 Thanks for coming. This is very exciting. I don't know if you all realize, this is our first author reading in 26 months. And applause to all of you for coming out and to our authors, our poets, for being here. So it was very exciting. We didn't really know what to expect. So thank you for coming out. We're gonna have a great evening. We're kind of slowly unrolling our event series and we have a few things planned for spring next Tuesday night. We have a book release party for Jennifer McMahon's new book, The Children on the Hill. It's going to be at Hugo's piano bar down the street. So that should be a lot of fun. Seven o'clock next Tuesday. And we're having a birthday party on the 30th on Saturday for our Russian tortoise, Veruca, who lives upstairs. If you haven't met Veruca, you totally should. You can go up and meet him. He's a crusty little gentleman. And we're gonna have a celebration for him too. So things are starting to happen and we're excited about that. But tonight we are really grateful for poetry and especially poetry that can bring us together and these beautiful anthologies are I think just what we need right now. We have How to Love the World and The Path to Kindness, both edited by James Cruz, who's with us tonight. And he's gonna start us off with an introduction to these books and some poetry of his own. And we would like to thank Poem City, a program of the Kellogg Hubbard Library for cosponsoring tonight's event. And we thank all the Vermont poets here to read for us. Do a quick intro before I turn it over to James. Sherri Altman is one half of the dynamic duo that runs Literary North, the organization that provides a calendar of literary events in Vermont and New Hampshire partnering with the local literary community to promote and host literary related events. She lives in rural Vermont with her husband, three cats, seven chickens, and a few hives of bees. Megan Buchanan is a teaching artist, performer and dance maker and the author of Clothesline Religion, poems that chronicle alphabetically by title. 20 years worth of adventures in the life of an artist as a young single mother. Dan Butler is an actor and director. You might remember him from everybody's favorite 90s sitcom, Frasier. He now dedicates his time in Vermont to poetry and altruistic pursuits. Judith Chalmer lives in Burlington and is the author of most recently, Minnow, a collection of poems about natural landscapes and intimate connections. And Laura Foley won first place in the Common Goods Poetry Contest judged by Garrison Keeler. Her poem, Gratitude List, was read on Prairie Home Companion. The winner of the 2016 National Outermost Poetry Prize judged by Marge Piercy, among others. And her latest published collection is Everything We Need, Poems from El Camino. And now I will turn it over to James. Hi everyone, thanks so much for coming. I was just joking with Megan here that I will probably cry at least a few times throughout the night. I feel very full of gratitude to be here and also for this to be the very first in-person event at Bear Pond Books that has taken care of writers for so long. So thank you all so much for coming. And so I wanted to start just with saying a little bit about the anthologies and then I'll hand it over to our amazing poets here and then kind of finish things up at the end. I really started these anthologies before the pandemic began. The idea for the one How to Love the World, Poems of Gratitude and Hope, was really first born in Argentina. My husband and I were traveling and we kind of took ourselves out of the culture of the United States and we're in this other celebratory, more hopeful, more grateful culture. And I'm just like, you know, what's going on? Why don't we have this? And so that kind of planted the seed for the book and then once the pandemic hit, it really felt like, you know, I needed those poems, these poems, more than ever. And so that's kind of what led to that book and then the new one that just came out, The Path to Kindness. I wanted to start off tonight just by reading Ros Gay's Forward to How to Love the World, the very first one in the series. And I'm so grateful to him for writing this. It just feels like the right time to share it with you all. I'm doing my best. I have a very low voice, so I apologize. I have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about witness, about how witness itself is a kind of poetics or poesis, which means making. By which I mean, I have been wondering about how we make the world in our witnessing of it. Or maybe I have come to understand to believe how we witness makes our world. This is why attending to what we love, what we are astonished by, what flummoxes us with beauty is such crucial work, such rigorous work. Likewise, studying how we care and are cared for, how we tend and are tended to, how we give and are given is such necessary work. It makes the world. Witnessing how we are loved and how we love makes the world. Truth is, we are mostly too acquainted with the opposite, with the wreckage. It commands our attention and for good reason. We have to survive it. But even if we need to understand the wreckage to survive it, it needn't be the primary object of our study. The survival need be. The reaching and the holding need be. The here have this need be. The come in, you can stay here need be. So I'll just stop there. And just to get us started, I wanna read one of my favorite poems that begins The Path to Kindness. And this one is called Small Kindnesses by Denisha Lamaris. I've been thinking about the way when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by, or how strangers still say bless you when someone sneezes, a leftover from the bubonic plague. Don't die, we are saying. And sometimes when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly we don't want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot and to say thank you to the person handing it, to smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pickup truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other now, so far from tribe and fire, only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, here, have my seed. Go ahead, you first. I like your hat. I'm looking at you, Dan. So please welcome Sherry Altman, our first poet of the evening. So thank you so much to Bear Pond for having us all here tonight. And thank you so much to James for including my work in this beautiful anthology with so many other amazing poets. I'm reading on page seven if you want to follow along if you have the book. Worry Stone for My Grandfather. You let me cut the mint, put me in charge of taming the kittens. We picked tomatoes and beans in a bushel basket, collected water from the healing springs. For years you saved me with action, the beauty and relief of work. When you became sick, who knows how our thoughts collided. A worry stone passed from young to old, smoothed down by a thumbprint. I had nothing else to give. When you gave it back to me, I did not expect it. Found it hard to witness your acceptance. On the day you died, I brought you a poinsettia, the same red as your favorite sweater that lives in my closet now. I still believed in invincibility. My limp wrist, the tilt of the pot, brushing the ground. And I'm in a poetry group, and we're called the Saturday Poets that we meet on Wednesdays or Fridays. And three of those women are in the anthology and I wanted to honor them tonight by reading their poems. So, and then I will finish with one of mine. But this is Pinchpot by Mary Ray Gehring and she goes by Ray and it's on page 26. Pinchpot, if it's perfectly into the cup of my hands when they are pressed together as if holding precious water gathered fresh from a clear ice capped mountain stream. A Pinchpot made by my son in high school, terracotta colored clay, carefully smoothed by his hands, rounded on the bottom like a bowl or an ancient Anazazi vessel. Inside an indigo blue glazed line spirals away from the center as if this opening, this empty space can be forever filled to overflowing. Into the cradle of my hands, it conjoins like a prayer finally answered. This one is by my friend Nancy Gordon. It's called Rescue Dog. Nancy's gonna be reading at Battenkill Books later in the summer. It's about a dog named Jake. Jake comes into sight 10 pounds of whirling golden fur, legs and feet, a blur, released from his leash to greet me, racing toward me. Eyes, dark pools shining, ears flapping with his running and jumping, up into my arms, onto my shoulder, his body close to my chest, my heart. Tongue lapping everywhere, doggy kisses says my friend who lets me share walks with him. Quick breaths, his heart pounding, his body warm and flexible as a gymnast. He drinks water from my hands, he walks us. He explores the sense, the grass, all that he can reach from his reattached leash. He and my friend debate the boundaries. When I have to leave, I turn to watch them go and Jake turns, looks back, looks back again, crooks his head, where are you going? Aren't you coming with us? This one is by Susan Zimmerman and it's on page 146. Get close. So close you see something you thought you knew as if for the first time. Then closer, beyond seeing, lost, mystified. Like the time I photographed the gray shadow on the side of the tree, magnifying until I realized it was not a shadow but growing moss. Until I realized the white dots were not dots but tiny flowers blooming in the moss. Until I was so close, I disappeared. In the whole universe, there was nothing and no one but the tree and me and we were only one thing. And I will finish with one of mine. This is a poem I wrote in the summer and it's a work in progress and I've been inspired by some poetry readings I've seen where poets are reading works in progress so I thought I would be brave and do the same. This is Balanced Do. I feel like I have made a life of false alarms but it cannot last forever. I see this like someone holding up a mirror to my face. How many more do I have? Did I use up my last one on Thursday, head nestled into the MRI machine, oversized headphones covered in a T-shirt, box traveling through the noise, eyes fluttering from trying to keep them closed. That early morning call, almost too early to be good news. And yet, a tent life as if discovered in the pocket of a winter coat folded up increased but the writing's still legible. I live recklessly again. My Vermont neighbor dedicates an entire greenhouse to figs, the bravado. She brings the swollen fruit to my workplace because she knows I can't resist the taste of home. I never have cash. I take them anyway, like a Victorian woman buying seasonal dresses on credit and making her husband the talk of the town. I am carrying a $10 fig debt and it feels delicious. It's hard to follow figs. Wow, thank you, Bear Pond and thank you, James. And thank you, Literary North. Such a great service. Okay, glasses. I'm Megan Buchanan. James asked if I would contribute my dream poem, I dream visitation, page 153. My dad passed away pretty suddenly and I cut off all my hair when he died and so I was thinking like he's been dead this long. I think it's been about five years. And so I had a dream, this is it. Okay, this morning before dawn, my dad visited me in my dream. He was here where I live now, in a house he never did see. I came down the wide staircase with a lost dog that had spent the night to find my dad sitting in a chair near the kitchen. As I walked into the lamp lit room, he rose up and hugged me. He was wearing a red plaid shirt and his navy blue blazer, signifying important business. He was warm, it was him. He held me tightly in his arms, my tears streamed. With a gasp, I asked, dad, where are you now? Where did you go? And he answered, I am in the pixels of the pictures you are looking at. By which I think he meant, I am here and everywhere. So James and I, we have a lot of tears and feelings. So I'm gonna try to read a poem that definitely has been making me cry, but it's just so beautiful. I just, even if I cry, who cares, I'm just gonna read it. Okay, so this is page 159 in the book. It's by Jillian Wegener. And it's called Juvie Kid for Gus. Again, we meet in the hallway. As usual, he's sweeping the floor. Look at all the bugs, he says, leaning in to examine his pile of dust and flies. Hey, he says, when are you going to write poetry with us? His hair a wild halo, his eyes intense, his shoulders not yet as wide as mine. He means, when will I matter to you? I've been in here four whole months, he says, but I'm getting out soon. I'm going to a group home far away. They gave me a choice, but I don't care where, far away from here. Regulations say no handshakes, no touching. We aren't supposed to be talking, but we say, good luck, good luck. We say something about second chances, something about taking the right path. We aren't supposed to be talking to him, this boy excited at what's ahead. We turn and pause at another door. We know his slim chances. Pray for me, he calls. Pray for me, okay? You're so good. Okay, so now I'm going to join you and I'm going to read a very work in progress, like this kind of a work. Like it's still, okay. So I just went to Ireland for a writing residency at this really cool place called Cowhouse Studios, which I totally recommend. And it's in County Wexford, which is on the east coast, which my people are from the west coast. I used to live there. So this was like a total adventure and a new part of Ireland. And in the early morning, I was taking the train down from Dublin to Wexford to Enesgorthy to get to the residency. And so this is my, it's called Ireland by Train. And it's just everything that was going by. And there's something about like the speed of trains is like a really, for me it's like a perfect poem speed. Okay, so this is a very rough draft. Behold these miles and miles of stone walls. Imagine the hundreds of hands that placed each stone. Thousand year old place names on sign posts in Gaelic. It hits me how every place is simultaneously alive with life. And here, Gorse, Nettles, Ivey, Blackberry, security cameras, film the pigeons. Daffodils rock in unison as the train passes. Below in the harbor, wrapped up sailboats rest. Coffee shops blink open after dawn. Off leash dogs charge the waves. All the windows glow that face the sea. New lambs sleep beside their kin and hawks watch from the hazel. Okay, I'm gonna read my one pandemic column. Right before COVID, I was grateful to buy my first house in Putney where I live now. I'm from California, but I still can't believe I'm living in Vermont, but I love it here. I'm grateful. Okay, so this is called Spring Fire. And you Vermonters will totally get this. For weeks, we dragged limbs across the rutted road to the bristled October moan field. My carpenter partner, like a modern dancer, his slow walk, a top hard mud, arms full of boughs, early spring's satisfying procession. First year in our own place, we cleared and clipped with care. Crisp hemlock branches, thorny whips of raspberry, fallen willow branches like upturned hands flashing at the dark green pond. Our neighbors bring blueberry muffins and I unwrap hazelnut shortbread from napkins on the old blue tailgate. Daisy shares her favorite watermelon juice with A. Her daddy's splashes of old gasoline mixed with rainwater saved the day. We sit upon stumps six feet apart. Papery grapevine, lances of red sumac, skeletal Christmas trees yanked from tangled thickets, all crackle under a thick duvet of cloud. Nathan knocks a transverse birch from the treeline, hauls it to the blaze, stirring red coals and ash. The kids can't help themselves, inch in, way too close to flames. Our view from the lip of this tiny valley, a 20 minute walk, a tiny ripple on the surface of earth. We live within new distances, diagonal lines of data drag across our dreams. Hunkered down, we burn what we can. Words we won't say again. Hunkered down, we burn what we can. We check on the neighbors, slide seed trays beneath the wood stove. Hunkered down, we step with care into this darkness, this burning, we step forth toward what's breaking on the radio or inside of us. We step towards it, reach down and pull from our pockets, our stashed courage. We unwrap it on the tailgate, brush the ash from our hands. We step forward over embers, pricked up, listening under these stars. We step with care, our ready breath carries us towards whatever happens next. Okay, I'll just read one more. So, N. Scott Mamaday wrote this poem that's like the I am, I am, and it's all these beautiful things. And when I was a teenager, I read that and I was like, you know, it didn't have any mirror or a rhyme and it was like, it just was like such permission. So, this summer I wrote my own and it's a little spooky, but it's all from dreams or real life. So, okay, it's called the now life and the next. I am the striped wasp trapped in your dress, smooth leather rains slipping out of your hands. I'm the luster of golden birch bark even in the dark, a snag of soft wool caught on barbed wire. I'm a fast splash of road salt on this ice covered stream, the coral of the Cardinals beak, the scent of lemon skin from back porch terracotta pots, the breath of the tree and the scream of the chainsaw. I'm the turtle's track across the muddy road. I'm the coat left hanging in the Hawthorne tree. Thank you. This is so cool. Thank you, Bearpont. Oh my gosh, there's a lot of people here. I'm Dan Butler and I will start with the poem that's in this beautiful anthology. This is called New York Downpour. The night sky cracked open on us full force, a deluge, a drench and laughing, arms around one another. We soaked it up like a couple of Jean Kelly's, stomping, singing, not even a twinge of an urge to run, just pure revel, hummingbird joy as lightning flashed, capturing the moment. Soon the storm grew tired of scaring us off the streets and subsided into grumpy rumblings, while we splashed our way through puddles from West End Avenue through Riverside Park all the way to the edge of the Hudson. And I would like to honor both of these anthologies by reading another poet from each one. So I love this, well I love so many of the poems. This is Jose A. Alcantara, is that how you pronounce it? I love the title of this and in the, anyway, divorce. He has flown head first against the glass and now lies stunned on the stone patio, nothing moving but his quick beating heart. So you go to him, pick up his delicate body, and hold him in the cupped palms of your hands. You have always known he was beautiful, but it's only now in his stillness, in his vulnerability, that you see the miracle of his being, how so much life fits in so small a space. And so you wait, keeping him warm against the unseasonable cold, trusting that when the time is right, when he has recovered both his strength and his sense of up and down, he will gather himself, flutter once or twice, and then rise a streak of dazzling color against a slowly lifting sky. And I got this one marked. This is a mutual friend of both James and my Ted Couser, who probably inspired me to write poetry. This is a poem from the first anthology, Dandelion. The first of the year's abundance of dandelions is this single kernel of bright yellow dropped on our path by the sun. Sensing that we might need some marker to help us find our way through life. To find a path over the snow-flattened grass that was blade by blade unbending into green on a morning early in April, this happening just at the moment I thought we were lost. And I'd stopped to look around, hoping to see something I recognized. And there it was. A commonplace dandelion, right at my feet, the first to bloom, especially yellow, as if pleased to have been the one chosen from all the others to show us the way. I would like to read a few more of my poems. Excuse me. These next two are being published this month in One Art online. It's a dad poem. Let me lay one on you. That's dad's signal that he's about to tell a joke, usually something racist. Though my sister and I have told him a million times, we wish he wouldn't. Two black guys fishing in a boat. And we're off. I looked to Richard who pastes a smile on his face. I warned him this might happen. We're standing in the parking lot at Cracker Barrel, dad's choice for breakfast. And we'd almost made it to the car. And one of them gets bit on his penis by a rattlesnake. Every part of that sentence defies logic, but I let it go. I know the joke. The unbid fisherman races to a doctor, explains the situation, omitting the specific location of the bite. And the doctor tells him to make an X on the fang marks and suck out the poison. And I wonder why on earth dad chose this joke to tell his gay son and his son's partner at their introductory breakfast? Is he really that unaware? Or maybe he's just nervous and this is his way of coping with it. Or could this be dad's attempt to say it's okay that I love another man, that this is my life? And why can't the three of us share a little laugh together to mark the moment? And whether that's true or not, I realize that it still matters that this man, who I have often made a joke, accepts me. And dad says, so the guy gets back to the boat. His friend says, so what did the doctor say? And he says, he said you're going to die. And dad gives us each a clap on the back and saunters off, jingling his car keys happily in his hand. And we climb into our rental car and just sit there, staring straight ahead. Then we turn to one another and say, and why were they black? Yes, this is the second, this is the midpoint, breathless. It's the quarry beach and the air is all copper tone and the top 20 countdown blasting over the snack bar speakers. There are corn dogs and snow cones and the jabber and squeeze of people sunning on every side of us. I've never seen Michael with his shirt off. He always seemed so student council and swing choir, but there he is stretched out on one elbow with his squinty smile and his submariner stomach and all I can do is keep cracking jokes. And then we're holding hands and everything feels like church. Everyone on shore stands looking at us, a chain of us, walking slowly through the shallows toward the bobbing buoys, searching for the drowning boy. The only sound, the steady dribble coming off the end of the big slide. And as the water inches up my chest, I shiver, thinking of brushing up against something beneath the surface. Later on land, we watch them bring him to shore like they're teaching him to walk. He's skinny in bright floral trunks, eyes shut, not a boy like I'd imagined, but hovering somewhere between boy and man, hovering there forever now, for when they lower him to the wet, footprinted sand, his limbs go every which way like a puppet cut loose. And I feel Michael wrap his towel around his girlfriend from behind. And I watch the lifeguard kneel to kiss the young man's lips. And all I can do is keep cracking jokes. I think here's one more father, son talk. This might be a series later on of different talks, but I guess the subtitle would be dating. My mom and dad dated again after their second spouses died, some 30 years after their divorce. And they'd call me up giving their versions of how it went. I could only utter single syllables like oh, wow, good. The kinds of words I was trained to use on the suicide prevention line where you're urged to never challenge any of the caller's delusional voices. Dad had all these plans for their future while mom was reminded why they had split up in the first place. He was excited. She found herself getting depressed. The dating only lasted a few months when mom finally called it off. And afterwards every time I'd visit dad would pour over conspiracy theories of who had poisoned her thoughts against him. It was all going so well, he'd repeat. And I'd mostly nod, try to steer the topic off in another direction, avoid giving advice or hurting him further, thinking of all the plans romantic and otherwise that hadn't turned out even near the place I'd intended. Sometimes there isn't a reason, dad. Things just don't work out. And we drive in silence for a while on our way to smoky bones for a little barbecue, cornfields spreading out forever on either side of the interstate, silo standing sentinel in the distance. Thank you all for being here. And thank you very much to Bear Pond Books, which has been a foundation of culture making for almost 50 years. And thank you very much to James for your incredible work, for not only on these wonderful anthologies, but for bringing forward poetry in such an energetic and generous way. It's really very dear to me to be here. This is a kind of home for me, though I live in Burlington. I'm Judy Chalmer, by the way, I should have said that. I lived here in central Vermont for about 25 years. And it was the place where all my children grew up. It was the place where I started writing poetry. And it was the place where I, as an adult, grew up. So this is very, very special. I should also say that I'm really happy to be on the board of Vermont Humanities, which is a wonderful organization for people who love to co-create culture, as we all do here tonight. And not the least reason which I adore that organization is that it supports Poem City. So thank you very much to Poem City as well. And it's just really a treat to be here and to be part of this. I'm going to start reading from How to Love the World, my own poem, an essay on age. It was a day to sing the praises of fire, to bow to its purpose, toes stretched apart, layers peeled. Our bodies gathered into their warmest folds. It was a day of mists, of freezing and love. Now the night when it returns will be kinder. Now the moon will dominate the dogs, sending them wild into the burdock. And we will have them for hours on their backs. This is the bright snap of apple. Catch in the throat. You realize how deeply you have loved. You blow hard on the flames, and each day is remembered mainly for the brush of lips, for the way we stand, hip to hip, in sheets of rain, almost covered enough. And next I'm going to read a poem by my friend, Patricia Fontaine. I've chosen this poem in part because Patricia also has very deep connections here in central Vermont and Montpelier. And also, Patricia was the person who introduced me to James Cruz. So I'm very grateful to her and would like to read her poem tonight, Sap Isicles. On the row of fresh pruned maples along Bostwick Road, the cold wind froze Sap Isicles sideways. I saw a chickadee land at an icicle tip, so I pulled over and put my tongue to the cold tears of the tree, tasted flint, tasted maple steam when it rises off the pan, tasted the shimmer pulsing up inside the cool gray bark as the sun applies its long march hands. The happiest child in me was tongued to that tree while the saddest reed the lost limbs. On the side of the road, we grew up inside my black coat, became white haired, cared nothing for the gopping cars. And next I'm going to read the first poem that I wrote was also in minnow. And I have copies here tonight. This was published in February of 2020. You remember February of 2020. So my reading that was scheduled for Bear Pond books, of course, didn't happen. So I brought them tonight and I'm just so happy to be here. So I'm going to read another poem from this book, minnow, pocket, nighttime. It's quiet. You're starting to shut down. A yawn, an empty cup carried to the sink. Nothing complex, just a little need for air. Anyway, you're out the door. Did I say February? It's taken some time to bundle up. The little park is white under the lamp. No one lingers. You walk, you turn home. Breath, a still cloud, no matter. A few months and you'll hear some things moving. You'll smell the greening. You have this for now. The winter wood and its great absorbent heart. The young beach, its dead leaves tiger bright. The glitter above, the softness below. Now you've come to it. You reach down in your pocket. Step up to your door. Here are your cares. Slip off your coat and be received. And lastly, I'm going to read two newer poems that both address the same theme but with very different approaches. The first is actually in conversation with a poem by C.K. Williams called The Vessel. So the title of my poem is a line from his poem, which is the title is Is This Prayer? And it has an epigraph that is a quote from C.K. Williams' poem, The Vessel. So I'll read the epigraph. What makes me think, though, that the region of my soul in which all this activity is occurring is a site which God might consider an engaging or even unacceptable spiritual location. C.K. Williams is a very intellectual writer. So that's the end of the epigraph. But is it all this activity occurring in the region of the soul? Why not South Burlington? On the second most traveled path in Red Rocks Park just before the overlook with the skimpy railing, where thank God my dog didn't fall all the way down that time I didn't see him behind me. And when I went back there, he was looking up from a ledge beneath the overhang out of reach with no way to get him back up. And what about the moment? The present moment, not the dog one. A gloomy day in November. I'm trying to pray. There was a patch just now of blue sky, and it lifted my spirits. Putting aside for now, C.K.'s thought about God's thought, what throws me off, and now that patch of blue sky, by the way, is gone, is if I still want a way to say I am or was grateful, then do I say the blue patch was given to all of us or just to me? How presumptuous is it to claim to be a we? If I lived on a dry plane, my farm soil cracked and jagged plates, would a blue sky elevate my soul? What about the many some right here in the gloom who wouldn't want any part of my prayer? Thank you very much. I'm a little baffled by who when I pray I am. But putting that consideration aside as well, if I just start and let God figure it out, is it the blue or the light that's given me a lift? It's the blue. But if I'm grateful for a clear sky, what about the rest? Shouldn't I be grateful for the gloom and the cycles of rain that sustain every third grade science fair? I don't want to be alone. And thank God I've still got my dog. I tried to climb down to the side where there wasn't a guardrail, but I couldn't get close, and that's when he started to cry. And the neighbor who climbed down back up with me said I'd have to call the fire department. So I got out my phone, and just as I was about to dial, the dog appeared next to me. And the neighbor gently said, maybe next time I should follow the law and keep him on a leash. So it kind of feels empty to say I'm grateful for a cloud or anything for that matter that just sustains me. My thinking, it's still murky, is a relational approach to God, but not so much about God. CK0 is in on God. Isn't he a kacham? But we're the ones we have to get along with, despite the way we're separate beings. At least that's my November way of looking at it, that we're stuck here inside our separate skins. No wonder CK longs for God who doesn't have a skin, and is lonely. But we do understand each other somehow through some magic of receptors and nerves. And I'm not talking about sex, by the way, so that's comforting. And now we know how trees converge. So maybe we're not as separate as it seems. People, I mean, though, the dogs on canny. And someday, someone will find little filaments that we can't see that connect us. Though that would be too bad, because it's way more poetic and better exercise if our souls could jump through our skin, and that's how we get joint budgets and sewage systems. It's lucky, given we're each an eye, we can even perceive each other. And that's just the start. There's more to it, but once you go down that path, you get to everyone you miss. And even if you forget about love and death, there's so much on the side, like trees in the sky, and the way if you like them, if you even start in on being thankful for this world, it breaks your poor heart. I worked this out once, how to form a prayer with my wife, who would really rather be called my partner, but that would take too long to explain. And now I can't remember what I decided. That's the trouble with personal prayer. My wife, if I may with her permission, use again a problematic shorthand for a relationship that's deeply nuanced, who is more spiritual than I, and also more efficient with words, says she likes to get her prayers from the book. They're catchy, almost like the tune for Kaufman's rye bread of the highest quality. You can hum over the hard parts and no one is the wiser. And for her being agreeably spiritual, some of the words pop out and she takes them aside for a private jamboree. I just lost my place. No surprise, the dog likes her better than he likes me. Every day she plunks down on the couch and says to him, come here, come here and talk to me. She's so cozy and lovable. I should go home and snuggle with her and ask for God, see problematic above. Same subject, very different tone, of. Tangled, sleepless, a dried out hydrangea ball snaps off and rolls on the wind into the woods where it lives out the rest of its days. That is, it finishes decaying. A few more petals breaking off every day, a tear at the edge of this one, a crack there, until gradually it's just a skeleton and then not anything with a name that a casual hiker might know. It may not make sense when it comes to decay to think though of finishing. The brittle hydrangea continues its progress. It doesn't visibly at least seem to feel itself at all misplaced. All my life, I've thought of myself as a being in the world, but was I wrong? I walk in the woods, sometimes I'm lost. Am I of the woods? Am I of the world? Could that be what is meant by God's love? Last night I dreamt I was gradually losing touch. I remembered who and where I was some of the time, only enough to realize some of the time I hadn't. I had been somewhere incomprehensible. My children loved me. I could see that when I was clear, but I was losing them. I was losing everyone I loved. A short way into the woods, I am trying to imagine love as much of the world as the beings that tumble through it. Minute by minute, I think this. Thank you very much. Hi everybody. So funny feeling to be seeing full human beings. Really nice. Thank you so much, James. And it was so hard to pick poems to read. Every time I opened the book, I found something that I loved. So that was really tricky. I'm going to start with Andrea Potos' poem on page 124. My name is Laura Foley. Thank you. Am I loud enough? Okay. Abundance to share with the birds. Another early morning in front of the bathroom mirror, my daughter making faces at herself, while I pull back her long brown hair, gathering the breath and shine in my hands, brushing and smoothing before weaving the braid she will wear to school for the day. Afterwards, stray strands nestle in the brush. And because nothing of beauty is ever wasted, I pull them out, stand on the front porch, and let them fly. And so my daughter is visiting, and I'm very grateful that she's here today. And so I just picked out these poems about daughters. This one is by Fadi Judah called Mymesis. My daughter wouldn't hurt a spider that had nested between her bicycle handles for two weeks, she waited, until it left of its own accord. If you tear down the web, I said, it will simply know this isn't a place to call home and you'd get to go biking. She said, that's how others become refugees, isn't it? This poem is one I wrote about my son, and it's called A Perfect Ark. I remember the first time he dove, he was five, and we were at a swimming pool. And I said, you tip your head down as you were going in. Well, your feet go up. And then his lithe little body did it. Exactly right, a perfect dive, sliding downward, arcing without a wave. And I just stood amazed and without words as his blonde head came up again. And today I watched him for the longest time as he walked firm and upright along the street with backpack, guitar, all he needs, blossoming outward in a perfect arc, a graceful turning away from me. He now has two little children. This poem is a memory of my mother. It's called Learning by Heart. I was seven, couldn't sleep, fearing my French teacher. Afraid I couldn't learn a line I had to memorize. Mom, trilling the night's loneliest hour at the piano, made up a little-ting song to help me remember. I did, and still do, her voice etched in tenderness, fingers running over the keys somewhere deep inside me. So I still have that sentence. When étudiant, ne pose attentive, elle est un peu bavarde. I wanted to read a few poems from my new collection. It just came out, and it's called Everything We Need, Poems from El Camino. And the cover photograph was taken by my wife. And when we were on Camino in Spain, 500 miles across the north of Spain, and we did it the next year, 300 miles up the coast of Portugal, both times ending up in Santiago. Packing light, excuse me. Slung across my shoulders, I will walk with it across Vermont. Then the Pyrenees, along a rutted ancient Roman road. Not too heavy, I will carry its silent weight through noisy Pamplona, Borgos, Leon, across the flat Meseta, whose dry heat cooks my feet in sturdy shoes, through soothing wooded mountains, valleys of Galicia. My not young knees will carry us through Spanish wilderness and time. Isabella's shadow, Charlemagne's too, Teresa of Avila, St. James's, of course, to Compostella, Meadow of the Stars, step by step from east to west, beneath the glittering Milky Way, through history and back to possible futures, my purple backpack and me. And this one is called Belief. So this was, the Meseta is the very dry section of the walk. And it's usually dreaded as being a time of not much change, very flat and very hot. And as it turned out, in our case, it just rained all the time, which was such a relief. And it also meant a profusion of wildflowers belief. Walking the endless Meseta, we turn to see yellow broom flowers, orange poppies going by, the only way to know these pilgrims' progress. Each night, an ancient town new to us steps closer to our journey's end. We feel no mystic pull toward Santiago, but we believe in the awe of those who do as Gregorian chants pipe through a darkened church and a friend we meet weeps freely at a cafe table. We leave Castro-Harris in the graying dark before dawn, before cafes open, our shoes tapping a slow rhythm on quiet streets. And though at this moment they're empty of all but us, we know the road, the path we've chosen takes us somewhere many have gone before. We feel them all in the hard-packed trail, in our aching feet, in our will to keep going. A mysticism we can believe. And I'm going to end with a poem also from this book. After we came back, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. And we found that the experience of having hiked the Camino twice at that point, and we do plan to do it again in the future, gave us a kind of map, in our inner map way of dealing with difficulty. Because the Camino was a wonderful experience and was very difficult. It was like how to go through a challenge. So this poem is called To Santiago. We began climbing in the years darkest days, diagnosis in late November, turning trips to the Cancer Center's mountain into adventure, tying a scallop shell to her hospital backpack. We met afford illness as a pilgrimage to Santiago. Eight chemo treatments followed by surgery. We trekked December's steep, bitter peaks, January's icy valleys. How many miles we'd say about halfway, sometime in snowy February? We slogged on through a wet March, a windy April that didn't seem like spring. Though our feet didn't develop blisters, her heart raced at an alarming rate. She lost her hair and her taste buds changed. A bit metallic, she'd say with grit. As we approached surgery in early May, we searched the horizon for the cathedral. Knew the steeple would soon come into view. Soon we'd descend the final hill to Santiago, soon the maroon-robed priests would swing the Boto Fumero over our heads, fill the vast space with cleansing fragrance of myrrh and frankincense, soon we'd stroll along the beach. At the end of the world, the beach that ends one world and begins another, cancer would become a wintery memory and our legs would rest. Our stash of metaphors ready for the next quest. Now, if you're anything like me, you are full of poetry, but I just want to share a couple of my own poems and say thank you again to all the amazing poets who joined me tonight. You are why I do this and so thank you for allowing me to use your poetry in these books. So probably like many of us as the pandemic has gone on and we've weathered these past couple of years, I've had to kind of redefine and learn what self-care means for myself. So this is my poem, Self-Care. Some days it feels like a foreign language. I'm asked to practice with new words for happiness, work and love. I'm still learning how to say a cup of tea for no reason, what to call the extra honey I drizzle in, how to label the relentless urge to do more and more as useless, and how to translate the heart's pounding message when it comes enough, enough. This morning I search for words to capture the glimmering sun as it lifts above the mountains, clouds already closing in as fat droplets of rain darken the deck. I'm learning to call this stillness, self-care too, just standing here as gold finches scatter up from around the feeder, like broken pieces of bright yellow stained glass, reassembling in the sheltering arms of a maple. And I just watched those gold finches this morning too. They are so bright yellow and golden right now. That's amazing. This next poem is called The Pool, and this is about kind of a retroactive kindness, so looking back at life and memory and realizing the kindness and attention of my father who always tried to please me when I was a very difficult child, please. So this is called The Pool because he couldn't afford the kidney-shaped in-ground pool we all wanted. My father went out and bought a used galvanized pool whose rusted rim I refused to touch. As usual, he had a solution. He split a length of black rubber hose down the middle with his pocket knife, then stretched it over the rough sides inch by inch until no rust showed. Back then, I never thought such gestures were selfless, evidence of what we call unconditional love. But now I feel my small hands gripping soft rubber and I see my father on the back porch, cigarette hanging from his smiling lips as he watches me lift myself out of the pool, flinging cold water from my goose-pimpled skin as if I'd been reborn again. Hard to get through that without the tears. So just wanted to read a couple more of my favorite poems from the anthology and this one is by Edel Lehmann, sort of in the same vein of looking back and realizing what our loved ones do for us. This is called The Raincoat. When the doctor suggested surgery and a brace for all my youngest years, my parents scrambled to take me to massage therapy, deep tissue work, osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine unpooled, unspooled a bit. I could breathe again and move more in a body unclouded by pain. My mom would tell me to sing songs to her the whole 45-minute drive to Middle 2 Rock Road and 45 minutes back from physical therapy. She'd say even my voice sounded unfettered by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang because I thought she liked it. I never asked her what she gave up to drive me or how her day was before this chore. Today at her age, I was driving myself home from yet another spine appointment, singing along to some maudlin, the solid song on the radio. And I saw a mom take her raincoat off and give it to her young daughter when a storm took over the afternoon. My God, I thought. My whole life, I've been under her raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet. And I just want to end on this poem. And again, thank you so much for everyone coming out on a typical chilly April, Vermont evening and enjoying some poetry in person. This is by Rudy Francisco, who's kind of a spoken word poet. And I think it's important to note too that he's writing as a younger black man, especially with this poem. And this one is called Mercy. She asks me to kill the spider. Instead, I get the most peaceful weapons I can find. I take a cup and a napkin. I catch the spider, put it outside and allow it to walk away. If I am ever caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, just being alive and not bothering anyone, I hope I am greeted with the same kind of mercy. So thank you all so much again for coming out tonight. We poets will stick around if you want to chat with us or have any questions. And I just want to thank you all here at Bear Pond again for hosting us. Thank you all for coming.