The Wild Braid

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.

---

---

The poet Stanley Kunitz wrote these lines when he was close to the end of his life, which lasted an entire century.

​"I am not done with my changes."

The layers of lives he lived within, like the successional growth of plants within the garden he tended for decades in Provincetown.

While working on the book, Stanley took mysteriously, gravely ill. After three days of living with the proximity of death, he re-emerged, transformed. "The Dark Angel doesn't bring death with him. He brings with him an aura, an intuition. And his contact with you--I'm trying to find the image for it--is an overbearing weight, you're being smothered. At the same time it's like a cloud passing over you that you engage, and it's combined with exhilaration. You meet your destiny, and there is a sense of being given power at the same time."

The cloud of unknowing.

​It was his garden coming to life that he followed back to light.