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 "île" and falsely arrived at my "former island"; and now, freed of falsehood, here was the word again, in a new yet familiar context. I realized that I had a start on the book that would bring the two continents - the two tectonic plates of my life - back together, in space and time. Other poems began to appear, some even before I had returned to my old hometown, stepping stones of a sort, and what I now had to do, I saw, was to put the separate stones together, to make, in other words, a breakwater rock of my own, something open to everyone, protective and inviting, entrance and exit at once.