One thing that was becoming very clear to me was that the more time I spent at my desk in the act of writing, the more real I became, and the more intent and concentrated I became on what I was about, what I wanted for myself, what was right for me in the sense of what I chose to belong to in the world. And I soon began to realize, as I spent more and more time writing my way into the book that eventually would become Where Many Rivers Meet, that I was living a life, or had been living a life, based on abstractions. I had an abstracted sense of spirituality, an idealized and abstract sense of spirituality. I had an idealized and abstract sense of relationship. And I had a very idealized and abstract sense of myself. The more I spent in the ecological landscape of articulation and of speaking everything

[01:07]

I saw, and everything, perhaps even that was over the horizon, which I could not see, but could only intuit. The more I began to see the full 360 degree circumference of myself, and to realize that I had been living out in just one small slice of that circle. And one of the things that became clear to me was that you had to say no, in fact, to many, many things which were not helpful to you. That if you simply drifted and did not attempt to clarify your particular uniqueness in the world, not in an egocentric way, but simply in the sense of being clear about who you were and what you wanted, what you were about, then you would find yourself in all kinds of tangles and mists and unclarity.

[02:08]

And in all kinds of circumstances of self-betrayal. So that it was very important to be able to utter yes, but that quite often, in order to get to a yes, you had to say many, many no's. And here is a piece written looking back actually many years to a relationship which I had to leave in order to save my life, and probably the life of the other person in the relationship too. The necessity for leave-taking came in the old Inca city of Cusco. I am the Peruvian Andes, and the poem out of the section of the book called The Rivers of the South is indeed called Cusco. It became clear toward evening, the gold hens of the high mountains in a blaze from the hidden sun, the streaming light and the shadows in the west hiding the nested houses, the train whistle streaming copper-colored smoke as it left through the fields toward Puno.

[03:11]

You would stay, and I, I would go on, one story already becoming old, how I left you. Centuries gone by, and the tale will only get better. I left by train to Bolivia, flew to the north from La Paz. Now the fields are passing by the window, and the young men turn toward home. I remember your face last night close to mine, looking down on the cobbled streets. You were a young girl almost wanting to begin again, and I left with you, a wild faithlessness to life gripping me for a moment. It could have been so easy one more day, true to the old promise, holding the tide of night at bay. Who wrote this story? Who wrote this story that we should meet and part again, the indifferent god we had made ourselves, faithless as ever to lovers with plans? The indifferent god we had made ourselves, faithless as ever to lovers with plans.

[04:18]

Who wrote this story? Who wrote this story that we should meet and part again, the indifferent God we had made ourselves, faithless as ever to lovers with plans? In some ways I felt like the relationship was not truly ended until I wrote those last lines of the poem many years later, when I was finally able to articulate the newfound freedom which I found on the other side of that right relationship by actually leaving it and by saying no to it and by understanding that a wrong relationship made right is actually an incredible prison and a kind of living death for both people. And that actually extends to anything we do in life, including a work, a job or a career. Things are even worse for you, I feel, if you make a relationship

[05:27]

which is actually wounding you and destroying you comfortable for yourself. You actually make it work when actually you should be gathering your courage to speak out and break out and move on. It became clear toward evening, the gold hands of the high mountains in a blaze from the hidden sun, the streaming light and the shadows in the west hiding the nested houses, the train whistle streaming copper-colored smoke as it left through the fields toward Puno. You would stay and I would go on, one story already becoming old, how I left you. Centuries gone by and the tale will only get better. I left by train to Bolivia, flew to the north from La Paz. Now the fields are passing by the window and the young men turn toward home. I remember your face last night, close to mine, looking down on the cobbled streets. You were a young girl, almost wanting to begin again.

[06:28]

And I laughed with you, a wild faithlessness to life gripping me for a moment. It could have been so easy one more day, true to the old promise, holding the tide of night at bay. Who wrote this story that we should meet and part again? The indifferent God we had made ourselves, faithless as ever to lovers with plans. So it seems to me it's always easy, one more day, true to the old promise, holding the tide of night at bay. A promise perhaps that we made when we were different, when we did not understand what we wanted. And that there is a place in life for the breaking of promises which have actually become prisons. And that the only question is will you have the conversation with the person to whom you made the false promise.

[07:29]

The phrase, the indifferent God, stood out for me in the sense that I realized that as I was writing my way towards some kind of reality, I was actually writing my way towards some kind of real apprehension of what a God might be in my life, what its place might be. I was writing my way into what a real relationship would be and writing my way into actually attempting to speak the truth. And I found that I started to read others' poems with a different set of eyes too. I realized that I was beginning to look at other people's poetry, not to see whether it was technically good, not to see the use of rhythm or the historical references or its context, although all those things were still interesting and important to me. I started to look at poetry to see if it spoke the truth, if this was truth, whether it was real,

[08:36]

whether it felt like the true personality of the person who was speaking in conversation with the greater personality of the world. And whether there were any sparks or fire between those two personalities, those two sacred othernesses, this small self and this large self we call the world. Another area that appeared on the other side of the circle, on the dark side of the moon one could say, was the whole experience of grief and loss. And I spoke to the understanding of loss and failure in the faith poem. But grief itself, this enormous kind of weight which is attached to loss and which can pull us down and can pull us back, almost as a physical kind of force even when we're unaware of it,

[09:40]

was something I feel that I was beginning to come to terms with as I wrote my way into my late twenties and early thirties. And I was trying to understand what this great shadowy cloak was that was almost dragging behind me and trying to lift it off the ground in a way. And eventually actually trying to take it off. But the image of clothing really, of carrying weight, wasn't actually an adequate image. And eventually to work with the grief I found that I actually had to treat it as a part of my own physiology and biography and history and part of my present body. And once I did that I found that I was actually able to make room for it.

[10:42]

And that grief inside the body that has spaciousness and articulation is a completely different quality than grief that is hidden and unspoken. And here's a poem called The Well of Grief, which is about, in a sense, descending down into the well of the body to investigate difficult areas that perhaps sometimes we would rather not enter, the well of grief. Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief, turning down through its black water to the place we cannot breathe, will never know, will never know the source from which we drink the secret water cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering the small round coins thrown by those who wished for something else.

[11:53]

Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief, turning down, turning down through its black water to the place we cannot breathe, will never know, will never know the source from which we drink the secret water cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering the small round coins thrown by those who wished for something else. I think of the image of the well and the images of coins that we often see, this ancient motivation, we feel, toward throwing coins, toward throwing treasure down the well. And I thought of the instance, you know, of coming to a well and throwing something precious down it, or symbolic of preciousness, such as a coin, and making a wish.

[12:55]

And I realized that the wish that we make is the wish that we do not have to go down into the water ourselves, and that quite often we will throw many precious things down into the well of the body to be, to gain a kind of exemption from entering it. And we hope that the more precious the thing that we would destroy or break or throw away on the surface, the less chance we would have of being drawn down into that darkness. In other words, you could actually cause a kind of sabotage and a kind of martyrdom and a kind of self-destruction on the surface, which you, in a sense, would do in a sacrificial way in order not to explore these areas inside yourself that are just too painful. And here, when I did actually swim down into the body, and as I was writing this poem, I actually felt a physical sense of diving down into dark water.

[14:04]

I suddenly saw these coins at the bottom, and I realized immediately that these were coins that I had been throwing down for years, hoping not to have to go down myself. And I just caught a glimmer of them. And I remember in an early version of the poem, this was a much longer poem, and I initially ignored this glimmering image which appeared, because I realized afterwards I was scared to death of it. And besides, I had this technical weight I was carrying, where I was writing a poem about grief, and therefore I was sure it must be a very, very long poem. All of these expectations were brought into the poem, and none of them survived after six lines. In the seventh line, the personality and identity that had begun the writing of the poem was totally and utterly obliterated and destroyed. And in its stead, I was left in this very dark but very real place, looking at everything that I had broken or destroyed or given away in a wrong way through the years.

[15:17]

Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief, turning downward through its black water to the place we cannot breathe, will never know, will never know the source from which we drink, the secret water cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering the small round coins thrown by those who wished for something else. There was a great moment of grief in my life in the early eighties when I lost a family member very close to me, my uncle Tom, Tom Charlotte, a larger-than-life character, someone who could have lived very happily in the pages of a Dickens novel, and who was known and loved over a very wide area of West Yorkshire, particularly by pub landlords, and he was known for his very sharp wit, all of which was spoken in a very, very broad Yorkshire accent,

[16:27]

known and loved across a wide area, grew up as a gypsy in a full-blooded gypsy family, and when his parents left their caravan they actually burnt it to the ground in the old gypsy tradition before they moved into their house, which was the end of a way of life which had probably been going on for century after century. And I was far, far away when Tom died and received the news and was just distraught at it, but I think being so far away I was unable to actually get to the bottom of how I felt, and I didn't have the good graces of the funeral or of seeing mutual friends at the time of his memorial service, so that I could fully understand what had happened, and it wasn't until a year or so later that I wrote this poem and reached that place that I might have reached at the side of his coffin.

[17:35]

News of Death for Tom Charlotte Last night they came with news of death, not knowing what I would say. I wanted to say, the green wind is running through the fields, making the grass lie flat. I wanted to say, the apple blossom flakes like ash covering the orchard wall. I wanted to say, the fish float belly-up in the slow stream, stepping-stones to the dead. They asked if I would sleep that night. I said I did not know, for this loss I could not speak. The tongue lay idle in a great darkness. The heart was strangely open. The moon had gone. And it was then, and it was then, when I said, he is no longer here, he is no longer here, that the night put its arms around me, and all the white stars turned bitter with grief. For this loss I could not speak. The tongue lay idle in a great darkness.

[18:43]

The heart was strangely open. The moon had gone. And it was then, when I said, he, he is no longer here, that the night put its arms around me, and all the white stars, and all the white stars turned bitter with grief. It seemed to me that the moment of full possession of the grief came in the moment where the language suddenly became absolutely precise. And I remember as I was folding those last lines together, there was one simple word, something like a definite article, like the word the, which I simply had misplaced. And the moment I placed it in the exact place in the sentence where everything fell into place, I was the moment of full entrance into that grief.

[19:46]

And I remember actually just breaking down in the crystallization of those last lines. And I was overwhelmed with the power of precise articulation, and why we're so afraid of saying exactly what is going on, because we will be totally transformed by what we say if we say it exactly as we experienced it. Though this entrance into grief and loss is a difficult one, there's also an immediate sense that there's an added richness, an added weight, an added sense of gravitas, once we fully acknowledge our losses. In other words, once we fully acknowledge all the things we have belonged to, that in a sense lie in our memories, and which one cannot eradicate.

[20:50]

There's a difference between living in the past and then trying to, once one moves into the present, to actually attempting to eliminate that past, which I actually feel is impossible. And there's much of our biography and our ancestry and our memories, which are actually present and enrich whatever is occurring in any one given moment. And if you tried to push that away, then you'd be in great trouble altogether. I had another great loss, another great friend who moved along and moved on to who knows where, and his name was Michael. And Michael was a very good friend of mine who shared a home in the Welsh Hills for many years. I lived on a farm called Tannegarth Farm, halfway up a mountainside, halfway up the Carneddy Mountains, on the way from Bangor into the heart of Snowdonia.

[21:54]

And the Welsh name for Snowdonia is Iriri, which means the Mountains of Longing, the Mountains of Longing, which gives you something of an idea of the actual physical experience of being in those hills and mountains. And Tannegarth was halfway up a ridge and was a collection of old farm buildings going back centuries. In the new farmhouse, which was only 200 years old, lived the Welsh family, who had lived ancestor to ancestor on that farm for probably 800, 900, who knows how many years. In the old farmhouse, which was 500 or 600 years old, no one really knew how old it was. It simply grew out of the hillside with three or four or five foot thick stone walls, lived Michael and Diane and the children. And in a blowaway caravan in the farmyard lived myself.

[22:56]

I say blowaway because in the great gales that had come off the Irish Sea and up over the mountains, that caravan would often threaten to take off and leap over the walls. And I had many an excuse to cross the farmyard at night and spend the evening with Michael round the coal fires we had in the old fireplace there. And we'd often read to each other. He was a great lover of poetry and a great artist, engraver, and it turned out actually later a poet himself, though he kept that hidden from everyone quite well. And we'd sit there and we'd usually have a glass of something and Diane would go to bed early and we'd be left to talk into the wee hours and look at old engravings, read Blake to one another. And there was always a moment in the evening where Michael would turn to me and say, you know, I love this place so much, meaning Tanagath, I love this place so much. I found my place to die. This is where I'd like to die. And he'd say that almost every evening.

[23:56]

And there'd be times almost where he'd turn to me and I knew he was going to say it. And if he was not looking at me, I would mow the words as he said it. But it was nonetheless heartfelt. This was indeed a stunning place. Because if you looked behind Tanagath, you saw this astonishing bowl of mountains, the Carnethi Mountains and the great ridge of Drosgol at the foot of which we dwelt. And if you looked the other way, you looked down the Ogwen Valley, which in mythological Welsh law is the place where Arthur pastured his horses. And down out to the coastal plain and then over the great sacred island of Anglesey, or in Welsh as it was called, Mon. And this is actually the place in the ancient world where the Druidic order actually had their central kind of sacred groves and central educational faculty. Druids came from all over Europe and finished off their education and training,

[25:01]

some of which was very, very fierce indeed, on this island. So the whole place was surrounded by beauty and mythology and great heather-strewn slopes of mountain. And everywhere you looked out of the door or the window, there was something beautiful and something inspiring to look at. So Michael would look at me and say, I think I found my place to die. But also he had a way, as we were talking about things, of bringing his own very particular personality to the conversation. He had a way of doubting anything at all that you might say that would be controversial or that would be asserting anything. And I always felt with Michael that his doubt was always absolutely sincere. I'd look at his great tall face, which he had, which was so lined, and upon my mentioning anything that might set him to think,

[26:03]

this huge face and forehead would turn into an absolute knot of doubt. He was almost the personification of doubt at that time. And I'd find myself questioning what I'd said in a very deep way. But there was not a trace of cynicism about him at all. I always felt like his doubt was completely innocent. And he had a lovely innocence in this farm and in this place. And we lived there many years. It was a base for myself. I'd go off and travel abroad and come back. And Michael and Diane and kids would be there, kids a little older. And the place, Tannegarth, would still be there unchanged. All the old names would be there. And this really was a place of names. And every corner, if there were four corners to a field, three of them would have names. And there was an old stream running through the farm, every little curve of which had a different name. There was one little elbow in the stream which was named The Place of the Three Dead Englishmen. This being in Wales, this was not a place of grief.

[27:06]

This was a place of celebration, The Place of the Three Dead Englishmen. And every little ridge and mountain you looked up had a name too. And there was one particular and very poignant day when I came back, having finally moved away from Tannegarth to the United States, and coming back on a summer's day. And I came to the door of the old farmhouse. And Diane came to the door. And that was the day that Michael was in hospital having tests. The results of which would tell him that he had leukemia. And three months after that time, he was dead and gone. But not before, as Diane told me, he had had a month's remission at the end where he'd felt well again. And it was as if all the doubt which he had carried throughout his life had fallen away. And he was experiencing at first hand many of the things he'd read about in his great hero, Blake.

[28:08]

And he had Blake's visionary experience in his own body for the last month of his life. And strode about the farm with everything he'd wanted to experience in his life, there in his eyes and in his ears and in his heart. And he died at the center of a life he could call his own. And it was really just a marvelous thing to hear. In the sadness of my hearing of his going, I was so, so happy that he'd actually had that experience at the end. And I came to write an elegy for him. Because I feel a character like that, a man like that, should live on. And his gift should live on in some way. And I certainly wanted his gift to live on in my own life. And so I came to write an elegy. And I was, as my pen hovered over the paper, I was trying to think of what it would be about a person that you could say that would actually carry their memory into futurity. You know, that would give the eternal sense of them.

[29:09]

And I suddenly realized that you couldn't praise Michael without praising the place that he loved. But you couldn't speak of Michael unless you mentioned all the names and things that he had held in affection. And, of course, in the place he lived, that meant describing Tanagath Farm. And this is the poem, Tanagath. It's full of those Welsh names which still live inside me down the years. Tanagath, elegy for Michael. This grass-grown hill's a patchwork lined with walls I've grown to love. Four hundred years at least the hill farms clung tenacious to the weathered slope, over the ogwen and the green depths of morn. The eye has weathered also, into the grey rocks and the fields bright with spring, the wind blown light from the mountain filling the valley, the low-back sheep following the slope, hemmed by dogs and John's crooked staff, the still valley filled with his shouts and the mewling of sheep pressed through the gate.

[30:13]

Beneath the arelyn the bowl of clava is stirred with mist, the dogs lie low in the tufted grass and watch with pure intent the ragged back of the last sheep entering the stone-bound pen. The rough ground of Wales lives in the mind for years, springing more grass under feet treading concrete hundreds of miles from home, and the ground has names, songs full of grief, sounds that belong to a single stream. Casseg's the place of the mare, Cumllava's the valley of speech, utterance of wind, Fridlas the blue moorland filled by the sky. The farm, passed down but never possessed, lives father to son, life after life, mother to child, feeding the sheep with grass, the people with sheep, and memory, with years lived looking at mountains. One single glance of a hillside darkened by cloud is enough to sense the world it breathes, and this world needs all the breath we have. Garneth Llewellyn, Garneth Daffith, Garneth Uchaf,

[31:17]

all the Carneddy, Irelin of the shining light, Droskill, the endless ridge curving to nothing. One man I know loved this place so much he said he'd found his place to die. One man I know loved this place so much he said he'd found his place to die. Years I knew him. Walking the high moorlines or watching the coals of a winter fire in the cottage grate, and I he did, but not before one month's final joy in wild creation gave him that full-sighted glimpse to Blake. He too struggled with his angel. In and out of hospital, the white sheets and clouds unfolded to the mountain's bracing sense of space. Now he was ready, his heart so long at the edge of the nest, shook its wings and flew into the hills he loved, became the hills he loved, walked with an easy rest, cradled by the faith he'd nursed for years in doubt. Walked with an easy rest, walked with an easy rest,

[32:18]

cradled by the faith he'd nursed for years in doubt. His ashes are scattered over by Abba the water, continually saying his name as I still go home to Tanagath, speaking the names of those I love. His ashes are scattered over by Abba the water, the water continually saying his name as I still go home to Tanagath, speaking the names of those I love. There was a poignant and actually hilarious moment months later when I found myself back in Wales after having written this poem and having told Diane, Michael's widow, of having written this poem, we all sat... There was a poignant and actually hilarious moment

[33:24]

months later when I found myself back in Wales after having written this poem and having told Diane, Michael's widow, of having written this poem, we all sat round the fireplace to listen to it and sure enough we got into the middle of it and we were all having a good cry there. But we came to the last line and the last lines were His ashes are scattered over by Abba the water, continually saying his name as I still go home to Tanagath. His ashes are scattered over by Abba the water, continually saying his name. Diane had told me that his ashes were to be scattered over by a waterfall which he often frequented called Abba Waterfall. And as we got to this line Diane suddenly threw up her hands and said Oh my God, he's still on top of the wardrobe. And sure enough his ashes were still there in the little clay pot and they'd not yet been taken over. And now of course because it was immortalised in the poem

[34:26]

he had to go over there. And sure enough that's the place now that Michael rests in all his great beauty and memory. In the poem Tanagath there's a great reliance on rhythm to take me through the names and the landscape of the place. And I found with increasing use of more elaborate rhythms that the rhythm itself could actually be a kind of impetus and onward momentum that would take you into places which a poem with very little rhythm does not have the stamina to actually achieve. And I had a particular experience of rhythm in trying to memorialise my son's first steps which he took in a churchyard in a very beautiful place in the north-western part of England

[35:26]

in the English Lake District in the small village of Hawkshead which interestingly enough is the place of Wordsworth's childhood home and education. And the place where the young boy called the owls and where I've often spent many a summer holiday. And there was one summer day when my wife and son were in the churchyard there and sure enough my son took his first steps and when I first had the news from my wife I noticed that there was a little hesitation in her voice and I asked her what it was because it seemed like an unalloyed moment for celebration. And she said, well, he took his first steps on a gravestone. And immediately I felt a kind of excitement. I couldn't understand what it was but it was something to do with past and future and present all in one moment. And I immediately ran down to the churchyard

[36:28]

from the cottage in which we were staying to find out whose gravestone he had actually walked on. And I found actually to my consternation because I was also secretly already composing a poem in my mind on the event I found that the woman's name was actually Anne Braithwaite. And I had a kind of immediate existential disappointment because I realised that the words Anne Braithwaite would be terribly difficult to scan into the rhythm of any poem. But I took another look at it and I realised actually that the word Braithwaite is a very old North Country name and Thwaite is actually Old Norse, Old North Country Norse for a clearing in a forest. And the Thwaite ending is very singular to the north of England and so here was a name that came out of the very ground itself. I also found that Anne Braithwaite was alive actually

[37:29]

at the time of Wordsworth and that she was known for her good works and charity around the whole valley of Thwaite. So I actually took that word Braithwaite and made the name actually the central rhythm and I found that it actually opened up a whole world of experience that was rooted in that place that perhaps I could not have been given admittance to if I'd have tried an easier way in. So this is First Steps in Hawkshead Churchyard. My son strode out into the world today Twenty-one steps on the grave of Anne Braithwaite Her horizontal slab of reposed grey beneath the lifting red socks Her exit from the world, his entrance to the world of walking She must have lain beneath and smiled Past the small arms outstretched to the church tower of Hawkshead She must have borne him up, her help from the end of life His beginning, her hands invisible, reaching to his

[38:31]

He walked through each line explaining her life Sixty-two years by the small lake of Thwaite Lichen, green grass, grey walls And the falling water of ice-cold streams His small place of play Her mingling with the elements she lived with A meeting of two waters Hers a deep pool, solitary in stillness His, swift, bubbling from rock to rock Pouring into her silence a kingfisher Flare in her darkness Promise of light, ineffable, unknowable The touch of his feet, a promise of a world to come Solid on a life well lived His, lack of surprise, when the church bell rang Her, knowing, the sound of time His now, hers then New rituals, new rituals Are always played on the graves of those long dead A meeting of two waters

[39:31]

Hers a deep pool, solitary in stillness His, swift, bubbling from rock to rock Pouring into her silence a kingfisher Flare in her darkness Promise of light, ineffable, unknowable The touch of his feet, a promise of a world to come Solid on a life well lived His, lack of surprise, when the church bell rang Her, knowing, the sound of time His now, hers then New rituals are always played On the graves of those long dead I felt those small feet And the image of the swiftness of his young movements found a kind of spaciousness in her eternal stillness and I do remember an academic friend of mine criticizing this poem because of the juxtaposition of male and masculine movement

[40:33]

and of feminine stillness which was associated with passivity and powerlessness but here this stillness of the older woman is the stillness of the eldership of silence and the eldership of silent wisdom in which you can see things and place them in a greater context because of your experience and because of your knowledge and I felt somehow a reaching up from beneath the ground of the present moment from this woman and from the platform, the stage she had granted to my small son as he took his first steps in the world if you remember in the first tape I spoke about another poet's first steps in writing and that was a wordless description of the young boy calling the owls

[41:33]

from the edge of Esuit Lake very near to the village where my son took his first steps and it wasn't long after that event where my son strode out into the world that I found myself one beautifully quiet late summer evening leaning on a gate and looking down the valley over the lake where those owls had called 200 years before and I wrote this piece, Owl Calls Late evening in Esuit And a half-moon rides above a still lake of clouds Only the white sweep of car lights curving through hedgerows Only the mind coming to rest in tired arms Leaning on the rough wood gate Late evening in Esuit And a half-moon rides above a still lake of clouds Only the white sweep of car lights curving through hedgerows Only the mind coming to rest in tired arms

[42:37]

Leaning on the rough wood gate Across the quiet field Two white owls glide toward the wood Beneath them only the dark bulk of cows to be heard Cropping the fresh wet grass And the still watercolour sky Washed above the eyes Then, from my own lips The first whispering of an old poem Long memorised each line Outlined by quiet The young boy blowing in his fists To call the owls Baffled by silence Uncertain, unsure of what he called The owl's voice returned The long silence The mouth open in surprise As if to speak And even now I sense the first faint crawl of his skin And even now I sense the first faint crawl of his skin And shiver of cold As in that same moment Empty of sound The scarlet brake lights flare between trees

[43:38]

And are gone Seems to me I was present there In this great circling of experience through time And a kind of presence of that boy And of wordsworth witnessing that boy And of wordsworth writing his way into his own life And my own resting on the edge of that gate Looking over that selfsame landscape Seemed to me that there was just an astonishing continuity Of which I was a part And which I was determined to participate in And bring together through the writing of a small piece And even to this day There's a kind of satisfaction In being able to gather those memories together on the page And to re-enter and walk back into the experience Whenever I will by giving myself over to the recitation Or reading of a poem such as that

[44:38]

This presence and importance of memory Was brought to me Brought home to me quite forcibly Not long after my son took his first steps And I leant on that gate And I left the Lake District and flew across to Dublin and Ireland Another old home of mine And I spent an evening with a poet friend of mine And he was telling me How he had actually gone through a very difficult time Something like ten years before A kind of mental breakdown In which time had actually become compressed And had disappeared in fact It was as if he was thrown back Twenty years Back into his twenty-year-old body And he was suddenly again Totally and utterly in love with a woman That he had been in love with when he was twenty years old And this time he was in a very difficult circumstance in his life

[45:48]

In fact he was in a home being looked after Because he was having such a hard time of it But from that place he actually called this woman And spoke to her as if no time had passed And of course this was totally traumatic for the woman Who received the phone call Because for her twenty years had passed But for him he was suddenly immersed Almost as if into a scalding bath Of absolute experience That was no longer memory But was still present in his body And although I can imagine How difficult that was for that woman I also see how for my friend Because he'd had such a break in his psyche It was such an astonishing act Of an attempt to heal himself To bring together two halves of his life And perhaps an old regret And disconnection which had lived on in his body all that time And had never finished its conversation

[46:51]

And it was as if his psyche was trying to heal himself But I was just amazed at what lies inside us That all of us actually carry Memories of everything and everyone We have ever loved inside us And if you were just to touch us in the right place Those memories would be there As fresh as you would want them So I wrote this piece It's called In a Moment of Madness A Dublin poet thinks of an old love Twenty years since I knew her Wherever she is now I will go to her I know you can never believe me But her face is as fresh to me As the winter day we parted Twenty years since I knew her Wherever she is now I will go to her I know you can never believe me But her face is as fresh to me As the winter day we parted Once my life was like a flight through clear air Searching the field lines for a high place From which to see

[47:52]

Now they have clipped my wings Turned my proud eagle flight Into the hesitant perching of a shivering wren It is in the shape of my old self then It is in the shape of my old self then The hawk, the curlew Or anything wild that flies against the sky That I'll find her once again Staring out from the woods on a winter evening Like this then, as a soundless shadow of love I will fly to the low branch above her Like this then, like this then As a soundless shadow of love I will fly to the low branch above her It seems to me that we're always attempting to return and return to things that have been real and have been precious to us and that that wish is a healthy one

[48:52]

because we're hoping to return to the kind of freshness that we felt in the midst of that relationship and this next poem is actually about a return and the title of the poem is in fact Return and the image is one of looking over the railing of the ferry crossing the Irish Sea as we come into Dun Laoghaire Harbour and there's the low outline of Ireland and the houses and the grey sea and the gulls and the peculiar sense of anticipation I always feel on returning to Ireland which to me is a place of ancestry in the sense of my mother's family coming from that place it's a place of articulation it's a place of heartfelt and passionate speech and therefore a place to which I feel a tremendous sense of belonging

[49:54]

and yet there's also a tremendous grief which runs through the whole place and this is always experienced to me at the same time as I feel the joy of return and I try to get to the centre of that experience without pushing one or the other away Return The day started with a flurry of gulls and a single cry as if I had spoken and out of the deep cave where my tongue lies birds were scattering in an open sky I went to the rail and watched them rise over the grey clouds as if the sky were a sea and the sea was cold now full of shapes and the horsetails of winter and I spoke involuntary out of a delighted mouth the old strange word Ireland joy when uttered grief when heard and I spoke involuntary

[50:57]

involuntary out of a delighted mouth the old strange word Ireland joy when uttered grief when heard One of the griefful things I remember hearing out in the west of Ireland once was back in my university days in the summer vacations I would go across to the west coast of Ireland and to the shores of Galway and Male and I worked for a shellfish company collecting lobsters from the fishermen along the coastal villages and hamlets and townlands of that rocky shore and there was one evening in Spittle Harbour which was a much quieter place twenty-odd years ago than it is now when I heard three fishermen suddenly coming along in the darkness of the stone quay carrying a tray of shining fish and I stepped back into the shadows

[52:00]

of the upper wall and overheard this conversation it's called Spittle Harbour it is night it is night three fishermen treading softly on the cool wet stones carry a tray of shining fish the youngest stops looks out to sea murmurs in a low voice while the others pull him on I am sick of this life I should have gone with Michael to America they will not look at him they will not turn but the moon looks at him and the fish with each silver upturned eye it is night three fishermen treading softly on the cool wet stones carry a tray of shining fish the youngest stops looks out to sea murmurs in a low voice while the others pull him on I am sick of this life I should have gone with Michael to America

[53:01]

they will not look at him they will not turn but the moon looks at him and the fish with each silver upturned eye One of the experiences of Ireland is the experience of leave-taking and of the special and temporary power of the person who leaves over the ones who are left behind that there's a granted kind of aristocracy of experience which is suddenly present for the one who is going off on the great voyage no matter what deprivation awaits them on the other side or what other kind of poverty awaits them or the circumstances of their voyage they are suddenly in the realm of gods

[54:07]

and in the old days in Ireland you had to say goodbye to the flesh and blood son or daughter who was leaving your family or your village as they left and watch them turn into these mythological and abstract gods who you might never see again and this next piece I wrote not as an exposition of Irish leave-taking but as an intimation an anticipation of what it might be like one day to leave this life and to leave this body and to say goodbye and what I would want to have left behind me and I was attempting to write this without being too precious but I did have very precise things that I felt would be diagnostic features

[55:08]

of a life well lived this is the poem One Day One day, one day I will say The gift I once had has been taken The place I have made for myself belongs to another The words I have sung are being sung By the ones I would want Then I will be ready for that voice And the still silence in which it arrives And if my faith is good Then we'll meet again on the road And we'll be thirsty And stop And laugh And drink together again From the deep well of things as they are One day I will say The gift I once had has been taken The place I have made for myself belongs to another The words I have sung are being sung By the ones I would want Then I will be ready for that voice And the still silence in which it arrives And if my faith is good Then we'll meet again on the road And we'll be thirsty And stop

[56:10]

And laugh And drink together again From the deep well of things as they are I suppose, you know, the poet or this poet just wants to leave a few lines behind that might last a generation or two and perhaps one that might last for an eternal amount of time I was once on a radio show where I felt the interviewer had a very idealistic notion of what poets were about and I found myself upbraiding him and saying that, you know, the Hollywood mogul only wants power, sex and money but the poet is the true materialist because he or she wants immortality We want to write lines and to sing songs that will be sung by others after we have left And as a last song in the book

[57:13]

Where Many Rivers Meet I wanted to have something that summed up the whole experience of flowing into the book and out again and flowing into life and flowing out again And this poem is called Cloud Hidden And the title, if I remember, comes from from an old Chinese Taoist story of the prince going out from the city into the mountains to find the Taoist master to ask him advice for the running of his kingdom and when he arrived at the hermitage where the master lived he was nowhere to be found and there was only his assistant, a young boy who was there looking after the garden and the prince asked him where his master was and the young child said he's off in the mountains gathering herbs cloud hidden whereabouts unknown

[58:13]

he's off in the mountains gathering herbs cloud hidden whereabouts unknown cloud hidden this chapter is closed now this chapter is closed now not one word more until we meet someday and the voices rising to the window take wing and fly open the old casement to the lands we have forgotten look to the mountains and ridgeways and the steep valleys quilted by green there, as the last words fall away the great and silent rivers of life are flowing into the oceans and on a day like any other they will carry you again abandoned on the currents you have fought to the place you did not know you belonged and just as you came into life surprised you go out again lifted, cloud hidden from one unknown to another and fall and turn

[59:15]

and appear again in the mountains not remembering how in the beginning you refused to join could not speak of did not even know you were that deep calm, welling, almost forgotten spring of eternal presence

[59:32]

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