Winter light

WINTER LIGHT

When someone's on his knees

and you can't see his face,

walk behind him

and look at the bottom of his shoes--

that's winter light,

when everyone looks the same.

I read the poem to Lea Ann last night. She was in the bathtub, bathing. I read it too quickly perhaps and with too much of my own conviction that it was a poem. Poems must be read with some tentativeness, unless they're poems like "Howl" or "With Usura" or something by Vachel Lindsay.

In any event, Lea Ann didn't like the poem. I was on the other side of the door when I read it. I could hear her listening, then I could hear the long silence that always follows the reading of a poem, then I heard prolongation of that silence, which I now know means she doesn't like the poem, the silence prolonged to the degree in which I have to say, "well, what do you think of the poem?"

"MMM, it's not much," she said. I could hear water splashing around in the bathtub. 

"They're couplets," I said. "Six lines, following Pound's injunction that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Maybe you have to see the poem on the page to see that it's a poem."

"I'll take a look when I get out of the bath," she said.

I walked back to my desk where I placed the poem face-down, and went on to something else.

This morning, the poem was still there on the desk, face-down. Outside, the light was changing in a big hurry. A storm was certianly coming in. I opened the front door and took a picture.