Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Monday, April 19th.

Today I'm going to read for you a poem by American poet Robert Haas. He was born in 1941. He's a contemporary poet. He's still living.

He's one of the most celebrated and widely read contemporary American poets. He is also a translator and a critic.

And today's poem is called Meditation at Luganitas. This is one of my personal favorite poems

in the whole world. I can't believe I've never read it on the Daily Poem before. It's also

quite famous. He's very well known for this particular poem, and this is how it goes.

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this, it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea,

that the clown-faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light,

or the other notion that, because there is in this world no

one thing to which the bramble of Blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies.

We talked about it late last night, and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief,

a tone almost querulous.

After a while, I understood that talking this way, everything dissolves.

Justice, pine, hair, woman, you, and I.

There was a woman I made love to, and I remembered how holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

I felt a violent wonder at her presence, like a thirst for salt.

For my childhood river, with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

muddy places where we caught the little orange silver fish called pumpkin seed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full

of endless distances. I must have been the same to her, but I remember so much the way her hands dismantled bread,

...