Breakwater Rock

Breakwater RockFor years I had wanted to write a book of poems that would bring together, geographically, the two halves of my life, first in the United States, where I grew up, and then in Europe, where I now live. I was not sure how I would find the diversity of voices for such a project, but then one day something totally unexpected occurred. As I was being wheeled into the operating room of a Swiss hospital, a few words suddenly went through my head: Exile, your

For years I had wanted to write a book of poems that would bring together, geographically, the two halves of my life, first in the United States, where I grew up, and then in Europe, where I now live. I was not sure how I would find the diversity of voices for such a project, but then one day something totally unexpected occurred. As I was being wheeled into the operating room of a Swiss hospital, a few words suddenly went through my head:

Exile,

your former island,

lets you go.

I have always been curious what I would think before losing consciousness, and when I came to, this time, after my knee operation, the strange words were still there, still in the form of a stanza, and soon other words began to appear as well. I realized at once what was happening, and asked my wife for a piece of paper and something firm to write against. And so began "The Turning of the Tide", a poem I wrote "upside down" on my back from my bed in the hospital.

The poem turned out to be an announcement, to myself, of a homecoming, both in space and in time, to the town where I had come of age during what is still called the Vietnam War, though it was not ever officially a war. I had scheduled the operation early enough so that I would be able to walk once more along the edge of the Sound where, as a young man, I had wandered alone and often at night trying to come to terms with the world before me. As a boy I had learned that a word, like a country, has a history of its own, and I had mistakenly derived "exile" from the French of "ex" and "