So my wife says that I shouldn’t just post poems (or excerpts) without explaining why. So here’s why I posted the excerpt from “The Topography of History.” I’m very interested in the ideas of continuity and change. I love the image of the river that is both constant (you can draw it on a map) and flowing (someday that water will reach the ocean). I feel like that. There are all these selves that I’ve lived at different times of my life, in different places and with different people, but I’m still myself. Or at least I want to believe I’m always myself, that there is some sort of me that is constant. But I know I’ve changed. A lot. Sometimes I feel like a stranger, to others and to myself. And that’s why I’ve started this blog: to chronicle some of that change, to understand my history, to not lose my love down the river.
strangerextant 
I came across the following poem by Robert Bly, McGrath’s Midwestern comrade, this morning. It made me think of the McGrath piece, especially the bit you excerpted (amongst my favorite TM lines). -sw
Mourning Pablo Neruda
Water is practical,
especially
in August, water
fallen
into the buckets
I carry
to the young willow trees
whose leaves
have been eaten off
by grasshoppers.
Or this jar of water
that lies
next to me
on the carseat
as I drive to my shack.
When I look down,
the seat all around the jar
is dark,
for water doesn’t intend
to give,
it gives anyway,
and the jar of water
lies there quivering
as I drive
through a countryside
of granite quarries,
stones soon
to be shaped
into blocks for the dead,
the only thing
they have left
that is theirs.
For the dead remain
inside us, as water
remains
in granite-
hardly at all-
for their job is to go away,
and not come back,
even when we ask them.
But water comes
to us,
it doesn’t care
about us, it goes
around us, on the way
to the Minnesota River,
to the Mississippi,
to the Gulf,
always closer
to where
it has to be.
No one lays flowers
on the grave
of water,
for it is not
here,
it is gone.
I really like that. Thanks for sharing.
Unrelated to the poem, but I love the short stories of his ex-wife Carol Bly
Those lines from McGrath blew me away when I read them the first time. I had to reread it a few times immediately, and I’ve kept returning to it ever since. Thanks for sharing that with me, too..