Self-portrait. It doesn't interest me if there is one god or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned, if you can know despair or see it in others. I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you, if you can look back with firm eyes, saying, this is where I stand. I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living falling toward the center of your longing, if you are willing to live day by day with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have heard in that fierce embrace even the gods speak of God. It doesn't interest me if there is one god or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned, if you can know despair or see it in others. I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you, if you can look

[01:05]

back with firm eyes, saying, this is where I stand. I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living falling toward the center of your longing, falling toward the center of your longing. I want to know if you are willing to live day by day with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have heard, I have heard in that fierce embrace, I have heard in that fierce embrace even the gods speak of God. I have heard in that fierce embrace even the gods speak of God. Fire on the Earth is an attempt to sustain very, very difficult qualities in my speech, in my articulation, in my body. Fierce qualities about the world, fierce qualities of fiery darkness within the self. Self Portrait was written after returning from the Van Gogh

[02:07]

Museum in Amsterdam and seeing all of Van Gogh's self portraits lined one after the other up on the wall and seeing that you could actually attempt to paint a picture of yourself that was not self-indulgent or self-concerned, but one in which the rest of the world might be implicated. And I remember going back to my hotel room in Amsterdam, sitting down and facing the page, imagining that I would write something perhaps about the particular shape of my face, or the cut of my jaw, and being absolutely surprised and almost knocked over by the first line, which was, it doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods. In a sense, Self Portrait is an attempt to hold my feet to the fire in the sense of a firm and close questioning, self-questioning, in which I had a possibility of getting to something

[03:11]

real, but at the same time, in accordance with the title of this book, a very fiery sense of self, and one that was flickering with light and with intensity. The poem following Self Portrait is a poem called Fire in the Earth, which actually gives the title to the whole collection. Fire in the Earth comes from a biblical image which has resided in me since childhood. As a child, I used to walk across the fields every Sunday morning with my sister through all weathers, wind or rain or snow, to a small Sunday school, and one of the reasons that I was so intent on going through the weather at that time, to my small child's mind, was a prospect of having my book filled with that morning's biblical image, which was on a stamp.

[04:12]

Every Sunday morning, you would have a new image affixed in your book, and one of the images that remains stamped inside myself since that time is the image of Moses before the burning bush, and the voice of God speaking out, not giving him the Ten Commandments at this point, but actually inviting him further into his own fiery innocence, and the voice did this by telling him to take off his shoes. Take off your shoes, you're standing on holy ground. And I always felt that the moment of breakthrough, of kensho, to use the Buddhist term of sheer insight, that Moses must have had was not when he first heard the voice, but when he looked down at the ground and saw that he was standing on holy ground, but not only that, he always had been standing in the holy ground of his own experience, and it was this holy ground of first-hand experience that

[05:17]

I was attempting to uncover with an equivalent kind of fiery speech. Here is fire in the earth, and we know when Moses was told, in the way he was told, take off your shoes, he grew pale from that simple reminder of fire in the dusty earth. He never recovered his complicated way of loving again, and was free to love in the same way he felt the fire licking at his heels loved him as if the lion earth could roar and take him in one movement. Every step he took from there was carefully placed, everything he said mattered as if he knew the constant witness of the ground, and remembered his own face in the dust the moment before revelation. Since then, thousands have felt the same immobile tongue with which he tried to speak, like the moment you too saw for the first time your own house turned to ashes, everything consumed so the road could open again, your entire

[06:20]

presence in your eyes and the world turning slowly into a single branch of flame. Like the moment you too saw for the first time your own house turned to ashes, everything consumed so the road could open again, your entire presence in your eyes and the world turning slowly into a single branch of flame. In many ways I began to see both sides of fire, as I wrote. One was the way that fire will sit at the center of your home in the hearth and warm it, and will cook your food and create a great ambience for nourishment and for a whole familiar life to take place. And the other side of fire in which it will actually burn your house to the ground and cast

[07:20]

you off and out into the world again to begin over, rediscovering what you're about. And we know when Moses was told in the way he was told, take off your shoes, he grew pale from that simple reminder of fire in the dusty earth. He never recovered his complicated way of loving again and was free to love in the same way he felt the fire licking at his heels loved him, as if the lion earth could roar and take him in one movement. Every step he took from there was carefully placed, everything he said mattered, as if he knew the constant witness of the ground and remembered his own face in the dust the moment before revelation. Since then, since then thousands have felt the same immobile tongue with which he tried to speak. Since then, thousands have felt the same immobile tongue with which he tried to speak. Like the moment you too saw for the first time your own house turned to ashes, everything consumed so the road could open again, your entire

[08:24]

presence in your eyes and the world turning slowly into a single branch of flame and the world turning slowly into a single branch of flame. The understanding there was something around the notion of the very pattern of conflagration that you would see one part of your life taking at any one moment as it disappeared would actually be a key to your vision of what would take its place. I've always felt, for instance, when you look at the work of Coleridge, that Coleridge's great gift in the world was the very nature of his attentive eyes, of his ability to pay

[09:24]

an incredibly fierce attention to the world and to convey all the textures and nuances and flaring nature of reality as it appears and disappears before your eyes. And that, in a sense, you feel one of the great difficulties of Coleridge's life and his writing was his constant attempt to get beyond that experience and to explain himself to the world, when in fact his ability to describe that very frontier of entrance into the world was his gift. I have a piece here called Travelling to London, which is really a description, my own description of an event in Coleridge's life, returning from a farm in the north of Yorkshire where he'd stayed with friends over the moors in a carriage. He looked out and saw this enormous

[10:24]

flock of starlings come careering over the ridge. And if you've ever seen a great flock of birds flying and given yourself any time to look at it, you'll notice immediately that it seems to have a life of its own, that the whole mass seems to have a kind of intelligence in the directions it takes and the way it forms and reforms. And Coleridge wrote into his diary that he must have had skittering on his knee a very profound description of this mass of starlings moving against the sky, as if this great wild movement that contained both chaos and intelligence at the same time represented a kind of code to his own wild creativity and an understanding that if he could penetrate to the centre of this image, he might actually enter into the centre of his own

[11:27]

being, understand something about himself. As it turned out, this image remained a great mystery to him, one that he seemed actually afraid to enter as he fell more and more under the influence of opium, which was prescribed to him for many of the ailments he suffered from at that time, and into which abyss many of his creative talents disappeared. I suppose I was interested too in the abysses which lay inside myself, into the areas of self-sabotage, into the infinite capacity we seem to have to betray ourselves and to give ourselves away. And I suppose I was looking at Coleridge's edge, the place where he was asking the fiercest questions, but in a way where he ultimately failed, in order to look at my own failures, travelling to London. Coleridge's eyes

[12:34]

belong to the world. The black mass of starlings smoking over the ridge was his life. No fancy this, but feverish with their blacked shapes, his view was to fly with them, make each word follow each bird. His grief accorded directly from what he saw, but could not speak. His grief accorded directly from what he saw, but could not speak. Their mesmerising dispersion summed up the limit of his powers, their protein shape shifting through his jolted body held joy and chaotic terror, as if he glimpsed through the moving carriage window a portrait of himself too terrifying to realise. As if he glimpsed through the moving carriage window a portrait of himself too terrifying to realise. Now the wintry line of moor, glowering to an unnamed blue, broods beneath an empty grey. Now each black speck scattered and reformed holds attention to its gravitational centre.

[13:36]

The turbulent reflector of his eyes, no longer accustomed to watching, can only join its misted surface of infinitely smaller curves. Beneath the graph-straight line of the moors, where imagination equals zero, is cut again and again by their flight. The flight of amazing freedoms held in tension by the menace of impending chaos. The flight of amazing freedoms held in tension by the menace of impending chaos. The cloud of his own unknowing darting this way, and that, like the lithe shadow of something deeper, suddenly revealed in the sky, his single vision exploded to a firework of doubles. Like the lithe shadow of something deeper, suddenly revealed in the sky, his single vision exploded to a firework of doubles. I imagine that this moment in Coleridge's life was very personal to me because it occurred

[14:42]

on the moors and on the Yorkshire moors, a place which in my teens was incredibly important to me, a place where I would take myself in order to lose myself, and in which I learned how to live in a landscape where I might not know exactly where I am at any one time, and where I would stumble through mist and rain to emerge on roads that would actually only at the end of my journey tell me about the landscape that I'd actually crossed. Whenever you're on the great kind of prairies of heather that you find in the north of England on the tops of the Pennines, there's always a tremendous difficulty in knowing exactly where you are, and exactly where you're going, and the horizons merge one to the other. And it was this this almost discipline of losing myself that I think touched me in this experience of Coleridge's.

[15:49]

The lines, his grief accorded directly from what he saw but could not speak, his grief accorded directly from what he saw but could not speak, of course was my own grief as a poet, the grief of not being able to speak to things which are enormous in your life and which affect your everyday behavior and speech, but which still in a way remain strangers to yourself, a kind of fire and passion that underlies almost all of a human being's movement through the world, but only now and again is able to emerge to the surface either through argument or loss or anger. The fire in the earth is an attempt to actually make friends with that passion and that fire inside myself and to be able to name what previously had been at the limit of my powers.

[16:53]

His grief accorded directly from what he saw but could not speak, their mesmerizing dispersion summed up the limit of his powers, their protean shape shifting through his jolted body held joy and chaotic terror as if he glimpsed through the moving carriage window a portrait of himself too terrifying to realize. This again is a very apt description of what I felt I was stumbling into myself in this group of poems, what previously had been at the limit of my powers. His grief accorded directly from what he saw but could not speak, their mesmerizing dispersion summed up the limit of his powers, their protean shape shifting through his jolted body held joy and chaotic terror as if he glimpsed through the moving carriage window a portrait of himself too terrifying to realize. It's as if there's a need, if one is truly serious about one's creative powers,

[18:00]

to enter to the center of them and actually be almost scorched by it or at least touched by it in a way in which you are given some of its imprint. Some of the imprint of your essential passions are there as a representation of yourself in the world. There you're patterning, there your plumage, there your everyday speech and people can tell who you might be by them. It's not the image of a perfect character or a 100 percent human potentialized human being but of a real human being, one who has flaws difficulties and passions but one who perhaps is real with all those and with whom you could have a real conversation. One of the real conversations that we have with ourselves is around the dynamic of being

[19:02]

recognized that as children we're desperate to be recognized and to be seen and that this phenomena does not go away as we grow into our adult bodies but simply goes underground. Most human beings are desperate to be recognized by others, to be shown affection, to be paid attention and there comes a point at which you realize that your own happiness and your deeper sense of yourself actually depends on supplying that voice of recognition yourself, of being that voice of self-recognition not in a negatistical way but in a sense of celebration and in a sense of joining an essential part of yourself that you thought you could only see in the eyes or in the approval of others. This is a poem called Never Enough which explores a very dark and difficult place

[20:07]

inside myself, the feeling of never being enough no matter what you're given, no matter what the circumstances are, the part of us that is always insatiable, always looking for something else, not in a useful way but in a way which prevents you from standing in the solid ground of your own existence. Never enough. It is never enough. The three riders arrive with gifts. The woman brings food. The child looks with admiring eyes. Something else is triggered. He hears unaccountably the voice of someone he knew. He pulls back the curtain. No one. At night he opens his depth and dreams. He will not appear. He turns to the old part of himself known since a boy gone. The door open

[21:09]

in the night wind and on the oak table a note. I am to be trusted but you are not. He remembers everything he can. I am to be trusted but you are not. He remembers everything he can. His face, his hands, the way he would rise as if to speak. Oblivion begins to pull on its long shroud. He has one moment before panic. His voice ready to pounce on death unsheathes its secret claws. His hour, his place, his voice with its new sound. A bunched animal cornered by stealth. Then someone gets up, closes the door, begins to speak. It seemed to me as if I took this experience to the edge of a kind of panic. It's the panic of non-existence. It's the panic of feeling everything you knew about yourself being pulled away from you as you go to this experience of recognition and non-recognition. And it was

[22:13]

just as if when I had created an absolute black desert for myself in that room, that there was actually room for someone else and a silence for someone else to stand up and speak. And I was totally shocked by this image which appeared in my experience and then in the poem of a person closing the door and looking at me very seriously and very intently and beginning to speak to me in a voice which I realized was my own. And a voice which was actually the voice of a kind of new maturity which would be able to provide security in a sense and a home for all of these other more difficult and perhaps more childlike voices which I had unnervingly begun to uncover in myself.

[23:13]

True to its own imagery then, the book in a sense is an exploration and an act of immolation and rehabilitation at the same time. And the fuel for the fire was my own history and my own difficulties. And what was being cooked in the fire was something which I had yet to articulate. Here's an image from my own history. It was a poem I wrote called Waiting on the Steps. Not the steps of the building but the steps of the Russian plains. This is a dream which would recur again and again with amazing frequency through my early teens in which I was standing on a quiet railway station platform somewhere in the vast open flatness of the wilds of Russia on a beautiful sunny afternoon, the sun going down, the wheat fields filled with the late golden light.

[24:19]

And I was waiting there in a very peaceable way for a train, an enormous powerful train which I knew would come and take me to Moscow. And if I looked the other way down the railway tracks I could see there shimmering over the horizon the far blue domes of the Kremlin. And to my young dreaming mind there, the Kremlin was an icon of holiness for me. And it was as if this was a symbol of Shangri-La, of paradise, of a place of contemplation and arrival. A dream-like place that became more and more real the more that the dream recurred. And it's fascinating to look back and to think that actually Moscow was the capital city of our then imagined enemy, the Russian Empire. And yet somehow I was, my underground sense of myself

[25:27]

was creating a relationship with the underground sense of Russia itself which is the old holy mother Russia. This is called Waiting on the Steps. What was that dream? What was that dream? Year after year I knew the brief heaven of its quiet visitation, the railway platform in the silence of a summer day, the tracks closing quietly to a middle distance of golden wheat. And beyond that, a deeper gold, the three domes of a far Kremlin, shimmering like a mirage, as if beckoning, as if to my clear child's eye a place I could know again, a bright sun of welcome, a treasure house of pure home. My presence there, sure stillness, stillness born of waiting, as if the body I possessed was neither young nor old, but flamed with a longing and a harvest as rich as the fields themselves. That waiting was pure silence, and in that silence a deeper waiting

[26:35]

yet, sure in the knowledge of the train that would arrive, its patience and power endless, its destination clear. But looking back, I know you'll say that not having dreamt for years these lines invoke the grief we share in growing old. You feel experience must mean forgetting, vision must mean regret, longing spells disappointment, and desire speaks only of shame. And Russia, and Russia, is not the place it could have been. Only sometimes, out of nowhere, the last smoulder of an old wish kindles our accumulated fear, and we rise in the flame again, the gold no longer pure and the vision blurred. But then, being blind and poor, we find another peace, and learn to wait again in that place where longing is the gold that flares, and waiting can be its own sun, and forgiveness its own far dome of belonging, a vast Russia of the possible,

[27:40]

longing for itself again in the intimate patience of your new body. The gold no longer pure, and the vision blurred. But then, being blind and poor, we find another peace, and learn to wait again in that place where longing is the gold that flares, and waiting can be its own sun, and forgiveness its own far dome of belonging, a vast Russia of the possible, longing for itself again in the intimate patience of your new body. One of the phenomena occurring in the intimate patience of my new body was a familiarity with the frontiers of writing, and what it felt like to actually attempt to articulate things which were only just appearing in your field of vision. And I felt a great parallel with the art of painting, and the way that you would take a palette

[28:41]

of colors and use them to fill a blank canvas. And I thought that there was a tremendous parallel with the inner palette of remembrance that we might have. And so this poem, The Painter's Hand, takes that analogy of painting and brings it to bear on the art of writing. The Painter's Hand. You start with a painter's hand, working up color from a dark palette of remembrance. You start with a painter's hand, working up color from a dark palette of remembrance. It used to be guesswork, touching the pigments as if they might at any point portray the startling vision of its need to live. Now the paint itself startles, and the hand darting to the blank canvas returns the color whole to the remembered world from which it came. And the hand darting to the blank canvas

[29:43]

returns the color whole to the remembered world from which it came. Wrong touches make the blood freeze a moment before contact. A color's deepening field of visual gravity is deflected a moment before it pulls the image down. The fierce eye of remembrance, finding the eye of eternal presence, absolves the mind of its struggle to live. The fierce eye of remembrance, finding the eye of eternal presence, absolves the mind of its struggle to live. The blaze of yellow, Vincent, mistook for God, reveals again its sacred name. The light from the window traveling home becomes, in the flattened brush, a journey complete. Now, now, something outside the window, high in the branches of the fiery trees, announces that other hidden and unseeable name of light, falling onto the stretched canvas where my hand moves firmly. The artist gladly resigns his

[30:51]

freedom in the split second when the hand feels the brush halt on the painting's opening world. The artist gladly resigns his freedom in the split second when the hand feels the brush halt on the painting's opening world. The lost world where we live and remember, not wishing freedom for a moment. The lost world where we live and remember, not wishing freedom for a moment. Not wishing freedom for a moment because you're actually experiencing freedom in the moment of writing itself and in the act of arrival to which the poetry has brought you. The heart of this book, Fire in the Earth, lies in the chapter of poems called Fire in the Voice, in which I'm looking at the way we attempt to belong to the world through speaking.

[31:56]

And I began this section with a piece called The Soul Lives Contented. The soul lives contented by listening. The soul lives contented by listening. If it wants to change into the beauty of terrifying shapes, it tries to speak. That's why you will not sing, afraid as you are of who might join with you. The soul, the soul lives contented by listening. If it wants to change into the beauty of terrifying shapes, it tries to speak. That's why you will not sing, afraid as you are of who might join with you. The voice, hesitant, and her hand trembling in the dark fjords. She touches your face and says your name in the same moment, the one you refuse to say, over and over again, the one you refuse to say. The soul lives contented by listening.

[32:59]

If it wants to change into the beauty of terrifying shapes, it tries to speak. That's why you will not sing, afraid as you are of who might join with you. The voice, hesitant, and her hand trembling in the dark fjords. She touches your face and says your name in the same instant, the one you refuse to say, over and over again, the one you refuse to say. She touches your face and says your name in the same instant, the one you refuse to say, over and over again, the one you refuse to say. She touches your face and says your name in the same instant, the one you refuse to say, over and over again, the one you refuse to say. I often found when I spoke out that the act of arrival in speaking was at once also the act

[34:09]

of farewell to a whole way of being that I had become quite used to. And I remember, too, when I lived in the Galapagos Islands as a young naturalist, that the act of paying attention was an act of self-immolation and self-disappearance. In other words, revelation was a terrible kind of entrance. Often you were leaving a life you were quite happy with and stepping out into new territory which, as yet, you could not recognize. So it was as if you're stepping out into the dark. This is a poem called Revelation Must Be Terrible and it harks back, actually, to my time in the Galapagos Islands, looking out at that world. But it also speaks to the act of writing. Revelation Must Be Terrible. Revelation must be terrible with no time left to say goodbye. Imagine that moment,

[35:13]

staring at the still waters with only the brief tremor of your body to say you are leaving everything and everyone you know behind. Being far from home is hard, but you know at least we're all exiled together. When you open your eyes to the world, you are on your own for the first time. No one is even interested in saving you now. And the world steps in to test the calm fluidity of your body from moment to moment, as if it believed you could join its vibrant dance of fire and calmness and final stillness, as if you were meant to be exactly where you are, as if, like the dark branch of a desert river, you could flow on without a speck of guilt and everything, everywhere, would still be just as it should be, as if your place in the world mattered. And the world could neither speak nor hear the fullness of its own bitter and beautiful cry without the

[36:15]

deep well of your body resonating in the echo. Knowing that it takes, knowing that it takes only that first terrible word to make the circle complete, Revelation Must Be Terrible, knowing you can never hide your voice again. Knowing that it takes only that first terrible word to make the circle complete, Revelation Must Be Terrible, knowing you can never hide your voice again. Quite often we will hide our voice because we know that if we speak out we will have to live up to that voice and into that voice, and that others will hold us to what we have said, and so it can be much, a much safer proposition to hide behind yourself, not to speak at all, rather than set off on a journey which begins and takes us further than you can even know just in the first sentence

[37:21]

of articulation. Revelation Must Be Terrible with no time left to say goodbye. Imagine that moment, imagine that moment staring at the still waters with only the brief tremor of your body to say you are leaving everything and everyone you know behind. Being far from home is hard, but you know, but you know, at least we are all exiled together. When you open your eyes to the world, you are on your own for the first time. No one is even interested in saving you now, and the world steps in to test the calm fluidity of your body from moment to moment, as if it believed you could join its vibrant dance of fire and calmness and final stillness, as if you were meant to be exactly where you are, as if, like the dark branch of a desert river, you could flow on without a speck of guilt, and everything, everywhere would still be just as it should be, as if your place

[38:22]

in the world mattered, and the world, and the world could neither speak nor hear the fullness of its own bitter and beautiful cry without the deep well of your body resonating in the echo, knowing that it takes, knowing that it takes only that first terrible word to make the circle complete. Revelation must be terrible, knowing you can never hide your voice again. I think when we begin to understand the consequences of not speaking out, of remaining in hiding, and the lack of electricity in the air, the lack of celebration, the lack of a sense of belonging, the lack of being heard, being seen, of making a difference, has a tremendous deleterious effect on us and starts to drag us down like a kind of immense weight. So the act of speaking

[39:26]

out to me is the act of lightness, not of floating free of the earth, but of having some kind of relationship with both air and ground at the same time, the ground of my body from which I will speak, and the air through which my voice will pass to another's ear or heart, and that those two are in a constant relationship with one another. I think I began to, in these pages, explore what it was that would stop me from going to the place of articulation in my own body. This is one piece in which I uncover one of the difficulties of speaking out, when your survival in the past may have depended upon hiding the fire in the soul. The mouth opens and fills the air with its vibrant shape, the mouth opens and fills the air with its

[40:33]

vibrant shape, until the air and the mouth become one shape, and the first word, your own word. Spoken from that fire surprises, burns, grieves you now because you made that pact with a dark presence in your life. He said, if you only stop singing, I'll make you safe, and he repeated the line, knowing you would hear, I'll make you safe, as the comforting sound of a door closed on the sphere at last. But his darkness crept under your tongue and became the dim cave where you sheltered and you grew, in that small place too frightened to remember the songs of the world, its impossible notes, and the sweet joy that flew out the door of your wild mouth as you spoke. But his darkness crept under your tongue and became the dim cave where you sheltered and you grew, in that small place too frightened to remember the songs of the world, its impossible

[41:37]

notes, and the sweet joy that flew out the door of your wild mouth as you spoke. The mouth opens and fills the air with its vibrant shape, until the air and the mouth become one shape, and the first word, your own word, spoken from that fire surprises, burns, grieves you now because you made that pact with a dark presence in your life. He said, she said, if you only stop singing, I'll make you safe, if you'll only stop singing, I'll make you safe. And he repeated the line, knowing you would hear, I'll make you safe, as the comforting sound of a door closed on the sphere at last. But his darkness crept under your tongue and became the dim cave where you sheltered and you grew, in that small place too frightened to remember the songs of the world, its impossible

[42:38]

notes, and the sweet joy that flew out the door of your wild mouth as you spoke. I'm certain there are times in our lives, especially in our young lives as we're growing, where your survival may depend on hiding, because there are people actually in your immediate familiar situation who may actually be dangerous to you, and who may roll over you and literally flatten you. And one of the ways we have of surviving is to disappear. And there are certain voices inside ourselves which would disappear because they would make you too conspicuous. The difficulty with this is that when the threat goes away, when we grow and move out of a difficult education or familial situation where we're not threatened, we have lived in it for so long, perhaps, that we have actually included it in our sense of identity.

[43:46]

It's become a kind of shelter, which is now a part of the covering of our identity. And in a sense, we have convinced ourselves that this is how you should be in the world in order to get on, in order to survive, in order not to be destroyed. But as darkness crept under your tongue and became the dim cave where you sheltered, and you grew in that small place, too frightened to remember the songs of the world, its impossible notes, and the sweet joy that flew out the door of your wild mouth as you spoke. Part of the sweet joy that might fly out of our wild mouths as we spoke might be the sweet joy of spontaneity and of contentment and of celebration and of belonging.

[44:48]

And possibly the most difficult utterance to make, especially in poetry, the articulation of joy and of a kind of wild creativity is very difficult. I think we hear it out in the wild sounds of animals and in the cries of birds and of all those things which have no mortgage to pay, but which surround us in the natural world. And this poem is an investigation of silence and in the midst of that silence hearing the sounds of birds and the cries of animals. It's called The Sound of the Wild and the image at the beginning of the poem is one of sitting in silent contemplation with the evening gathering around me. The Sound of the Wild

[45:50]

Finally, at the first firm shadow of evening, and after many hours falling toward the body's ebb and flow of quiet revelation, I hear that voice which belongs to no one except the hidden world from which it flows like a river, filling the deep branches of my body with the wish to slip beneath its quiet water and disappear. And listening, and listening in the half-light above the sound of a single brooding dove, I try to remember my former life, and realize how quickly the current travels toward home, how those dark and irretrievable blossoms of sound I made in that time have traveled far away on the black surface of memory, as if they no longer

[46:58]

belong to me, as if my body might feel lighter, as if my body might feel lighter without their weight on what I have to say. All night I followed those currents down to the sea, and finally, with that sweet entangled encouragement we get from greeting everything we meet along the way as if we might belong, I sacrificed at the shores of that great silence my last possibility for safety. That's why I speak the way I do. I'm like everything else. I have no immunity. That's a fearful thing to say, and having been there, you'll know how much it means. We humans must be such strange and reluctant creatures to live with. We humans must be such strange and reluctant creatures to live with. All those cries in the night with which

[48:00]

we could join, the fox crying fox, and those winged and silent creatures of the dusk dropping with such fierce delicacy onto the shrew's tremulous back, even when the owl is silent, the shrew cries owl into the black woods, its life a last blaze of sound before the small fire of its body goes out. Our own sounds we refuse, terrified as we are to wake that voice inside us, waiting with its wings folded and its strange expectant face. The moment we try to explain ourselves, he moves those wings to cover his face and longs for the wild where cries are involuntary things, and everybody generously gives their voice to others, even in their last breath. But this, but this can be no comfort, knowing the world learns the sound of its own name by dropping its fearful weight on us out of the dark when we least expect. But this can be no comfort,

[49:04]

knowing the world learns the sound of its own name by dropping its fearful weight on us out of the dark when we least expect, so we can know the full terror of that love like the shrew shrieking its final gift, owl. So we can know the full terror of that love like the shrew shrieking its final gift, owl. Sometimes you have the experience in poetry of having invoked enormous energies and powers, almost as if those powers for which you might not be fully ready take on the form of a predator, which are circling around you as you write, and in the moment that you break through is the moment that those claws fasten on to you, and your person is abducted off up into the night, and you're taken off as you're taken off in the old fairy stories to some nest or place or new land

[50:10]

where you begin the new adventure and the new story. But the initial experience of entrance is one of terror, fright, exhilaration, and arrival all at once in a place which is totally unfamiliar to you. This arrival in the territory of the unfamiliar seems to be part and parcel of the act of writing anything that's real at all. It's anything real will take you to an edge and to a place where you must both live out your life in the physical world and reimagine it in the other world all at the same time. And I do feel that we don't get to choose between those two worlds, the world of practicality, of taxes, mortgage, of paying our way, and the inner world of reformation

[51:15]

and reimagination, and we live our life out exactly at the edge between those two. This is a piece called The Poet. The poet moves forward to that edge but lives sensibly. The poet moves forward to that edge but lives sensibly through the senses, not because of them. The poet moves forward to that edge but lives sensibly through the senses but not because of them. Above all, he watches where he steps as if it matters where he leaves his prints. The senses overwhelm him at his peril. Though he must be taken by something greater, this is what he uses senses to perceive. The poet's task is simple. He looks for quiet and speaks to what he finds there. But like Blake in his engraving shop, works with the fierceness of acid on metal. But like Blake in his engraving shop,

[52:20]

works with the fierceness of acid on metal, melting away apparent surfaces and displaying the infinite which was hid. In the early morning, he listens by the window, makes the first utterance, and tries to overhear himself say something from which, in that silence, it is impossible to retreat. In the early morning, he listens by the window, makes the first utterance, and tries to overhear himself say something from which, in that silence, it is impossible to retreat. It's almost as if we're asked in writing not to take too literally many of the wilder experiences that we have in the inner world and attempt to live them out too immediately in our outer lives, but to allow those wilder, fiercer, fiery experiences make their own way to the surface

[53:28]

and not force them too much. It's one of the great cliches of the poet's life, the life of alcohol and early death, which perhaps has something to do with this bridge between the two being walked over too quickly and too soon. And yet, you cannot live a life which encloses that wild energy in a way in which it will stagnate. Here's another look into that frontier, and it's a poem I wrote, Rhyming, which is not a form which has had much of a place in the late 20th century. All the energy of rhyming poetry seemed to go out of it in the early part of this century, and there hasn't seemed to be much that people have wanted to say using rhymes, but here it seemed to work very well in this piece called The Body in Full Presence. Another piece looking

[54:34]

at the fiercer celebrations of the act of writing. The body in full presence holds its first creative essence in the pen that touches paper, lifting the glass that holds the wine. This beckoning uncertainty is mine. I'll follow my line to an early death, feeling out rhythm in the spoken breath, and startled by flame. This arrogance shall be my moth, flying with his burning cloth, and humility will rise, humility will rise, out of Portia's deep surmise. Then I have confidence in my powers, and wanting this presence, burnt by the past, I'll die in the first line, and become the last. And wanting this presence, burnt by the past, I'll die in the first line, and become the last. And startled by flame, this arrogance shall be my moth, flying with his

[55:40]

burning cloth, and humility will rise, out of Portia's deep surmise. Then I have confidence in my powers, and wanting this presence, burnt by the past, I'll die in the first line, and become the last. There's a way in which the act of writing poetry is the act of of putting yourself out in the world in a way in which you wish to be noticed and to be heard. And there's a certain kind of arrogance that goes with that emergence and appearance. And you need, it seems to me, a certain measure of arrogance in order to sit down and attempt to write poetry. When you think of all those who have gone before you and written so well, from Emily Dickinson to Yeats and Shakespeare and Dante, they all sit over your shoulder looking to see what you have to say. But it also seems to me that if you give yourself fully over to the art,

[56:41]

then the humility will arise out of the disciplines and conversations of the poetic act. I'll follow my line to an early death, feeling out rhythm in the spoken breath, and startled by flame, this arrogance shall be my moth, flying with his burning cloth, and humility will rise out of poetry's deep surmise. Then, then, I have confidence in my powers, and wanting this presence, burnt by the past, I'll die in the first line, and become the last. I've always been fascinated by the ability of a particular artist, whether it's a poet or a painter, to take their particular vision of the world and give it to the society at large, to take their one peculiar sense of things and turn it into a gifted kind of commonality. And one of my favourite

[57:45]

painters of the natural world, and someone who was very important to me in my adolescence, was the German painter Franz Mark. His depictions of the natural world just seemed to combine light and shadow and the essence of the animal and the essence of the landscapes in which those animals found themselves into one remarkable whole. And I remember a few years ago going into a museum in London which had an exhibit of Franz Mark's paintings over from Germany. All of his greatest paintings collected there in one exhibition. And finding myself in the middle of this group of schoolchildren who were being subjected to the most horrific and mechanical lecture on Mark's paintings by a young woman teacher who seemed to know absolutely nothing about the subject and seemed to be able to marshal enormous amounts of material to get

[58:52]

that nothing across to these poor young children. And I couldn't help after hearing her speak about one of my favourite paintings, a painting called Horse in Landscape, leaning across to the children who were near me and telling them in no uncertain terms that this woman knew nothing of which she was speaking about and they should just look at the paintings themselves and ignore her completely. When you think of the root of the word education, which is from the Latin word educare, which means to lead out. The best education is the leading out of the inner essence of a person. I thought to myself what it would be like to be absented from that pummeling in that the young woman was attempting with these children and to sit in front of the painting and have the painting lead out my own experience of the world and my own inner recognitions of horse and landscape and see what Mark had brought to that himself, what freshness he could bring to that common image.

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And after they left I found myself sitting in front of the painting Horse in Landscape and attempting to get to my own personal experience with the essence of what he had depicted there, which is of a wild horse running across this astonishing green landscape. Horse in Landscape, Franz Mark. We know the fiery animality of the pure bred horse, its ghostly hide moving like smoke over the green landscape. We know the fiery animality of the pure bred horse, its ghostly hide moving like smoke over the green landscape, but must remember, we know the fiery animality of the pure bred horse, its ghostly hide moving like smoke over the green landscape, but must remember in that wild vulnerability a natural power of rest. Mark did it with a bold gesture, painted the neck rising to the curved horizon

[61:06]

and its blue mane swelling in waves. Primary colors and prime emotion swirl in the coiled flank, head rearing to the pasture's expanse, the landscape living in its body as the sinewy horse lives in the world. Now, now, as it turns towards you, head curved to one side, and the wild mane flying above the distant hoofbeats in cantatory silence, you are asked again, what will you do, and what will you say, in the times when you are left alone, to meet, like this, the quiet fury of the world? What will you do, and what will you say, in the times when you are left alone, to meet, like this, the quiet fury of the world? Oh what will you do, and what will you say, in the times when you are left alone, to meet, like this, the quiet fury of the world.

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One of the quiet furies racing towards me at that time in my life, at the time of the writing of Fire on the Earth, was the fury associated with my increasing notoriety in the world, the fact that I was becoming more and more well-known as a writer, as a poet, and that there was a personality growing around me which had very little to do with my essential nature, and ambitions into which I was walking which were almost like a force field that belonged to perhaps every public figure that had ever been out there in the world who had been subject to the great temptations and errors of being seen or heard in large public settings, and this poem was written as a kind of prayer, as a kind of a way of returning

[63:18]

to myself, written when I was out in the garden working, and it's called Midsummer Prayer, and it's about leaving areas that belong to themselves, not disturbing every part of the garden, not trying to turn every corner of the little landscape that's in your stewardship into something that's delightful to the human eye, but letting things grow to themselves. Midsummer Prayer In midsummer, under the luminous sky of everlasting light, the laced structures of thought fall away. In midsummer, under the luminous sky of everlasting light, the laced structures of thought fall away like the filigrees of the white diaphanous dandelion turned pure white and ghostly, hovering at the edge of its own insubstantial discovery in flight. I'll do the same. I'll do

[64:26]

the same. Watch the shimmering dispersal of tented seeds lodge in the tangled landscape without the least discrimination. Watch the shimmering dispersal of tented seeds lodge in the tangled landscape without the least discrimination. So let my own hopes escape the burning wreck of ambition, parachute through the hushed air, let them spread elsewhere into the tangled part of life that refuses to be set straight. Herod searched for days looking for the children. The mind's hunger for fame will hunt down all innocence. Let them find safety in the growing wild. I'll not touch them there. Herod searched for days looking for the children. The mind's hunger for fame will hunt down all innocence. Let them find safety in the growing wild. I'll not touch them

[65:26]

there. It seems to me that this place of untouchability inside each of us is of primary importance. And whatever way we have, whether it's walks out on the shore or in the fields, or a time of reading to ourselves, or where we're actually thinking and thoughtful about what we're reading, or a time of contemplation and prayer, we have to have a way of returning to that as a way of going to first principles, as a way of remembering who I am in order to truly reimagine myself without giving myself away in that process. And this next poem is about the act of remembering through the practice of sitting zen, sitting zazen, sitting zen. And it's also actually conflated with the image of Beowulf, a very important poem to me,

[66:28]

and the image of Beowulf going down into the lake to wrestle with Grendel's mother. And in the sitting, it was just as if I reached the same surface of that lake. Sitting zen. After three days of sitting hard by the window, following grief through the breath like a hunter who has tracked for days the blood spots of his injured prey, I came to the lake where the deer had run exhausted, refusing to save its life in the dark water. And there it fell to ground in our mutual and respectful quiet, pierced, pierced, pierced by the pale diamond edge of the breath's listening presence. I came to the lake where the deer had run exhausted, refusing to save its life in the dark water. And there it fell to ground in our mutual and respectful quiet, pierced, pierced

[67:30]

by the pale diamond edge of the breath's listening presence. After three days of sitting hard by the window, following grief through the breath like a hunter who has tracked for days the blood spots of his injured prey, I came to the lake where the deer had run exhausted, refusing to save its life in the dark water. And there it fell to ground in our mutual and respectful quiet, pierced by the diamond edge of the breath's listening presence. There's always the experience at the beginning of an intensive sitting where you realize how much energy you are putting into your breathing, and that your breathing is far from its natural rest point, and that it takes enormous amounts of letting go and of freeing yourself from that

[68:33]

willfulness to let the breath find its own place of rest, as if you could suddenly again slowly let your breath be subject to the great tides which are affecting you, as the sea allows the moon and the sun to move it inshore and outshore every day and every night of the year. And the experience is one of feeling that tide and that movement in a greater and greater way. It's as if you're tracking an increasing sense of freedom, an increasing sense of giving over and relaxation. But at the same time as you're tracking this, it's almost as if the part of you which has been holding the willfulness is dying actually. It's as if you're actually hunting a part of yourself

[69:37]

down, and as if you're following the blood spots of an injured prey. And of course it's the old part of you, the willful part of you, slowly giving up its life at the edge of this lake. After three days of sitting hard by the window, following grief through the breath like a hunter who has tracked for days the blood spots of his injured prey, I came to the lake where the deer had run exhausted, refusing to save its life in the dark water. And there it fell to ground in our mutual and respectful quiet, pierced, pierced by the pale diamond edge of the breath's listening presence. By this stage of the book, of Fire and the Earth, I was ready for a kind of simplicity and a relaxation

[70:38]

and a free point away from the entangled kind of combustive material I'd been working with. I wanted to get out of the twigs and the ashes and see what I had wrought in a way, to see what kind of vision had emerged from this immolation. This is a piece I wrote remembering an experience I had in the Himalaya, in Bhutan, of seeing a temple after many days out in the wilderness. The poem is called Takstang, after Takstang Monastery. Takstang means the tiger's nest. Interestingly enough, even as I'm talking of getting away from fire here, this monastery has since burned down completely to the ground and no longer exists in this way. But there was an

[71:39]

experience coming out of the mountains after 10 days of trekking, of being in human presence and human architecture again, which was quite striking. And this has to do with bringing the simplicity of experience out of the mountains into social life, the life of society, almost like the streams bring the clear mountain water down to the plains. Takstang. Takstang Monastery. The tiger's nest. Two thousand feet to the valley floor. After many days alone in the mountains, the body hesitates at the sight of a single roof. Having listened to the wind sufficient to itself, like a single clear breath from the body of the mountain, we hear the Sutra's diamond-hard presence at the center of experience so clearly now spoken from the felt rhythm of a

[72:44]

ten-day walk. And having crossed the pass in cold rain, we wait, about to ripen into our own going. Like a drop of clear water hanging from the cliff edge, its own transparent world growing from within, until it fills with just enough to flow on, out of the mountains as we do, so silent now, only the sound as we go of that pure water falling toward home. Like a drop of clear water hanging from the cliff edge, its own transparent world growing from within, until it fills, until it fills with just enough to flow on, out of the mountains as we do, so silent now, only the sound as we go of that pure water, only the sound as we go of that pure

[73:50]

water falling toward home. Part of the pure water of my experience in Bhutan was at a roadside shrine in the mountains, where we stopped for a moment, and I entered into the shadows of that shrine, and saw a small statue of Buddha there, that was so filled with a kind of essential and characterful personality, that I felt as if I had a moment there of entrance into the personal life of Buddha, and suddenly it was as if all of the centuries of projection which had been laid on Buddha had been stripped away, and I felt as if I was in a moment of personal conversation with him, and he was telling me something of his life, and what it had meant

[74:56]

to leave the comforts of a well-appointed existence behind, and step out courageously into a first-hand more raw experience with reality. And there's a great old folk story in the Buddhist tradition of Buddha having been born, and in the moment of his birth he was able immediately to take a step, and he took not just one step but four steps in all of the four directions, north, east, south and west, and then he said, heaven above, earth below, I alone and sacred. I thought it was marvelous that he included heaven and earth and all the four directions before he got to this I we call ourselves, Statue of Buddha. Your hand moves in the gesture of welcome, your lips in the gestures of praise, you believed in your own sound and so everything you said is still being spoken.

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In that first step away from home you came so far and all alone, faithful to all things as you met them, until finally everything bowed to you and everything spoke to you in its own voice. You were the child whose first step encompassed the four directions, you said, heaven above, earth below, I alone and sacred. Creation, creation means finding the new world in that first fierce step with no thought of return. Creation means finding the new world in that first fierce step with no thought of return. The last poem in the book called Here in the Mountains is a valedictory poem but also one which tries to stitch together with a fiery kind of thread a lot of the light and darkness present

[77:08]

in the book and it's an intimation of the largest self I could feel shaping out of the creative destruction and the fire of that quite fierce process that I had put myself through in the writing of these poems. Here in the Mountains. There is one memory deep inside you, in the dark country of your life, it is a small fire burning forever. There is one memory deep inside you, in the dark country of your life, it is a small fire burning forever. Even after all these years and neglect, the embers of what you have known rest contented in their own warmth. Here in the mountains, tell me all the things you have not loved, tell me all the things you have not loved. The shadows will tell you they have not gone, they became this night from which you drew away in fear. Though at the trail's end your heart

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stammers with grief and regret, in this final night you will lean down at last and breathe again on the small campfire of your only becoming. And draw about you the immensity of the black sky which loves your fire centrality. And draw about you the immensity of the black sky which loves your fire centrality. The deep shadow that forever takes you in its arms, the low song of the long and patient night that holds you in your sleep and stitches faithfully with that impossible light, the dark blanket from which you were born. Fire then is an image that speaks to us not only of creativity and immolation and disappearance and reappearance, not only speaks to us of warmth and nourishment, but also speaks to us of all the

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surrounding shadows and hidden horizons that can be gathered and held together in that central light.

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