The Layers

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

Stanley Kunitz

Stanley Kunitz became the tenth Poet Laureate of the United States in the autumn of 2000. Kunitz was ninety-five years old at the time, still actively publishing and promoting poetry to new generations of readers.

Having published books throughout the greater part of the twentieth century, Kunitz exerted a subtle but steady influence on such major poets as Theodore Roethke, W. H. Auden, and Robert Lowell. Through his teaching he provided encouragement to hundreds of younger poets as well.

Kunitz's early poetry collections, Intellectual Things and Passport to the War: A Selection of Poems, earned him a reputation as an intellectual poet.

Although Kunitz's style changed over his seven decades as a poet, his methods did not. A notebook and a pen render a sketch; many late nights over a manual typewriter result in a finished poem.