 I write some poetry, having recovered from other things in my life. And this is Dee Davis, who is a wonderful musician, composer, and who played with Brian and Ruth and me when we did our performance of birds, words, and notes of military. So I came early to, this is just an experiment and trying to find new venues for poetry. And Dee was kind enough to read a common play with me. So I had the lunch outside, which is a delicious corned beef hash in honor of St. Patrick's Day. And I sat at a table with some very nice women who were deeply disturbed that my poetry reading had kicked them out of this room. Where they normally play mahjong. So just to show you that I can write in different poems, I wrote them this morning. I write poems in most any style. You might cry, remember, or smile. But this was the worst. And it made me feel cursed to learn and send mahjong into exile. A lofty note, people picking our poetry. What a man of the moment. This is a poem that I realized. I wrote this a long time ago. And it was about the flood. How many people were here for the flood in 92? I saw it on the news. What was the news about it? Oh, yeah. I was in New York on a night in Seoul. So we're a little bit worried about that this year. And it's OK. So I'm going to read you this old poem called The Flood. And it's in four parts. The first part was from March 11, which was the actual day of the flood. At 730, nodding his tie, David Dean, who knows rivers, saw ice floes stop on the Manuski and ran out to move his car to hire Grant. An hour later, there were rapids on State Street and canoes in the parking lot. Water still rising, we assured each other, as it welled up storm sewers and riffled down stairways. And the order of the day dissolved into easy revolution. We collected life flotsam at the edge of the flood. It was an old fashioned crisis. Nothing we could do to stop it. Better yet, nothing we could have done. It was dark. Water from the Worcester range, silencing our phones, filling oil tanks, setting electricity free. It was a day of dangers that finally had a name, with something important for soldiers to do, and simple things to rescue. Videos, food, paper from our past, even when it was only a flood between us, each other. March 17. This morning, at last, the pumps stopped. The water that leafed through novels at Bear Palm Books ran around the vinyl grooves in Bookspealer's basement, the way we listened with thorns to old 78s, and tried on hundreds of pairs of shoes, is back in the usual channels. The trout has gone from the cellar of the transportation building, where it briefly swam among plans for better bridges. The produce, piled in rows like a November garden, will be thrown with carpet and chocolate and crackers, ruined in red boxes, and computers with no memory, and the haddock in front of Capital Market, which for a time believed in resurrection, into the mouths of green trucks, and disgorged and buried as jumbled as dreams in the central Vermont landfill when there wasn't. I added that. 3rd of March, March 21. Today, the stores are open. Sales offer astonishing discounts on salvaged goods, and crowds fill the scoured streets. Politicians gather and pledge to restore the old economy. The red slate doorsteps on Langman Street are shattered at the corners. A granite slab on Main Street sank two inches in the basement field. Walls of the barred block are cracked. Water damaged lingerie is half price of Robin's peach tree. I think I made that up. Already, an official t-shirt is on sale. The water runs light green over clean sand under the bridge. Tires and shopping carts have been swept a little further downriver, and gray boulders are rotting on the Middlesex fields. Willows are white with skin wood along the Manuski. The flood has gone back to sleep in the granite mountains, like leaves that sleep in the tips of winter branches. For today, this morning, a ladybug appears from nowhere and circumnavigates my breakfast plate. The cat eyes finches through the glass who arrived to feed on black oil sunflower seed from Kansas. I used to understand so many things. Now everything surprises me. Anger shows up on my doorstep like an orphan. Sadness is a thread of light I try to pick off the carpet. There is nothing I'm qualified to rescue. I am learning to be patient. Like us, the flood has its own economy. It is as curious as we are, but incapable of pretense. It leaves gravel in the furnace and strews flowerbeds in the street. The man who works in capital market, how many people remember? Which opened after the 27th flood is selling off what's left. He thinks he can get his job back at the lumberyard. He is worried about the customers he used to take groceries to. He knows there's nothing called normal to go back to. And then this is a title piece for this, The Poem of the World. The poem of the world reveals itself like a doe's hoof tapping ice till she can drink. It startles like the rust of purple on this fall's horse of yield leaves. Though it may have used that small voice every year unheard. It blinks like red and blue potatoes dug this morning, drying in the sun, testing their startled, untrained eyes. It stirs the man with belt between his teeth after airport screening to laugh when I smiled at him for our shared absurdity. And it's the unexpected tickle, the fit of shared giggles and our urgency of touching that becomes another way of making life. It's an ocean beach of pebbles that suddenly starts seeing each stone its own tank together a gloriously indifferent song. And it's the voice of each bird I have only heard as morning chorus landing with its own song and bright perfect body in my brain. It is even now I begin to see them the subtraction of the birds taking summer with them too busy to announce their new life. Oh, it is a dolphin swimming in the boat's prowl visible then diving down for power faster than a chugging engine. It wants me to wake in my own body. It is astonished I might let these supple bones grow. It seeks only my permission. It is the sudden thing I trust. This is called visitation. Perhaps it was the carpet, the color of vast deserts that lured the black beetle with the elegant orange Babrej designs. For all I know it teleported from Tunisia or the early 13th century. It stayed for days. Wherever it was from whatever time I'm certain in the universe of beetles it was no extraordinary thing to do. It was my noticing the surprise of its beauty. My urge to have it stay that made it a visitation. It's calm precision, the orange on such perfect black. The cats showed studious respect. I don't know where it went but there are tiny fractures in the rules that shape me. I think I became more patient. There was no promise of return. I have a question in there. Is inadequately rewarded for his skills? And he has some CDs over there which you can, I think the hat is there for $10 bills to be thrown and we'd like to take it. The hat's actually a free gift for anyone. Like if you can take it home you can take that. I don't think I'd afford to be given that. It's only a 20-year-old hat. And he composes much of his own music and rearranges other things to make them. My? Yeah, or? This is a poem that I wrote for a high school friend who I had lost touch with. It's called First Love. A friend of mine who was a good friend in Harvard. It's for John. You and I were busy 50 years ago exploring our ways to love. The road we take today over Standard Mountain used to be unplowed in winter and like love and adventure in any season. Its metaphor was different from my father since it was the shortest route between two places where our family lived. It stood for good sense and valor in the face of danger, the danger that he acknowledged. We drive at this late September day of our renewing friendship. Creep along, slow to find our way. Fall colors seem still muted, not yet at peak. Today's road is improved, as Brahmagers say, but we know how a few years of neglect could leave it gullied and impassable. We have both seen small victories won and rapidly undone. Spring of our junior year, we drove from Hardwick to our bereft North Danville farm. The house had burned, the cows were gone, but this was our great adventure in your father's model day. We came the long way, route 15 through Danville, to stay at the surviving cottage. The prairie road to North Danville Village was a sea of ruts that spring and every spring. The high, narrow wheels rode through like Jesus walking on the water. We said we could conquer anything. We lit a fire, hiked, cooked meals, companioned in the sagging double bed. Your gentle investigation of my body sweetened me. It was the first time I let myself be cherished. You touched the molds, the curves, the prairies of my skin. This, I thought, was what friendship could be. But I pulled back when you wanted me. The valley opens before us. So much color awaits in this Northeast kingdom. Burke Mountain already hinting at November purple. I say, I'm sorry, I didn't love you the same way. You pause. I'm just glad to have my friend again. We let our sadness fill the car. You say you were 34 and still pretending. Then you let yourself be free. Your mother taught your first lover how to cook your favorite casserole. She thought that he was good for you. She always sort of knew the way mothers do. That summer, I fell in love with Kathy Hancock, her music, mind, and slender body. My parents asked why you and I spent less time together. I think he's a little jealous of Kathy. Like looks of surprise, then panic erupted behind their eyes. At least they didn't punish us, but fear took over. That courage, my father honored, seemed to pause, step back, turn remote, and form. They talked to a psychiatrist, warned the other children, sought comfort in some confidence that I was new. They feared the suffering they hoped I would be saved. At best, the church would stand by silently, if not like some, ratify the lash of each day's casual cruelty. All that was left to you. I saw how belief holds hands with that more ordinary scene, relief. I ask if you remember when we hit 100 on the road to Woodbury, just out of town, your father owned the Ford dealership, you always had a car to get around. I don't remember that specific day, but I drove fast a lot, mostly alone, you say. Now, you just keep driving slower. Cars pull up, honks, swing out to pass. I imagine them motoring old leaf peepers. Even with affection and good intent, we let 50 years of silence flow between us. That's how the injury prevails. Decades harden like cement. As we drive, we find our way to talk. You ask about my sister, what it feels like growing old. Slowly it seems our families pile into the backseat, desperate to share with us each other, full of their own stories, familiar and long told. You want to see the farm. My mother and stepfather died last summer. The cottage where we slept, still where it stood, has returned to emptiness. My brother greets us. His friend Tom is turning an old maple, one of those that line the road to chunks of firewood. His blue battered tractor's bucket is nearly full. You say, four, good choice. I joke that you might try to sell him a new one. No way, says Tom, this here is my last tractor. You say, the new ones are great. It feels like we could pause here, past and present, and just talk all day. We drive to Peacham where my grandfather and his second wife, who left her partner, Marenian, to take up her new wife, are buried up among the massive plants. We get out. You call me as we search the lichen stones. You say what I am thinking. Another thing that's better, not to do alone. And this, going back to North Danville again, this is the North Danville School. The school basement was a concrete box. I urge you to go to North Danville and drive by it, with the perspective of this poem. We played in when the weather forced us. We gave concerts there, singing songs of many nations and anthems for each branch of the military. Parents lined up at the metal rail above. For basketball, a red stripe across the middle, foul lines came almost to that center, hoops at each end, three feet from the ceiling, which was the floor of Mrs. Sleeper's first four grades. We all shot flat and hard. The girls could only run three steps, then had to pass and could not cross the center line. You remember this? Yes, but yes, it was there. But played just like the boys at recess. The walls were out of bounds. The ball was put in play one foot on cement. When teams from Danville, Barnett, or Monroe were visitors, they found momentum was there in it. We turned briefly like a tractor raking to the fence. They hit the wall, we got the ball. We never lost a game at home. The Linas, Langmades, Gadapes, passed and dribbled through the forests of those neighborhood teams. Amazingly, we won in air dunes too, exploding on those spacious maple floors, still passing, dribbling and shooting flat. Our families huddled in the sands. Upstairs, the learning. Each row was a grade. We always knew the lessons for the next year. Ronnie Amidon, who lent me his small horse to ride the mile up to our farm and back again each morning for the bus, kept trying to get right the lessons of last year. The teacher tapped out her annoyance on his shoulder. Looked over at me, smiled almost confidentially. Shrugged, is it to say, what can you do? As though this was the lesson he had come from. Always appreciate outside percussion. Probably pick up on the rhythm of the song. Next time I hear that, I'm gonna just go. Couple more poems about living on the farm in North Kingdom, this is called Still There. In the picture on our bedroom wall, I stride behind Molly, our first Jersey cow. Up a pasture, flecked with dandelions. I am solemn, stick in hand, gazing down. She looks calmly past the crouched photographer to her spring-fed pasture pool. The corridor of trees marks this field from fields beyond. The brook that finds protection there starts by the towering elm, umbrella arching to the left. I can hear the language of that water. Not pristine, but delicate and clear. The leaves are barely forming on the trees. A grove of poplars, first to colonize the open land, is to the right. A few pasture spruce, rubbed dense by itching cows. The forest yielded this land grudgingly for farming. Use it, or I'll take it back. At the time, it all seemed permanent. I was 10. We had moved up from the city, ambitious to be farmers, learning honest work. We milked the cows by hand. The photographer could glimpse the story we were living, but still don't understand. I worked on all the land we owned. My brother does it still. The flowers and the grasses thin as trees return. The woods has claimed back all those fields since then. Through all the change, the brook still rises, whispering its song again. And this is called Elm, and this is about remembering the elm tree that's actually described in the previous poem. All the way from Pittsburgh to Phoenix, the men behind us talked to marketing and never once gave a clue what the product was. In college, Clay Hunt said, it's not what you say, it's the way that you say it. It was a kind of a chant for the English department. So if I want to say, for instance, that I miss the elm trees, I should tell you, they held up the sky over our north bandel farm, domed and rustling, alive with orials, soaring on raised arms, perfectly trained to lift the daily weight of food. Or should I just admit, I can't tell you how much I understand. This is called my affection for toads. I talked to them initially as though they were small children, then correct myself trying to be respectful, adult to adult. Even then I am too enthusiastic as though greeting a long lost friend on Main Street, who stares back struggling to recognize me. About the tiller and its bad behavior, I apologize, though remarkably that relative made it to the tall grass with only a small limb. No cleverness or deft protection, tripping, rolling over, such unglamorous beauty, revealing its creamy underside in all disciplines. And this is one for broccoli. I don't know how many of you have encountered the sweet mish, which has meant I don't grow broccoli right now, but this is when I used to grow broccoli. The unrulyness of broccoli, it seems well-mannered in the store, clumped by orange rubber bands or twisted wire, sometimes three or four heads bunched in an intensive seminar. In trays, sliced with celery and carrots, it waits to be finger food. Frozen and dismembered chunks from microwave or pot, it seems resigned to be in good. But in the garden, broccoli wants it all. Can't you see I need more compost here? It mushrooms to a basketball. My knife can barely find the stock side shoots wait for the head to fall. Succulent caterpillars in team colors, lurking in the inner forest, chewing to create the next rhapsody of butterflies, but cooked, curled protein on a plate. Wait summer, I have picked and picked and picked again the shoots take over dark green, plump, surging into flower, yellow, functional, triumphant in their hour. Now a couple of grandchildren poems. This is called Walk With The Grandson. First spring in a new house, he'll show me everything. We race up to the fort, a roof of lashed sticks woven plastic covering a gap between two boulders. Twigs collect on tops, leaves on the floor are almost dry. The stone seats suggest a welcome. He stays outside. It's not quite fear that heeds the privacy someone created and abandoned here. Orange plastic tied on yellow birch. He explains this means the land that's theirs ends now. The space beyond is somehow different, maybe dangerous. And yet the ground is little changed from one step to the next, or as we decide, last bits of snow, mossy stones, brown leaves, hugging the sapling roots, dead logs forged with fungus change quietly all over on their own. It takes almost no encouragement to cross the hesitation in his mind. We explore along the ridge until we find the backside of a neighbor's barn and house as deer must on their rounds. Small boats on racks, two moldering grain-stained ships, a desultory fence sketched the line between another human residence and a more cautious waiting presence. To our right there was a ledge or what he calls a cliff, but here the rock is gone and there's a steep but safe way down. His small dogged yellow boots follow his exploring mind. I realized this was his destination all along. Tall pines, a bowl of wilderness that right now belongs to him. A distant cliff, rocks, puddles, filmed with ice, soon to be gone. His body quickens with adventure. He wades into pools that flood his feet. I suggest the names for trees, bird songs. He collects them as I relinquish. Beside the pine I grew up for midden as we marvel at the knuck hauls stripped from their tiny skeletons of comb. I didn't think hole them all apart because the seed was hiding in each one. Puddle to puddle, snow and turkey track. We have come to the cliff's other side. Gray slabs in slow motion, creep down the ledge, jumbled. Small black caves at every edge. Almost a stairway back. I tell him I could lift him to that level place then we could climb up over. He shakes his head and smiles. Sorry grandpa, I might next time. Right now I'm just scared. We take the long way home, pebbled with deer sign, the path skirts another house. A slab and pole that held a TV dish are resting quietly. He wants to be a deer. Watch here from behind the trees next to the driveway, close observing unseen. He won't step out on the lawn. We climb to the dirt road then wander home through stubbled fields just commencing green. This is called working for Ray. Ray is my neighbor who does everything. It's not easy to work for people who think they know what they want but have no idea what it takes to do it. For some, their money makes them think they're smart enough to give the orders. Ray Hickory runs into this all the time. So when I hire him to help set posts for deer fence on my neighbor's stony land, I end up working for him. It's as risky as Ray is no fan of incompetence. Michael and I had tried to dig a post fold, tried a post fold digger then an auger on his tractor's PTO. But the holes veered off in all directions. Looks like you had a team of woodchucks on the job, Ray says. My back hole would be best. You mark the spots, I'll excavate, then you can hold the posts while I fill in and pack the soil around me. The day we did it, he kept nudging me. You really want that distance between posts? Where's the one for the next hole? Hold the damn thing straight, it's tipping north. You're slowing down, you must be getting old. It felt like working with my brothers when determination that we get it right meant more than being nice and was a lot more fun. Politeness just seemed silly. Once or twice I told him, more fill here and the steel bucket glided over, dumped precisely the amount of dirt required, tamped it down, moved on. When we were done, I wrote the check. He looked around and said, not bad work today. You did okay. This is called safe as light. Long before guilt was invented, this stream managed rocks without it. Never a thread or a wheel, it shifted them when strength was gathered. Changes from every storm were there for my exploration. That's how its small riffles and dark pools became such freedom for me. Neither worms I pierced nor speckled fish I hooked cried out in accusation. In turn, they claimed me, taught me to thin in place beneath a dark green overhang of rock. Oh, how the heart is taught to bargain, search the hard ground of obedience and its deceptions. I would rather sink my feet in black lomi banks where a holy beaver pond spills disconcerting welcome through the tree-nose. There is no promise I will be safe if I relinquish. It is a place where for a few years work trout fatten and the silt accumulates until some torrent tears the sticks apart and I come explore Jews fertile mud. I confess I have chosen sides and welcome new companions. My grandson shudders at colliding arguments of thunder but will not be denied the liking. And this, I'll read one more about canoeing on the Winooski River. A morning of little consequence. Shopping for two kinds of milk, exchanging cat food for the fussy cats, bottles to return, some strange vibration to get checked on in the car, the luxury of drawing up a plan or just a list and doing it or not or only part of it, crossing a few things off. Appointments I can make whenever, a summer program for the children, time for a nap perhaps, so much for ambition. I am still dazzled by yesterday's river, sunlight patient, stroking sly of lucid water, eagle soaring downstream, claiming everything. We thought we had a plan, as usual, we lost it. In the warning shallows or was it the deep current that tugged us through that draping millow? The railroad tries to river manage with massive granite boulders, blocks that pretend to be invincible until the flood tosses them. All my life I've driven beside this river, crossed it on bridge after crumbling bridge. Here I am, captured, knowing I'm captured. Yesterday's shoes soaked with time, how the bedrock swims upstream, whale-sleek staring at us with its small quartz high. And this one is for the cats. It's called feed the cats. Mentioned in the previous poem, but really more devoted to that. Upon waking the cat's first and urgent task is to remind me, before a bathroom, before a toothbrush, that nothing is more important than feeding them. Some peoples believe their supplication drags the laggard sun up the morning sky. Never would it rise or the can be opened. But for them, the sun has its practiced ways of coping. I am inclined to groggy banter, which is solidly ignored. Pat pat down the stairs, my only choice to follow. When I am home all day, the cats are at my feet, insisting on the evening feeding at one o'clock. It rouses them from the daily round of dedicated relaxation. I wonder when I give up and feed them at three, whether there is a sense of triumph. I have seen nothing that could be considered excessive celebration. And I'm gonna read one longer poem and then Dee and I will do the final poem together. This is called Gratitude. I don't wanna leave those tidy, unclean fictions when I go, like legacies of a departing colonist. I want loved ones to find no unused wads of kindness in my pockets. This wild explosion of undone will barely notice when I leave. A garden tilled for fall, cover crop of rye, subversive common seeds I might consider weeds buried there in wait. The nephew I hardly ever hear from, hardly ever call. The war, the uniform in both Korea and Iraq makes a living fixing roofs, floors, patios, you name it, there in Texas. Bass fishes after work and weekends. I keep pretending silence is respect. Why don't I talk with him about his mother? Why did the Dalaiys never bloom this year when they were in full riot last? I realize my first garden shed may never get the fix I planned this season. My grandson might keep shrugging when I reach to touch him and I keep aching for a reason. Misery loves company, I sometimes tell myself, as though that might be comfort, but really, I never find new friends there. My misery's an excuse tailored to postpone my fingers from the dirt, the fear I need to touch. It always leaves me soured and alone. The peonies and gladiolas are more seductive every fall. October, I plant slips of peony root with three buds full of color that may prosper years from now. I dig shaggy gladiola corns plumped on slender stalks, next year's replacements for the top exhausted husks left from the thrust of color trumpets to the sky. Bulblets cling, intending futures of their own, purple is steeped in black, regal crimson, slim white avesinian, lavender that cries out to sunset orange. Beauty's nonchalant kindness accepts the slow learning of my eyes. I plant the slips, store the corns, my day possessed by past and future blues. I sit awash in an October sun. Gratitude is like this, all is a surprise. I remember how I dreaded grown-ups who creaked like closing doors. Even now I fear joy might never be allowed back through my window, but gratitudes, a different eye that opens, unnerving in its great permissions. In sun on this cold porch, I'm grateful. Some shy part of me is always sitting here, no wisdom, no plan, full of songs, no notion you may receive. Curled beige feathers, downy at the base, litter the stream that wanders toward us, and Elmore's Lake. Beavered alder branches, submerged pond-hair cushions, duckweed corraled by viburnum roots, all strewn as though by a gentle pillow fight. We paddled past managed shorelines with tidy cottages to this neighborhood of lily pads and pickle weed, hidden from their sight. More happens here, like the basement daycare center chorus with children, all of us cluttered, doing a better business than the church. This is the water's sweet meander, slow channel, where more dancer, mallard grew. It's also where the storm cloud races through. My grandson cried when he gave up his first and favorite fight, the one he trusted enough to let his feet release the ground. I had to argue with myself against the urge to dry his eyes, hurry him along, stop, honor that lonely human sound. Two young ducks try to keep one bend upstream from us, trapped by our invasion. They finally stop, one leaps to flight, the other hides behind the marsh grass in a small alder pocket. We paddle by, eyes averted, our small courtesy. It quivers as we pass. Six summer weeks, this was their home and world. Now they leave for something new. I think, detachment, that's a vision too. We first approached a heroin rose up like a scarecrow taking flight. It might be in the next pool, playing its silent heroin tricks. But a beaver pond opens before us, flood at eye level. No heroin, just water seeping through a thousand sticks. This summer we went up five streams. The beaver, always there, insists it's the effort, not the dam that's permanent. We put off our leaving, poke up every bull rush alley, give in at last, turn, stroke hard across the open reach, land on the expanse of beach. Women in bright saris watch their boisterous men play tag, joined by the youngest daughter. We greet them, lift the boat, and leave our visit. So I offered, if anybody wants to stay and offer feedback or anything that would be great for me, otherwise, you are dismissed. Yes.