126
PART ISAN REVIEW
[ said that we shared a sympathy for rivers. T he next book o f poems of
mine coming out is call ed
The
Ril!C'r SOlllld
and it's abo ut th e Ge rman poet
H olderlin, who in the ea rly nineteenth century left Germany and either los t
hi s passport or didn't have one. He los t hi s mind as he crossed th e Auvergne.
He had some kind of traumati c experi ence and was in coherent mos t of the
time for the rest of hi s li fe, bu t he came down to the Do rdogne and then
made hi s way, nobody knows how,
to
Bordeaux, whi ch was where he was
more or less rescued. The poem is call ed " Holderlin at the River."
T he ice aga in in Ill y sleep it was fo ll owing someone
it though t was me in the dark and I recogn ized its w hite tongue
it held me in its freezing rad iance until I
was the o nl y tree th ere and I bro ke and ca rri ed
my limbs down thro ugh dark roc ks ca lling
to
the summer
where are you where w ill yo u be how co uld I have mi ssed yo u
gold ski n the still po nd shini ng under the eglan tin es
wa rm peach resting in m y pa lm at noon amo ng fl owers
all th e way I was looking fo r yo u and I had nothin g
to
say w ho I was
un til the last day of th e world th en fa r below I could see
the great va ll ey as night fell the one ray w ithdraw ing
like th e note of a horn and afterwards bbck w ind took
all I knew but here is the fo reign mo rn ing w ith its clo uds
sailing o n water beyond the black trembling poplars
the sky breath less aro u nd its b li nd ing fi re and the whi te flocks
in wa ter meadows on th e fa r sho re are fl owing pas t th eir
sil ent sheph erds and now o nly o nce I hea r the hammer
ri ng on the anvil and in some place that I have not seen
a bi rd of ice is singing of its own coun try
if any of this remains it w ill no t be me
Thi s is th e ri skies t part of the reading and I don't know how to do thi s.
[ wa nt to read a few sections, each of them abo ut the length of those poems
from
T71e
Vixen,
fj-om a narrative poem that's coming o ut later thi s year call ed
T71e
Folding
Cliffs.
It's based on a hi stori cal occurrence about which [ found
out everything [ could and then made the fi cti on on the basis of the hi sto–
ry, about something that happened in 1891- 1893, th e time of the piratical
takeover of Hawaii by a group of businessmen, with the help of the guns of
the
USS
Boston,
but the main protagonists are a Hawaiian couple. T hey're
Ii
terate but not well educa ted, certainly not ri ch or high in the social order.
He's a cowboy. She was thought by her village to be very beautiful , and they
were sort of a legendary and wonderful coupl e in their youth. They married
