Poetry Sunday: The Layers

I love this poem. It is contemplative; the poet is looking back on his life and seeing the striations laid down by the events of that life, like geological layers. 

Looking at the walls of a canyon, the Grand Canyon, for example, one can see those geological layers stacked one on the other, building all the way up to the surface. And so it is with our lives. Some of those layers are ones we would just as soon forget, but they all are a part of what made us who we are. 

The poet is saying that we should not be distracted by the litter of our daily lives; we should embrace and live in the layers, the solid stuff that made us. 

The Layers

by Stanley Kunitz

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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.