Saturday's Poem: The Layers
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