I’ve kept two journals in my life, one at age nine and the other at nineteen. Most entries as a nine-year-old were about my cute baby brother or the boy I had a crush on. As a nineteen-year-old I wrote in code about things that felt overwhelming. Yesterday I read an interview with a woman who’s kept journals since she was a child. Sometimes she reaches for one and leafs through it, remembering who she used to be and the changes she’s been through. I wish I’d done that, I said to the Painter last night, then I would remember all the selves I’ve ever been. Who and what are our true affections? How do we reconcile our hearts to their feasts of losses?

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.

​Click here for more information about Stanley Kunitz, who, in 2000, at age ninety-five, became the tenth poet laureate of the United States. Today’s poem is from from The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz​, published in 1978. 

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