Things I've Learned to do Since I Was Forty
Fell a big tree with a chain saw; use a router;
build a stud wall; cook Thit Ga Kho Gung; sharpen
a chisel; give a short speech to 1000 people;
conduct a meeting according to Robert's Rules
of Order; love my students without wanting to
seduce them; say No; say Yes; make a woman
come every time. I am tired of skating over
the surfaces of things & I have learned-
or am learning-to read a book from cover
to cover, including the Preface & I am drawn
to the lovely little world of the Afterword,
retrospective as a Victorian garden. I still cannot
calculate the geometry of rise & run for stairs
& I only know a hundred words of Vietnamese,
nor can I make sense of what's under the truck's hood;
my wife's self-sufficiency leaves me breathless
with desire & I take personally the pinging
of flight recorders on the ocean floor because
I always want to know how everything happened.
Especially disasters, for which I require
explanation in detail until I understand.
The spiritual practice of my middle age shall be
To let go of this obsessive need to know the facts.
I have learned to talk to strange dogs, even big ones,
& to my neighbors next door who live in such
a far country I can hardly understand their language,
which is as tonal as Vietnamese & as nasal
as a dulcimer. The first half of my life
was dominated by the drumbeat of fear
& bright rim shots of anger; the new scholars
reject the soul because it insists on its own presence-
the hound's deep sigh as she curls to sleep
beside the bed untroubled by the provisional
nature of meaning, the modem's buzz & carrier tone
connecting me to my friends, though I have
no desire to "look the witness in the eyes" and
read her body language to know the truth.
I believe truth lives in the privileged little world
of the Afterword, frost smearing the windows
of the summerhouse, the garden breaking under
the weight of the wind, which is not the truth but a force.