Saturday's Poem: The Layers

boat in channel

Stanley Kunitz wrote the following poem during the turbulent decade of the 1970s. On a personal level, he had recently endured the loss of several dear friends, and he felt that he was at the end of a phase in his life and work.

Speaking of it in an interview with Bill Moyers years later, he said, "The poem began with two lines that came to me in a dream, spoken out of a dark cloud: 'Live in the layers,/not on the litter.'"

I think it is a beautiful poem of summation...with advice for moving through. "I am not done with my changes," he concludes.  

I suppose as long as we are living, we are not done with our changes, either. And even if the next chapter of transformations is already written, we must somehow learn to decipher it.

THE LAYERS by Stanley Kunitz

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, "The Layers" from The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz. Copyright © 1978