all the liquor
and talk in a drawer, and said: sit there.
Be sad.
Concentrate.
It was a meditative goddamn place, the books stacked
in a corner reading themselves, and the wooden lists
on the walls of writers, composers,
Gods who had been there before me, now just hanging there.
And the big table with four feet poised by the jungle (rug)
ready to rip something up, maybe a poet, and prove Darwin.
I did push ups, but the younger poet
was getting too old for push ups. So I went outside
and the sun was out of the smoke now.
And the birds and the bugs were at it again, world without end,
so I went to breakfast.
Tell me the story of Job, mom, the story of Job.
Was he the one with the big scratchy bathrobe,
or was he the man with the locusts?
Mom, tell me.
I want to hear about somebody like me.
Breakfast with poached eggs and a good bit of talk,
and the toaster popped up and down,
and the artists looked nervous.
I thought of all of them thinking
like me of trudging each back to his God hole after the coffee,
then sitting a while on the toilet,
then tidying this up and that up, and smoking like mad,
and circling the desk like a hawk coming in with care
on a smelly carcass.
Gods?
I went back and did all that.
What is the name of that Indian in Cooper,
who walks through the primeval forest like a ghost?
Teach me the lore of silence, how
to make it creepily through the thicket on dry twigs,
eating dry toast.
I went and sat like a stump in the 9:00 AM sun,
on the lee side looking South at a different Parnassus, hazy,
a sketch of mountain that could be cloud,
and I wondered if the gods there were also dead.
A Lament.
Out there beyond the porch where my God country starts
to get dense and godly, I am.
That brown thrush is me blasting it out
in the woods, Omar Khayyam.
In the sun, nude, oozing out to the spruces, moss, fat beetles,
stumps, boulders, I lie.
Pretty soon I'll be immanent in the firmament, with here a bit,
there a bit, everywhere a bit-bit, of me right by.
But when the lugs from the heavenly Poetry
Society gathering up their far flung warbler blokes to my woods
come, they won't find much but some undone verse,
some old smokes, and an empty chair
by a desk in an empty room.
Fourth day.
I had just one match.
I lighted the Sterno with it and a cigarette and made coffee.
And craftily shut the Sterno down to a thin flame,
and went to the desk and smoked a cigarette,
and finished the coffee, made busy,
and reached for a cigarette, and went to the Sterno flame: out.
With the matches a mile away and no other God up,
my old trivial life swept in like a mist.
I fretted an hour, paced, kept looking
for matches, then patted early to breakfast, found matches.
Somebody was impelled, over her poached egg,
to play out with gestures the drama
of climbing the Matterhorn.
I backed out away from that, back to the cabin,
and smoked, smoked.
The mountains were hidden, the trees stood stony,
a thousand strong; so the shrubs; and the grass,
even the grass, each frail dry blade was fixed as if behind
glass with a card in front of it: "of the order Gramimae."
Was this the Peabody Museum?
Where was the guard?
I remembered there a wax Indian, loincloth and tomahawk, 'twas I,
but now wearing shorts, waving a cigarette.
What would my card say?
"Of the order Americanus Parnassianus; ranged narrowly;
is extinct though still living near Crotched Mountain quietly."
The fifth day.
On the first day the first God made great whales
and creeping things.
I got up late with a head and barely made breakfast
and sat in my cabin still fuzzy from too much beer,
wondering what I was doing there.
The mountains were clear, the air had a rinsed look,
but the land was dry, unchanged.
I was still in the museum.
My wife and children were half a country away.
The sun kept tearing around in the empty sky.
I was 45.
I was old.
I wanted to cry.
Sixth day.
On the sixth day after coffee, I made man.
I made him hairy, tan, middle-aged, arrogant.
I gave him warts, colds, wit, phobias, woman.
I put books in his hands and taught him to drive, dance,
lie with woman.
I put him out in the sun under Crotched Mountain,
and I looked at him.
He was well-made, would get on, he would sleep poorly
at night as he got older, would forget people's names,
misquote things, drink too much, rage at woman at breakfast,
lose keys.
With bankers he'd be ill at ease.
But he'd work hard, and make money, and pay his taxes,
and vote for the school bond issue,
and love woman, and take children to zoos
and wear tweeds.
He was well made.
I looked at him.
He was sitting out on the steps of a cabin in shorts.
He had no mark on him.
His body was firm, he was muscular,
his hair was still black, yet the eyes and mouth and flesh
of the cheeks and forehead were old.
He looked out across ages, like a saurian.
What had I made?
I went in the cabin and worked, but could only think of him.
The afternoon came on, no wind, no motion.
Whatever I did he was there.
The hours passed, and I wrote these things.
I wrote these words, and evening crept in the cabin.
And a hush came over things and the sky darkened,
and I sat in the cabin with him, and he sang My age at night
lay sleepless, my old one hunting me, escaped.
The windows and door beckoned, the still paths beckoned,
that I lie in my dark lair breathing, itching,
aging, and the old one will not leave me.
I, Esquire.
I sleep for the old one.
I watched him sleep.
At last I got up and left, left the cabin to him.
Seventh day.
There then was the world.
The man surveyed it.
He doubted it was his duty to call it good.
He knew it to be but a world like any other.
He knew that his God, now resting, had made what he could.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]