The Layers by Stanley Kunitz

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.
~Stanley Kunitz

Kunitz copyrighted "The Layers" in 1978. He had some maturity from which to write. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts on July 29, 1905, he received both his bachelor's and master's degrees from Harvard. He was the United States Poet Laureate in 2000, and the above poem was published then in the book The Collected Poems (W.W. Norton). Kunitz said of his work, "If I hadn't had an urgent impulse, if the poem didn't seem to be terribly important, I never wanted to write it and didn't." He died May 14, 2006.