 Good afternoon. I'm Tom McCullough, Executive Director of the Keller-Hurbert Library. It's great to have you with us here this afternoon for this poetry celebration from Poland City. And it's great that here we have a nice sunny spring afternoon and we're all indoors to celebrate poetry. I love it. Thank you so much for being here. Today we have two important poets with us. We have Ralph Colvert and Ralph's poetry fiction and criticism have appeared in many magazines and journals. His awards include a creation grant in poetry from the Vermont Arts Council, a nomination for a Pushkart Prize. In 2013 he won the inaugural poetry broadside from Chickadee Chaps and Brods. And he also won the anabiosis, I think it's the right name, anabiosis press chapbook prize for his highly praised collection, Both Distances, which is on the back table, in which afterwards he'll be signing and selling. Ralph is also given many poetry readings and presentations throughout the Northeast. He's produced readings for other writers. He's a former lecturer for the Vermont Humanities Council and he's past literary event coordinator for UVM's Continuing Education Department. Sid Lee was poet laureate of Vermont from 2011 to 2015. In 2013 his collaborative book with um with Flatop Brown, sorry, Growing Old in Poetry, Two Poets, Two Lives was published. Also that same year his book of personal essays on North Country Life, Tales of Widsman, Waters and Wildlife was published. His 12th volume of poetry, no doubt the Nameless just came out last month I think. In his fourth collection of lyrical essays, What's the Story? Short Takes on a Life Grown Long, was recently published by Vermont Green, Vermont Green Writers Press. So Sid, those things sound great like being poet laureate and everything, but at the Keller-Covered Library the most important thing about Sid Lee is every February he's a pronouncer of words and judge for the cabin fever spelling day. So would you please welcome Ralph Culver and Sid Lee. Can you hear me? Can you hear me now? I would like to do a whole reading like that. How you doing? I'm a reader poem by Dylan Thomas. I like to start with reading poetry by someone other than myself. It's a poem by Mark Strand called My Name. Once when the lawn was a golden green and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials in the scented air and the whole countryside pulsed with the chur and murmur of insects. I lay in the grass feeling the great distances open above me and wondered what I would become and where I would find myself. And though I barely existed I felt for an instant that the vast star-clustered sky was mine and I heard my name as if for the first time heard it the way one hears the wind or the rain but faint and far off as though it belonged not to me but to the silence from which it had come and to which it would go. And it will be downhill from there. I want to start with a couple of poems that are either about childhood or based in childhood. This is called Taking Bluegill at Lake Seneca. Lake Seneca is in Ohio. My parents and I and my sister used to vacation there in the summertime. We grew up, we lived in Pittsburgh. Taking Bluegill at Lake Seneca. Under the weight of a few rocks and the unmerciful heat of mid-day they lie. Eight bejeweled beauties aligned on the edge of the dock. The first five utterly still. The two next murmuring at the gills. And the last not quite reduced to commentary but yet in the veil of acts and action. A tremor shutters his length to the tail the coddle fin taught and quaking. And I suddenly feel a memory fall through me of what it meant to consider surrender. Remembering swimming for shore on a dare. Our rowboat out too far. And the sound of thunder nearing. A limitless pain and fear deep in my thighs and calves so pathologically engraved there. I stared down at my bare legs in wonder and laugh. But I am young. And so these fish are young. This water with its battered skin is young. The trees surrounding young. Even my father and mother are young. Soon the eighth captive is left no belief in escape but speaks instead his conviction of infinite release. I will not be the one to flay them naked or scuttle the flawless heads in the minnow bucket for the coons. I will not touch them again except to eat them. So speech is mine. The first words are small and have a taste of hook. The sting of a pearl of wine. Fill up. Laud. He sits. A nothing in the vast back seat amid the drumming of the gasoline. The stuns smell of worn felt and marboros. Two heedless growths perch on their collared stems murmur the day and will not turn. Between them the air bends out above the hood the way a snake sends itself across the surface of a lake. He studies his debased reflection in the chrome plate of an ashtray mounted damaged at the center of his parents seat before him. Gulf. He slowly leans into that face. It swells, narrows and runs down the cracked silver. One voice enlarges saying watch it honey or you're going to be replaced. A laugh. A cough. They are always almost there. Where are they taking him? How could I waiting for whatever was to happen to happen? How could I not see where they were taking him? Boy at the plate. As palms dedicated to my children and to my parents and I'll dedicate it to Diane Swan too whose lovely poem about watching her daughter play softball I always think of when I read this. Boy at the plate. Spread the boy's legs are unsteady as tent poles in a squall. It is useless to tell him I know what this is. Waiting on someone who seems as near as the end of his reach to give him his chance at shame. That he hardly believes it is himself. I heard that voice in my head so many times it became a weapon. The only weapon I had. It is useless to tell him the same voice splits from the throat of the field mouse rearing up to teeth as long as its own four legs. Useless and wrong. For now the boy must believe he stands in the mouth of the first fear birthed in the world. Later in time perhaps while watching his own and shaken by the glory of it that it is he will see for himself the common fear the common love he fell out of now into and watch and love and be thankful. Totem. This poem is based on a true story. It has a little epigraph at the beginning. Totem. One full day Jay a boy of eleven found the decomposing body of a dog. It appeared to have been dead for some time. The boy worked the dog's head off the carcass, shoved a tree branch in at the neck and carried the head down through some woods into an adjacent public playground. Totem. This new spine screwed tight in the under pulp of a skull formerly dog. As an invention of meaning in your hands it makes sense. The park trees beginning to smolder with autumn colors jangle and jag. The possible beauty of things pisses you off. Your mouth waters at the lift and bell of young girls on the seesaw but there is this terror of whatever is pushing the black hair outward at your armpits and balls and who understands it at all. Left no choice. You came down out of the oak and locus trees head high leering, spitlish and lousy, obsessively marking your borders. Your little corner of hell in September school just on and just out that day down to the playground and the children who must recall it better than I. Everybody hear me okay? Am I reading too fast? Too slow? Good? All right good. This poem is for Thomas Luxe. It's called The Tiny's. The Tiny's. Bless them. Bless them. The Tiny's. Sipping a drop of tea from an acorn cap. Changing a flat on a Lego car the color of daffodils. How I love them. The Tiny's. Always on the lookout for the blind foot. The mouse sozzled and reeling from the meat of a turned apple. This one digs down through her handbag. One pea skin. Do you have the keys Harry? The Tiny's. The Tiny's. Who will care for them? Who will help paint their living rooms with a blueberry? Who can possibly tie their shoes if they hurt their fingers? The Tiny's skipped stones in the birdbath. Set sail across a swimming pool with a week's worth of provisions meticulously catalogued. Oh you Tiny's. Who will protect you? Danger is a storm the size of a hat. Death waits in the black thread of shadow that trails from a needle of grass and yet and yet they know it is a world of joy these Tiny's large as it is large as it is. I have been for reasons that I can't really determine precisely. I've been reading a lot of excellent prose poems in the last year or two and so I've been trying my hand at a few and I'm going to read so these are these are pretty recent I'm going to read a few of these and I want to start also this is not really a prose poem it is it is in lineation but it is it's to the memory of James Tate another wonderful poet it's been a bad few years for some of my favorite poets but this is called another Thursday off to a fine start and those of you who know James Tate's work I hope you will find it cleverly emulative rather than patronizingly imitative. Another Thursday off to a fine start I was feeling glum disgusted with myself to be completely honest sitting at Rachel Decker's car on our way home from the Wednesday night poker game. I've been ahead most of the evening and then stupidly misplayed my last hand when we all gathered up our jackets and scarves to go I was about 15 bucks in the hole Rachel hadn't spoken much since we left Stan's apartment and I'd said almost nothing there was the merest suggestion of light over the hills to the east a thin pale outline marking the contours of the ridge. Rachel slowed the car as we approached the all night supermarket on Doyle and said you mind I just have to get a couple things suddenly I had an urge to buy a box of sultans to munch on in the car the rest of the way sure I said sure why not inside Rachel went off in one direction while I went in another looking for the saltine aisle I rounded a corner and stopped blocking my path was the largest cat I had ever seen outside of a zoo it looked like an ottoman upholstered in spiky orange fur if the ottoman had enormous glittering caribbean blue eyes those eyes were something it was as if two round cut sapphire pendants were jammed in the cat's skull the cat didn't move I didn't move and we stared at each other for a moment when a high raspy voice behind me said that's Steffi I turned my head and saw one of the third shift stock boys smiling at me he was tall lanky sallow one eyebrow cocked speculatively your standard issue third shift stock boy he had a name tag that read hi I'm she won't hurt you the stock boy said Steffi I said yeah Steffi she won't hurt you she's just interested in reading your thoughts the stock boy said really I said yes he said I glanced back at Steffi whose eyes were still fixed on me she'll probably fill me in on them when I'm on my coffee break the stock boy said that's nice I said I have always liked cats but still I went looking for Rachel who was going through the checkout with a few purchases dish washing liquid three boxes of wooden kitchen matches a carton of soy milk some other stuff back in the car I told her about Steffi you never know with cats Rachel said it had continued to grow brighter the hills were beginning to take form a jade green blanket someone had casually tossed onto the horizon my cell phone hummed in my pocket and I looked at my watch 5 a.m. I didn't recognize the calling number hello I said hi a familiar voice said although I couldn't place it what's up I said Steffi told me to tell you you forgot the saltines the caller said I opened my mouth but kept silent Rachel was shooting me a look oh the voice said another thing waiting on a jack to fill a straight when Danny was showing one would that look like he probably had a pair you really should have known better yeah well I said I thought where the hell were you when I needed you where is anybody the voice said Rachel drove on the sun rose eventually I decided we might get home I can't I can't decide on a title for this poem lately I've been calling it lecture but it was published under the title on the ineluctable and strands collected poems so I think that one's maybe even too smart as for me so but anyway you can maybe tell me afterward what you think is the better title lecture or on the ineluctable and strands collected poems I paused in the lake shore and looked out across the ice ice as even and polished as a marble countertop as far as the breakwater long pennants of blowing snow lifted and sped over the gleaming surface winter bidding farewell said the jogger passing at my back from an errant sky tinged the color of moss seagulls convene now landing in silence on the ice as a group standing facing me as a group as though each goal were about to unroll a yoga mat but it's not Tuesday it's Wednesday the gulls wait this would be the time to light a cigarette I thought if only I smoked instead they have taken out their composition books clearing my throat I begin this poem is called camping alone as you lean toward the fire the flames reach out to you and you think of your mother at the kitchen sink holding a rinsed dinner plate up to the light of late afternoon how she sensed you there watching her from the hallway wearing your mantle of dirt and sweat that you wrapped yourself in every summer day at the ball field but now the fire is guttering down and you begin to feel the thin layer of grief that settles on everything almost a fragrance reminding you that memory always memory and nothing else is the only fuel available to you to stoke the embers back into a blaze tableau a boy lies on his stomach on the floor head propped up on his left hand drawing in a sketchbook with his right so far only a line or two just a suggestion of a shape over near the window sitting at his desk a man stares at a sheet of paper rolled into a type writer a few words are there nothing substantial and the third figure in the room whose very form is nascent untroubled by detail nearly transparent really although the man and the boy sense a presence acknowledge it they pay it no mind confident as they are as you are reading this as i am writing it that now is not the time the figure congeals casting a shadow at last and rises to take his measure this is the last pros this is called the problem it's called the problem of poetry which is here in my peeler as part of poem city at a bus stop i don't know what bus stop but um as i hope you'll you'll see it's appropriate the problem of poetry the problem of poetry is not going away and will not go away standing there in the steady rain waiting it would seem for a bus and then there it is the bus the 87 ardmore as it happens leaving a wake behind itself in the seething black water masked at the curb slowing to a halt and the door smoothly opening then closing with a hiss and a sigh and the 87 pulling away to reveal the problem of poetry still standing there drenched smiling perhaps a little too smugly no gloves no overcoat no umbrella in sight there's the r-rated portion of the reading we look like a pretty mature audience here today i don't know what sydney has planned to read but this this poem is full of a lot of it's full of gratuitous sex and violence and sort of apocalyptic mayhem and destruction so of course as you will have guessed it's based on the old testament of the bible um this is a different take on the story of lot now if you know the story of lot most people remember lot story from genesis because his wife turned into a pillar of salt when she turned around and looked back at the cities of the plain and saw them at the mora that were being laid waste by by the lord which as i read in an essay somewhere what a human thing to do you know i mean just why the good lord would punish her for looking back is beyond me but anyway if you know the story at all well it's completely insane it makes absolutely no sense i mean it starts out with abraham dickering with god about whether you know like how many righteous souls would it take for you to save these cities you know like like two guys in a middle eastern market you know like arguing about a bolt of cloth or something like that and abraham starts god at 50 souls i think can get them down to like 10 you know god says you know 10 so okay 10 righteous souls all right we'll we'll spare them anyway it doesn't happen of course and god decides to destroy saddam and gamora lot takes off with his wife and two daughters and god tells lot to get to the mountains where he will be safe and lot replies and there's an epigraph here this is from genesis 19 verses 18 to 20 and lot said behold now this city is near to flee unto and it is a little one oh let me escape thither is it not a little one and my soul shall live and god said okay and that this the town is called zoar which is the name of the poem a little town and you know how it is everyone knows everyone and everybody's business so when the stranger and his two preening tarts arrived we gave them a good look one old old man in rags eyes always on the verge of panic a face the sun had churned a bearded pitch muttering wrapped he wouldn't meet your gaze and i thought this one is going to be a problem still it was the girls no better dressed but young straight backed smug and teasing who gave me the most pause sisters to each other we assumed but their companion that cow derelict could hardly be the father of those two with no one playing wife or mother in their company and so we guessed they were two whores arrived from sodom and slaved to this decrepit pimp the heat and years had bent into a fool later my brother's hips gripped tightly in my sweating hands it came to me to cut the old man's throat and keep the girls myself but blessed lust and drink made sleep of my ambitions all praise for by dusk the shouting had brought us to the roofs to watch the soundless flame and smoke devouring the obliterated distance no one saw them leave the girls and the old man but they were gone no doubt fear or some surmise set them to flight had i followed them to carry out my plans i might have died it was four days before the scouts returned with a word that nothing stood of the cities of the plane only ashes the charred bones of livestock not a shrub or tree across fused and blackened sands is finally polished as a shield no tracks leading to our gates but what the scouts themselves had made zoar alone remains the only sign of man beyond our walls a crumbled stump of salt that some lost traitor left behind that beasts have gnawed away to nearly nothing i'll finish up with uh sip harm i wrote uh in the manner of jack ylbert i'll dedicate this to charm if you know jack ylbert's work i just suggest the same thing that i did about the uh the poem that i read of that was sort of emulating tape resolute after jack ylbert the towering sun screaming whiteness high above the sea the lights dropped waves along long island sound curved blades ranked and relentlessly advancing that whiteness the gesso alex layered across another canvas one she had stretched some nights before how her eyes ground shut and teeth gridded when i moved inside her as if she were dragging a great weight three of us living in rooms barely adequate for one not that the baby and i will be there much longer thinking of my vast hunger set loose by the smell of boiled eggs that slid across the parkway east as i rode beside my father driving into pittsburgh flame tipped stacks of the jnl mills decanting smoke sulfur pouring into the forward through the open windows just 14 famished wondering what would become of us certain i heard the clink of empties jostling in a case of beer in the trunk behind the back seat praying the university might let him keep his job or not if we open ourselves to quintessence rather than particulars we gain in clarity the way a bee does not recall a flower but does its purposeful gavote to point the way to an abundance spinning under the blows of the sun helpless the dazzling white sands ablaze beneath my feet this helplessness that will set me to flight again already beginning to resolve in me as anticipation pleasurable expectancy a kind of contentment and delphin shook with poems called fishing with my father and the craft of poetry and like to thank tom and the library and all of the folks behind poem city in my peculiar for all the work that they do every year here it's really a wonderful celebration fishing with my father and the craft of poetry hours holding the poles over the water hours of catching nothing or not much and throwing back what we did catch what the hell was that about anyway and yet today i have this patience for things that drive some people crazy standing in line at the supermarket waiting for some full blowhard to stop gabbing searching for a coat button in the snow the finely honed conviction that beneath this nothing is a deeper richer nothing consecrating myself to the silence and then to what interrupts the silence self is a really good bullet you might have noticed that i noticed that when i actually judged that chet book competition it just wasn't any there wasn't any competition as it news when it started it how you're doing i my i'm married to an italian american woman wonderful way out of my league and i adore her family but she had one relative uncle tony and he always uh i asked her when she said something about uncle tony is he mobbed up mobbed up he's a he's a member of the massachusetts legislator i said yeah like is he mobbed up and i had this notion that i might take him to poetry readings i read a poem and say i like that poem i uncle tony here he likes it a lot too what do you guys think you know uh but i i never did that and he's gone to his reward uh so i'll never try that trip um this is a this is a great library i mean when when tom was talking about the spelling bee if you haven't been to it it really is just more fun than you can possibly imagine it's hard to explain to people why it's fun but it's just a lot of fun and all the people uh involved in poem city as ralph said are to be much commended um i'll read about eight or nine poems and i'll suppose you can stop me um this one is called a man tells a story it's based on a story that i did here i my late friend bill matthews was once asked after reading it i really enjoy that are those real poems or did you make them up a hard question even to understand at a rate a man tells a story he described at the start how he bribed an older student to buy the wine rose of course some sappy song laid poise for the touch of the high-fi needle he lit four scented candles behind his curtains to cast what he thought would be a romantic glow the flower he snickered the flower as he snickered where roses needless to say oh i was full of originality he almost believed the september breeze was panting along with him as he crossed the quad to the bus soon enough sandy or sally the name doesn't matter got out they embraced and headed back to the dorm meanwhile disaster the breeze had blown the curtains against those candles steam leaked out of his window the fireman had already spooled their hoses and dawn not much of a blaze he intoned but it was flame that doused our flame he pretended to tear his hair then needlessly called his wrought up paradox so much poetic bullshit and then he ended these many septembers later i made for the porch looked across the fields to the star pock river and heaved the sigh as real as my laughter had been like everyone there i knew from the start they were done for but hadn't we all suffered broken hearts when young and of course recovered so this melancholy i felt wasn't a matter of a couple's love gone wrong it was how in time we mock our very own dreams whatever they are our best laid plans as the poet so famously called them often go down in flames so often that we may think we've grown wise from watching them die that now we're seasoned enough for irony such adult dispassion however is hard to distinguish from resignation our little blazes spread to places we never predicted and when what's left of all we long for reduces itself to ash we shake our heads we shake our heads and laugh i don't know how we're often i should mention that uh my successor charred deniodas in the back the current poet warrior uh those kids probably don't call him poet low rate as my youngest one but uh so i won't speak for him or any other poet but i know myself sometimes i i have this feeling that to be a poet i'm praying on other people's unhappiness and it makes me feel mildly guilty uh and this is a poem i think is premised on that uh it's called how to sort them that woman's husband works a graveyard shift in a warehouse someplace he's a big man sleeps all day i bet he drinks what do i know dark clouds are stealing in well no they aren't that's poetry and bad at that she's a headstone color gray hair gray face her hooded sweatshirts dull like a sleet of old a sheet of old tin this is though she doesn't look forward to much but passing away her eyes are gray too though it's too easy to call them empty their tears might so easily flow oh no i'm fussing around for eloquence here and coming up short the woman and i just nodded each other as we wait by the post office window though i'm a rather old man now i go on looking towards some sort of future i'm a big man too which may be why that woman shrinks or i think she does we all like the postmistress who's older self but spry and despite her losses still cheerful and bright her hairdos knew i recall her husband who was a person people that are always called big mic some old folks claim the man could lift a barrel brim full of hard cider right over his head i'd like to imagine some tribute to mic i'd write it if that were feasible a character mic he drove a truck that he'd brush painted pink he lived with his wife and children and a bunch of critters and mixed breed hunting dogs far back in the woods in time the kids grew up and moved from here but the family we remember seemed always so decent each other with one another the postmistress wears that shirt she loves it's a pretty shirt now what shall i name it purple fuchsia puth and how might i sort them good and evil how portray them let the clouds above the goddamn clouds steal in no let them hurtle kansas this is based on some nighty which in the king james version has a line that's always appealed to me we've spent our years as a tale that is told you will have remarked that i'm interested in stories anyway kansas joey and i sit in the prairie junction he scans the menu in order the prairie burg he's never been here before but it looks worth trying a man his friends called marty just walked in marty pulls up a chair next to lauren and rod they resemble a comrade comradely flock of ancient birds i decided i'm going to order the chicken sandwich i haven't had it before but it looks good too i mostly want to know that there's god the men have on the clothes they wore to church right after service their wives must have gone back home bill jokes about the football team at k u lauren and marty laugh as though they mean it shelly the waitress is a bit too loud but nice she's very young but she's laughing right along there aren't that many here but they all seem nice i call up a passage about the eye of god i want it truly to be on the sparrow of the eye i privately study the faces around the table anybody would tell you that lauren is handsome there's a certain rugged hawk-like look to rod though he isn't handsome he appears to tell a good tale there's something in marty's expression that strikes me as sad it looks to me as though something bad has happened maybe it has but i have no way to tell his friends are being especially nice to marty they may know the man has something painful to stand i'm not i don't know a soul of the prairie junction but one we're not having much luck hunting out here but no matter it's good just to be with such a dear buddy as joey we swap our own little narratives back and forth the men are of an age and so are we i don't want them really cut down like that grass that withers they've all been inside their church this morning i bet that each has made it a habit to pray these men i'm watching believe there's god i believe that's for me i really want there to be i have a connection to a part of me that goes back some generations and it's in a remote place and by virtue of having been born quite a while ago i was able to know a a lot of men and women who lived in that part of the world there are only 70 people in town so i knew and know everybody and they worked there prior to the to the use of power tools they all worked in the woods the men and the women whom it would be ludicrous to describe as housewives work like dogs to keep the home fires burning and because they had no exterior means of entertainment they were all fabulous raconteurs and there was one in particular that i was very very fond of whose name was Earl bonus who moved to that town from the runswick side of the river when he was three and was there for for the rest of his life referred to as an outsider but he was you know how it is in new england a wonderful guy and he was a river driver back in the era when people drove logs by water and he would he couldn't swim a stroke but he would ride the logs downstream 39 day drive from third machiaeus lake down the machiaeus river to wittyville on the coast of Maine and uh it was hard he is just a wonderful narrator and just a fabulous voice i would have liked to rent that voice but he he had more pain in his life in his life than one can imagine and unhappily toward the end of his life he took the 94 year old life mind you uh he took to drink pretty badly that was rough on him and and those of his relatives including his spouse who survived and this is called when the lake fails so little was left to my aged friend that autumn the shadow showed all chiseled in the door yard against the lake when the moon was more than half and the chop the water surf broke like a mammoth track device and the sharp edge slivers the lights supposed to save us i tipped the shade to see his backlit outline his daughter had been dead for ages who would think that a heart could fall fail in a girl of 16 and that so much pain would follow his son big mickey came home from vietnam he said it's crazy he's gotten how to make a man now this no reason anymore to thank that god or hate any claim he'd sit all night out there in the wind which usually calms come dark but didn't that fall the next son bow was long dead too for all his valor fighting the muscular dystrophy working each day till he fell a bit rising that at last not rising my window framed him near motionless as the pines behind him which paraded in their standstill file along the seawall he built a pick and prize bar his only tools but hands whenever he stirred it was slow as he ever moved in his blinds for the ducks of october it looked as if he parodied the gestures of some other person he fell in the pocket of his wound pants for his bottle and pulled it out his arm inching up his head back tilting and he did all that in reverse i was so damn helpless i wasn't magic no one blamed his wife for raising hell when she came on those pints always empty or almost empty though he tried his best to stash them out of anyone's sight this latest death he swore where the load that broke the critter's spirit no matter it didn't break hers a woman who knew the identical grief that booze is sure a beast he admitted but seems the ladies do better when life bears down i know it does bear down no i don't really know thank god and now that crazy little mick had shot himself my friend said his grandson's gun would often expected a whole town did expect it but my neighbor said no bad accident meth we knew wasn't that in the morning he'd swear he'd shake like a wormy puppy it ate up my heart still does he was always so full of life he's gone and i i keep coming back to the light prettily winking and watered behind him having paired him the silhouettes she recalls a book of saying for some reason she's moved by the chili withdrawal to search for a fitting proverb why this one stay from among wild foul if you fear the wagging of feathers he jostled the china from her old wedding shower if he made his bumpious way through the crepitant hearth she whispers fire won't be hidden in flax her bouquet when she flung it was caught by an old maid aunt who tweeted after a wedding beware a corpse a joke a taunt but she still feels her own foreboding their wedding trip lulled her at first to imagine proverbial wedded bliss she's never known birds or sand so dazzling nor yet known as restlessness as they strayed on that luminous beach arm in arm the passes by must have witnessed what looked like young love become full dark the palms and their sudden stillness like milliner's plumes a nerving sensation flooded into her heart she could never quite find the right words to name them not quite complain that they hurt at trips end it shocked her the talk turned to anger which at home soon became automatic they were scarcely civil to one another though they rarely grew astrionic after this late quarrel hunched vulture in his strains to exude self-control through a living room window she sighs as she sees their small twin girls who roll and flail in new snow making side-by-side angels then watching a raven drop from a leafless blue beach at a murderous angle she gives the window a wrap she longs somehow to set the world back to what it once seemed right now pale dawn for instance pertains pretends something black and the commas of skies unquiet truth shows best naked she thinks a mirror grows dark on the chiffonier in this glass a vague image which rapidly alters first feathered then shrouded then bare this one is called autumn and just a passing landscape in the Olay just a glimpse of a landscape I live in the last town south of the kingdom south of caledonia county and I was just driving up there for what it doesn't matter and I just saw a scene which which produces foam somehow called autumn why not write something for those who scratch out improbable livings here someone has managed to sew this broken field with stones that appears so someone's scratching it still although that japanese knotweed has edged the tilts two wasps in the chill attempt to catch sun on the rail of the bridge the old local doctor has passed it are almost a full decade past 90 he never seemed depressed 70 now is barely it's an older poem 70 now is barely I consider the field again someone will drag those rocks away but they'll be back the air smells like rain which is fine the summer has been much too dry nothing is left of the barn but some rusty steel straps and some nasty red ozure the stone fence still looks sound but even there the knotweed steps over hadn't I pledged the elegy to the old ones who worked here who didn't claim they thrived exactly but maybe they likewise sent a good wind full of rain lifted eyes above this old orchard to the cloud darkened hills and found their support somehow somewhere no matter they kept going until they could go no more the trees puckered apples have gathered a flock of birds and as they alight they're full of unseasonable chatter as if to say that all will be right the old ones I promised a poem must have said it too it'll be all right I never knew them they're gone I say it out loud it'll be all right I'm actually lots of fun in real life when I made the selection I didn't realize quite how gloomy it was that's the healer monster on rendered by my very talented niece I think that's a wonderful illustration so new Jordan Lee is every chance to buy an ever artwork I suggest you get in on the ground floor quick silver spring how can the red wing blackbirds come back so quickly to croak from wetland cattails and the dishes run so soon with snow from hillside submit that odd leather odor beside the freshest and all of these take me to late april morning some 40 years gone when I dropped the only child we had then back at school who ran out and whistled and whirled on the merry-go-round in that muddy yard working up his fragrant sweat while raspy he ravens overhead whirled and fought amongst themselves for she ravens perched in the leafing woods as skunks began to roam again like the one I saw on this much later morning poor sad creature clipped by a car dazed mid-road with blood in its mouth and something I swear that could have been tears in its eyes which swept back and forth as those searching for what could have happened so quickly and how not close with this poem called my wife's back which also has a small erotic component which is one of the reasons she decided to stay home today it's certainly it's certainly certainly not it's a long way from x-rated but back longer ago then it's hard and it's easy for me to imagine when I when I was about 60 59 or 60 I used to jog I would never say run a real runner would laugh at what I did but I used to run through the woods to try and stay in some kind of condition and then my knees just wouldn't take it anymore so in a fit of what that same daughter that called me the poet low rates referred to as geezer madness I I took up the I took up the sport of competitive flat water kayaking which is great for me because I live virtually on the Connecticut River and there's no impact and it's just just something very zen as there used to be for jogging for me so I I do that but on those days when I'm acting in a somewhat more sane way I will often go with my life on the river and hope we can go and go much more casually and kind of drift down river and back up and see what we can see so this is called my wife's back all naked but for a strap it traps my gaze as we paddle the deer familiar nubs of spine bone punctuating that sunwarm swath the slender muscles that trouble the same sweet surface we've watched and smiled as green herrings flushed and hopped ahead at every turn and we've looked up at a red tail tracing open script on a sky so clear and deep we might believe it's autumn no matter its august still another fall will be on us before we know it of course we adore that commotion of color but it seems to come again as soon as it's gone away they all do my love for you over 40 years extends in all directions but it's now to your back as we drift and paddle down the tranquil Connecticut River we've seen a make stretch fleas on a mud flat we've seen an osprey start to die but seeing us think better of it two seabees wagged on an ash limb your torso is long I can't see your legs but they're longer I know seabee osprey herring hawk marvels under black mountain but I'm fixed on your back indifferent to other wonders bright minnows that flared in the shallows the gleam off that poor minks coat even the fleas and its fur the various birds the lust of creatures justice of life but I watch your back never have I wished more not to die thank you often said we'll be in the back if you have any questions and also we invited them to bring books in case you wanted to buy any books in heaven sign thank you so much for participating in poem c there are also programs in the back if you don't already have a great afternoon thanks everybody thank you