In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

11 n e w p o e m s o n s p i r i t I have not always told the truth in my love poems. I hear now when I read them places where I let the reader assume I was so tenderly in love, whereas in actual life I was not that so constantly, maybe just momentarily . I call it language-love, or love for the feel of those words coming through, which makes me a kind of caricature of myself and a hypocrite. I should apologize to the women involved, and hereby do. I did not love you quite as some of the poems imply. Or maybe I am being too hard on those love poems and that loving. What if I attacked my old landscape poems as well, the inner and outer sceneries. I feel differently now about those too. I loved the days and their green wet more than I did actually say. More. So those are untrue in another way. Maybe momentarily is all we ever say, that being the essential quality of love. I have not had a waking experience of spirit, except in the sense that Whitman says is the only way to understand his Leaves of Grass, by what he calls indirection, the unnameable something felt behind and within phenomena, that gives them significance. The hazy, exploding gold that melts form in the Turner paintings I love. Music we dance to with windiness . The Heraclitean fire that Hopkins sees in nature, the “cloud-puffball, torn tufts . . . down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash . . . .” I have felt that passionate way of looking, but how does such relate to what happens, and what we move into, when we die? Very largely, I do imagine. Love is the clearest opening into spirit, love and friendship. A dead friend, John Seawright, told me once through a medium that it was like he had a great balcony seat now. He can see what is going on, much better than before. He always loved to make connections, and the balcony seat helps with that. Jim Kilgo, my friend the great lover, with his wicked-tickled smile tells me he makes love three times a night in spirit. It was good to see him healthy, so alive and full of himself again, and he gave me something to look forward to, though I am not sure what, bodiless sex? Or some way of making love that we cannot imagine in this place of language and cornbread and D minor suites for the cello. In that same dream I put my head underwater in a lake and could see a perfect 12 n e w p o e m s colony of animals living in harmony. Baby raccoons crawling over each other and in among them bluish, bluntfaced furry baby animals I have no name for. All of them breathing underwater with no problem, as were Jim Kilgo and I, in our soul-element. Underwater has always felt that way. Until now, I have never put my head underwater in a dream. Jim Kilgo and I share a fascination with indigenous rock paintings. The American Indians on their high mountain retreats drew what seem to be representations of spirit. One figure about to jump from that into this more apparent place. Another rockface is a screen where those beings stand in such dignity and silence and watch us. As I approach the end, I begin to feel the afterlife as a definite possibility. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross has spent her life in the presence of dying people. She is very confident that death is a gorgeous transitioning from this body/mind to another way of being and knowing, of laughing and making. Where unconditional love is felt enveloping us and we are reunited with those we love who have preceded us into spirit. No one dies alone, she is sure of that. Helpers and guides are always present. My mother, a day or so before she died, said that she could see her mother, and Sarah and Edith and Rich, her sisters and brother who had already died. They were there, she said, but she could not hug them yet. In another recent dream a dead friend, Peter Thurnauer, is there. I am putting together a short radio program about how poetry and music can merge with spirit. In the seventh grade Peter Thurnauer and I invented a way to go back inside the womb...

Share