The echo of the lake, and other poems

Heard arrived and perched on our one and only chair. Isherwood, Maggie and I sat on the floor. Some weeks later, Heard and Aldous Huxley invited me to tea, where both leaned forward, one echoing the other, and asked: "Do you know what you are?" "What?" "A poet," they said. "My god," I said. "Am I?" So we end as we began, with one friend seeing me off and another taking me in from a journey. What if Norman Corwin had not sent me or if Walter I. Bradbury had not received me? Mars might never have gained an atmosphere, and its people would never have been born to live in golden masks, and its cities, unbuilt, would have stayed lost in the unquarried hills. Much thanks to them then for that journey to Manhattan, which turned out to be a forty-year round trip to another world. July 6, 1990 ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS DUSK IN THE ROBOT MUSEUMS: THE REBIRTH OF IMAGINATION For some ten years now, I have been writing a long narrative poem about a small boy in the near future who runs into an audio-animatronic museum, veers away from the right portico marked Rome, passes a door marked Alexandria, and enters across a sill where a sign lettered Greece points in across a meadow ...»