 Thank you for coming. Good evening. Thank you for coming to Berakon Books for a poetry reading with our former Vermont poet laureate Sydney Lee. A few, yeah, thanks a lot. I'd like to thank Orca Media for filming tonight's event, and I'd like to let you know that you can sign up for our newsletter. There was a clipboard that got passed around to learn about future events. Next week we host the Commissioner of Vermont Forests, Parks and Recreation, Michael Snyder, for a talk on his new book Woods Wise An Exploration of Forests and Forestry. And that might be a nice follow-up to tonight's reading since Sydney's poetry features Vermont's woods and natural rural landscape. Also for you poetry lovers, save the date for October 8th when we host Reuben Jackson and his new poetry collection Scattered Clouds. And this is available here tonight at Berakon Books. So we're thrilled to have Sydney here. His new book here is here. It's a wonderful collection of poems about a life in awe of the world right here around us. The book is a life remembered, a life in gratitude and apology, a life in the 21st century, a life in the country, a life in close proximity to mortality, and a life in mindfulness and love. It is simply stunning in its grace, and I love the poem Spilled Milk, an apology to a daughter almost 40 years late. It really struck me as sweet and insightful. So I urge you all, if you haven't already, to pick up a copy or two because poetry makes a great gift. By the book, support the poet, support your favorite independent bookstore. Sydney will sign books after his reading and talk tonight. Sydney Lee was Vermont Poet Laureate from 2010 to 2015. He was also the founder and for 13 years the editor of New England Review. He taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Middlebury, Wesleyan, the Vermont College MFA, and several European institutions. Winner of the Poets Prize in 1998 and a Pulitzer finalist in 2001, his work has appeared in over 60 anthologies, and he co-edited the anthology, Roads Taken, Contemporary Vermont Poetry, which we have here at the bookstore as well. His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in all the major U.S. literary quarterlies, as well as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Sports Illustrated, and The New York Times. We have plenty of chairs if you wanted to come on out. In addition, Lee has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim foundations. We're thrilled he's here. Please help me welcome Sydney Lee. I'm going to try and project, but if you feel at any point that I ought to pick up that handheld mic, don't be shy about it. That's a lovely introduction. I wish I lived closer than an hour away from it, because this is my favorite independent bookstore. I don't know how you could find a better one. I can't get out of this place without buying something, although my wife was taking care of that tonight, so I'm not obliged anymore. But I'm delighted to be invited, and I'll read Old Baker's Dozens of Poems. You can't stop me, so I might as well forge ahead. One of the audience members earlier said a very, very nice thing to me about how the first poem in this book called Here at Summer's End had been a bit of a bomb tour lately during some difficult time, and the last thing on Earth that I imagined my own poetry to be is prophetic. But as curious as I was putting this together, I looked at all the poems written before 2016, including this one, and saw that a lot of them had to do with an insistence on presence, physical, mental, spiritual, psychological, what have you, on here-ness. And then in 2016, August, I had a heart attack, which was something I hadn't predicted, and I felt fine. Indeed, I was training for a six-mile kayak race thinking maybe this year I'd do the 12-mile one, because I was feeling that fit, and then I got this little pinch. And then when they said you're having a heart attack at the local clinic, I said, no, that's what other people have, and that's not me. I've done well in that kayak race since, so they did something right at Eastern Main Medical Center. The first poem in the book is called Here at Summer's End, that birds have largely quieted me distress us. Like neglected male, the garden's lettuce went yellow weeks back, and it simply dissolves. But we ought to pause before we focus on loss, and the season is still teeming with vegetation. No matter the months, our sense of wonder remains, unless we will it to leave. Even now the mercury flirts with 85, so its wonders say how starlings decide to convene for migrations. We can watch their flocks in the roadbeds. It's a marvel as well, whatever the forces that's already started to blanch the legs of the snowshoe hares. Our longing is always for now to endure, though since the dawn of thinking, many a thinker has found death an engine of beauty. Truth is, however, our world will never go dead. Those heads of lettuce have fused with humus below, and after those starlings wing off, the joncos and titmice will show. And the ghostly hairs of winter won't be ghosts at all, the creatures with dark flesh packed with a bone under ivory hides. Coyotes will hunt them to keep alive through the ineluctable, I almost said awful, chill. And even then the ice-peeds on softwood boughs may look, if we want, like permitted fruit. As the season nears, or lingers, or ends, an amplitude can tell us we're still a subject to spells. We're here after all, let's chant it throughout the year, like so much birdsong. We're here, we're here, we're here, we're here. Thank you. Thank you. It's a poem that Samantha referred to called Spilled Milk, an apology to a daughter almost 40 years late. A train lumbered out of Toronto Station. Together we headed for subarctic lakes to visit your brother at camp, your older and only sibling then. I dreamed of Northern air as our coach careened past clinkers, barrels, filthy railway sheds, ugly as you were lovely. I ordered a spread of lunchtime stuff with for me some coffee, a glass of milk for you. A dozen miles would pass before you took a drink. You had a habit, almost willful it seemed, to spilling whatever you drank, and must have been afraid, damn it. To reach for your glass while the dining car swayed and quivered. As for me, distracted I was fixed on the winking waters we'd find upstream from the mess of Milky River at Trackside. In time we escaped those outskirts into open prairie space, and you spilled the glass, of course. I pray at least I said nothing out loud, but I have no doubt you could read my miserable thoughts. And now, if I get to hell, as I sometimes think I will if justice prevails, precisely for things I've thought, my Hadean vision may be of your shame-ridden six-year-old face, all riven by worry, which should have been my fatherly duty to soothe, restoring what had been its beauty. My wife is a really interesting friend who farms in Western Massachusetts and does a lot of other things. She's a wonderful artist and photographer and naturalist. And she came up one weekend while I was going to be away to teach my wife and her Jewish friend, local friend, how to make those Ukrainian eggs, gorgeous works of art, the poem called, un-originally, Ukrainian egg. I'm off on a late-season fishing trip with the guys. We bump along in my beat-up pick-up laughing, our humorous adolescent, the day-blown chilling. Meanwhile, her dear friend Portia and Robin, my wife, are learning from Joan here on a visit to fashion Ukrainian eggs. The teacher and students are certain there will really be something to see, the eggs, I mean. After our umpteenth idiot joke obscene, I feel some sadness rise up in me like one at Shullo might summon. That trio of women back home will be chuckling too, I suspect, though their jokes will remain a lot less crude in a doubt than the ones we're telling. But the women will also be serious, each intending, and I'm sure they will, to make objects of beauty and grace. But why would that cause this weeping response to rise? Vain, nail, I turn my face aside. To call those women cute as absurd and not at all a group that anyone would patronize. It's perhaps that I'm thinking, and not for the very first time, how much in my life I would, if I could, revise. Like the way my grade school posse of punks and clowns would stop when the girls turned to projects all their own. Some more pants under dresses against the cold. They'd play secretary, nurse, or laughably bold, even cops or firefighters, pilots, cowboys, soldiers. And we, we mocked them, we whittled unschooled fools, sure of ourselves, sure that we'd prevail in that age before we helped to raise our daughter. My father was a commander of the so-called colored troops in the segregated army in World War II. Some of the few African-American troops to be at Omaha Beach, 70% of them killed. And I probably, nine out of ten people under 60, don't realize that the army was segregated in that way until after the war on President Truman integrated them. At any rate, I was, came that close from being born in Alabama, where the hurricane recently ravaged. And that something happened that impaled my mother to come north to Pennsylvania where I was born. It's called the Owl and I. Once the Jim Crack Cross got burned on our lawn, my mother took off back north to have me. My father was stationed in Gadgeton, Alabama, before the Second Great War, commander of so-called colored troops. And he'd invited a few of his men inside the house, it seems. A radical thing, indeed, just then in the heart of Jim Crow Jixie. So my mother escaped giving birth down there, though I don't have any idea why I'd think of this, which, near to her death, she spoke of so many years after. Why now, on watching a barred owl glide to a hemlock gone dark at sundown? Everything else is well going dark around me, here where I stand. Once at midnight, she thought she'd heard a whoop of human anguish and wondered whether some soldier were being lynched outside. My father went for a look but found nothing. My lifelong relations with my mother were vexed, I now suspect, in part because between us two stood a lot in common. Jews were being crammed into cattle cars then, but for dad and those troops the evil in Europe lay several months ahead. Still, real or imagined, that cry of mortal misery stuck with mother. Though no signs of nearby violence turned up next morning. The company came on mass to mess. Shit on a shingle, as the G.I. said, dried beef on toast. So life went on, at least for a while, more or less. It ought to bring comfort than I'm where I am, aging but saved, my kin constantly swelling as sons and daughters produce their sons and daughters. And winter so harsh this year, giving way at last to spring, the snow drops glinting, the freshets making their evanescent cascades through the woods. I recall how my mother loved this season. Why then this lonely sensation? It feels that I'm in some pitch black tunnel and won't get out again. That this, as the saying goes, is it. That all have at the end. Of course there can't be anything to it. It's a sorrowful eight note anthem of that single owl. The sound just now having reached my vexed old head. Though I'd be foolish to think that song was addressed to anyone human. I've obviously misrecorded. Oh, 31, not 21. My grandmother always said there was less suffering when the mind went first. I don't seem to be suffering. This is called chimera. The eagle's wings were angled in a stoop that seemed almost languid. And yet in an eye blank it flew past the window and out of view. For me, now in my 70s, it can feel as if everybody were gone or about to be gone. For instance, my brother-in-law dead some time now young. I love them for years and years. Parents, a sibling, peers. The great creatures cutting across the window less sight than loss. As if flight had exemplified the concept brevity. And the bird were conscious of me. And consciousness were crucial in you, or me, or an eagle. I have many friends here who will assure you that I've watched the fun in real life. It's one called I Am Pune a Victorian. It has an epigraph from William Makepeace Thackeray. There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know until he takes up a pen to write. Or within a woman. Or maybe Old Thackeray was delusionary, yearning to believe that simply by being a writer he could write and thoughts would just show up. It's been too long since I read about his Becky Sharp and others to evaluate whether in fact they do arrive in his famous vanity fair or elsewhere in the imminent Victorian's work. Maybe he's only vain. But I also yearn to believe that reading that passage somewhere I jotted it down because somehow it's word spoke to something inside me. That is now that I'm taking up the pen's contemporary equivalent now that I'm typing, I hope my scribbles will appear perhaps not as thought, perhaps precisely, but as subject or theme that will ring the least bit true. At least I can dream so. Or on a better day, if you'll forgive my presumption, they may even instruct. How long, however, dear William, must I keep on composing these lines without deliberation before those thoughts you speak of, Supervene? I settle for one. It's exacting to keep all this up dimly expecting some higher level of mental engagement as, meanwhile, the feature by our windows seems keen with the same old delightful birds of our winters. A red-pole pine-siskin, miniscule-brown creeper, nut-hatch, the usual horde of chickadees, a tufted tit-mouse, hairy and downy woodpeckers, and down again to the more alert bird's consternation and mine, though I confess its beauty also thrills me. A sharp-shinned hawk, fixed on murder. It skulks in the high-bare limbs of that paper birch until it stoops upon some blightful victim, curiously merely perches there, a declining to dive into rake its havoc. Your comments have made a little peace in my mind, Mr. Bakepeace. I took you at your word, and here I am, with far-along thoughts, having you and I was at the start. I've been pressing and posing ahead for five desultory stanzas, and I conclude that since I have to move forward, since I have to move toward conclusion, that like so much of life in the way I have known it, all but a tiny part of the process is consisted of waiting without a clue. Not that there isn't a whole array of worse concerns to fret about than this bemusement. I haven't yet gone down to the village store to fetch the newspaper. Doubtless full of examples of such worse things. But meanwhile, look at these birds, so vivid, brilliant, who etch their small but eloquent marks upon the snow, even the ones without a clue, they're close to death. Many, many years ago, I was sitting in a canoe in West Grand Lake in Washington, Maine, watching an entire peninsula burn. And it burned. Things have changed. We don't have so many forest fires in the east anymore. Better surveillance, better firefighting equipment. But in those days, often these fires would erupt, and then they would burn essentially until the snow came. They'd creep underground along the mulch and then they'd come up again. My favorite poet from the local town of 70 up there, George MacArthur, who would entertain you a lot more than I if he were here as an old water. And it was depression times. And he told me that he worked as a fire watchman one summer. He said, I was loafing. I didn't know nothing to do. He says, I had a little jug of coal. I kept that damn thing going on some along. Anyway. And I reflected on that, remembering that. And then I had a dream. I don't usually like to write about dreams because they're usually boring. I hope this one is not. This poem is called Fire and Jewel. 80-foot hemlock spruce for a pine. They kept lifting off their stumps like so many rockets. Smoke trail and all. And I beheld the fire across late from where I drifted. I'd been plumbing the water for fish when my eyes were lifted. 50 years later, I still recall my thoughts. And I felt that the thinkin' was more than odd. I was glad I had faculties to behold the hills astonishing orange heat as it flared to white with each explosion. Then the whole of that conflagration bending toward Earth, a horizontal wall, a monolith that somehow tore downhill on the sudden fury of wind. It was gorgeous. Several hours he'd go by till I learned Earl Bailey was forced to fly as quickly as he could on his dozer down from the ridge right into Farm Cove. He just had to take the loss that was at or burned. Donald Chambers wielding an axe in his turn with a makeshift crew collapsed from labor and heat. Paul the storekeeper dragged him away by his feet. I knew Don Sadler just a few more years. He and Earl and Paul. Good honest men. I can't account for dreams like the one of last night when I watched that fire again. In what seemed again pure quiet, serene, the same jetliner as years ago crossed high, the same scent rose, torch needles, caustic smoke. The same evil roar came on as I rocked in the same canoe, the waves still slapping its hull. And an hour or five decades back, the length of that ridge line turned the color of onyx. The latest of my wife's birthdays will soon be upon us. Is that why the dream passed smoothly into the next one? I saw, precisely, a beautiful onyx stone hung on her breast from a slip of chain. I'd never dreamt such a woman as that hillside blacken wouldn't meet her for years. Today, I drove through a jewelry shop as if still dreaming, 300 miles to the west of that little mountain. I bought the necklace and I felt some fire in my being, my old version of one that kindled in that old autumn, which has, for a long time, underground kept burning. Oh. A poem called Auction. If I passed their sleigh-backed house on a summer day and like anyone in town, I'd hear Fred scraping at his cherished rosewood fiddle, which is now just char. Hazel would be singing no matter, no better than her husband played. Neither one cared. They made their music for fun, and I made fun of them both. Then came fire. I feel odd guilt to consider their frailty, and I wonder, what am I here to see? I was nowhere, I think, of an early love of how often I laughed at her dreams of being a painter and what she hoped but was simply unable to save with shapes on canvas and colors. Of course, she left me. My life has been more capacious than I deserve, but in those days, her loss kept scorching my soul. I was all but speechless. She later died of an illness horribly young. I reflected after her fire from ahead cooled, and soon, in fact, simply guttered. I sometimes wished catastrophe would strike her. Fred and Hazel reduced to cinder. That was a shock and a shame. But more vanished, too, some even beforehand. The children they bred in that old house had moved off years back, though they've come today to reap what little they may. Their son and two daughters are here. Unlike the initial silverware, the tunes we mocked, the crude watercolor-thread rot of sunsets, snowstorms, birds, old barns and deer. Hazel's antimicassers, black wisps on blackened couchs and chair. Old photographs of his parents and hers long gone, now gone again. And again, I'm thinking of gauntness, the way my lover would dip the brush in paint and scowl as if in pain. Here's the little remains to sell as absurd. The auctioneer stumbled, searching for words. The people will get a sense of the mean age of my life. How many people in the room remember stewed bakers? Yeah. They grow old with me. At least call them string beans. And I gotta tell this story about the stewed baker. Not that it has anything to do with the pump. But I was saying earlier to my friend George Thomas that some people sneeze when there's ragweed. I tell stories when something reminds me like a stewed baker. When I was a kid, I'll ask you again. I don't know if anybody ever saw a film called Weed Geordie. It was about an island shepherd who was prepping for the island games and he was what we used to call it, throwing the hammer. A big old sledgehammer. I just thought that was the coolest motion and he won and he got the girl and everything. I get home with that little 13-year-old, stumble into the shed, get my dad's sledgehammer out and I throw it about from me to Scooter. Over and over again. One last try. And I don't know what happened. This thing took off. And there was a white picket fence in front of our lawn and a stewed baker coming down. And it was all like in slow motion. And bang, right on the roof. Thank God, not the windshield, right? This guy pulled it off. Just as my father pulled it off. And he came over. He was the mildest of men. He said, you get in the house. And then some negotiation went on. That was the last thing. So then I came back into the house. My father, what in the world were you? And he started to crack up. Thank God my mother was somewhere else or I'd been beaten to a pulp. But at any rate, that has nothing to do with this film. This is called Stick Season. And I wrote it after hearing our friend Peter Gilbert then of the Vermont Humanities Council do a piece on VPR about Stick Season in mid-December or what have you. And I got thinking on how much I like that time of year, which is counterintuitive to some of you perhaps. But anyway, Stick Season. The one that precedes my season is the one that always shows on this quaint calendar photograph. The one that brings the tourists to scenes that are glorious, granted, exorbitant on the side hills. Most of the leaves incandescent drifting or plunging downward scuttle along the road beds of the creatures reluctant to be seen and warning us to notice them after all. But give me this, middle of November, Season of Sticks, a stubborn oak and beech leaves, umber and dung which rattle and gusts that smell so elemental they stab your heart. The trees, the other, unclothed ones standing there, gaunt bedignified and you can look straight past them. The contours of the mountains are perhaps but lovely in their apparent constancy. That gap-toothed barnhouse of space alone since its owner died. You remember Studebakers? That's one over there, a pickup truck, flat-footed among the sumacs, painted green way back these days at a stake in the hue of these later leaves I love. Old age has changed the mountains, too. They're rounder now than once, shaped so by the eons. Everything's for a time. Another colleague at the Vermont College, now Vermont College of the Fine Arts, named Jack Myers, died a few years ago. Jack was a Jewish boy from the North Shore of Boston and yet he ended up teaching at Southern Methodist University all his life and living in Dallas, but he never lost his love of the ocean so that after he died of cancer, his wife discovered a directive that he wanted his ashes scattered in as many oceans that she could manage to get. And she's been very diligent about that. I think she's been five of the seven seas. I was there for the Atlantic a spreading of the ashes off of Jetty in Winthrop, Massachusetts. That was the first stop. And this is a poem called Dark Chord, remembering Jack Myers, 2011. So an hours before I drove here, I slipped a DVD of Mingus in Europe into the player. And there he was on bass with Eric Dolphie on alto and bass clarinet, Jackie Byer on keyboard. Danny Richman drummed the Johnny Coleson trumpet and Clifford Jordan tenor. He was so young and strong. They were so gifted. And I was here on a jetty above the Atlantic one of several friends and family gathered to scatter the ashes of Jack our poet into the wave. Poor Eric Dolphie died within months of that tour in 64 while I finished up my chaotic college years. I'd been no genius. I had so little to offer the world, but here I was now. A pair of cormorants skimmed quickly by while two young lovers embraced the way they're supposed to embrace on the beach. And I saw the moon rise full. All was perfect, it seemed, except that Jack wasn't with us. Which may have accounted for the sound, not the intricate magic of that Mingus band I heard, nor a line or a stance from Jack's mournful witty poems, nor was it the cry of sea birds. And if Wagner didn't drive me almost mad, maybe because he does, I'd have said that the cord was a dark Fognerian one. As it played, it washed all over me as surf does a rocky shore. Some aunt or cousin that evening would show me a picture of Jack at 17 right here in Winfrey, Massachusetts sitting cocky and proud. On a motorcycle, handsome and frank, and it was oddly as though I somehow heard that photograph too, Jack sounded so young. His engine rumbled while he said something in that Boston grove he never lost. A boyhood friend had a word to say as well if it broke down before he could finish. I'll miss him terribly, said Mark, sweet mutual friend, and terrible it might be. So when I heard the cord again, it reminded me as I fought for balance on those rough and slippery rocks because I was old Jack's age exactly, damn it. I was older than those masters of jazz holding forth in Europe vibrant life back in the year when I was only 21. The cord reminded me as I noted the cormorants winging back and the lovers walking back and the moon and noted the ocean breeze the good Jack's went through childhood and thought I could be noting all this idly as believed me in this moment I'd love to have done. The dark cord reminded me something big has been shaping up for years and years and now you know old man it's for all of us here including you. I apologize. I had this corporal tunnel operation and I don't have any feeling back on my fingers yet. As I hope. Thank you very much. Alright. Coming to a close now I always say that when I gave my first poetry reading way back in the early 70s I was just so nervous I couldn't even describe it now. In my best poem I couldn't describe it. But the poet Richard Hugo had been very nice to me when I was starting out and he was out in Seattle but I called him up and I confessed I'm so I'm so nervous. Dick had a great big head with wrinkles not normally found in nature on it. It looked like perhaps on a St. Bernard. And he said well there's a secret to it kid. Oh good. He said never let a poetry reading exceed in length an episode, a single episode of Kojak. When I get to about half an hour I see this big wrinkled head and this bald one on the other shoulder and I become apprehensive. The poem called News Comes Third. Oh these guilty pleasures if that's what I really should call them I buy the local paper with store coffee. Then drive back home and sit ignoring whatever may be transpiring outside the window. Squall of the spring Tom Turkey calling his hands. The contrails of planes on the way to Europe, Tokyo, Rio, Paris who knows. I sit from the cup and turn first things to letter turn first thing to letters primarily to see just what might annoy me today. If it's someone fussing over an issue like water rates in a small town near or far whose fortune or misfortune I have no personal stake in I go right ahead to the sports. I check how my teams are doing that is if I haven't spent the preceding evenings hours watching games on TV but the hell I'm retired so leave me alone. My wife was right upstairs likely watching stuff of her own like some period thing from Great Britain which would allow me to sleep in an instant. No give me two on and two out on the bottom of the ninth an impossible game clenching shot and over time a field goal from 50 yards out. I don't care if some lady winds in her letter have a clerk in a local shop when she asked him for help said forget it I'm busy. That woman claims that people were kinder ones but I bet that complaint was heard when people still lived in caves. Don't tell me my wife and I should hone our communication. We know each other like twins for decades. Can you tell me you're doing better? A train shakes the valley each morning while I'm feeding my sports addiction. I don't mind that sound far away. News comes third and it seems these days it's always a mess. There I go sounding myself like that woman I just made fun of. Another exotic disease another IED a register man shot dead by someone less nice upset by a rude clerk's behavior. I go back and skin through recaps never mind if I've seen the game above all one that we won but for me to say we is absurd I don't think I don't know it. I'm sure there's not one player who'd give me the time of day. Though I've never met her I don't like to think of that letter writer because I'll start making a picture her husband dead in the gulf her kids all disappointments are worse or drugs or both she stares through tears out her shit box apartment window while I read such letters and fume or check the stats in the box scores I keep my eyes off the photos to go with the news which comes third I know a poem that I like to read and my wife doesn't particularly like me to read pulled my wife back with a little touch of the erotic in here even at my age though not enough to warrant censorship or even perhaps to offend Mike Pence oh but you know I took up this sport of flat water kayak racing when I was probably 16 couldn't even using the word it was always to be used loosely my kids couldn't run anymore my knees wouldn't take it they live very close to the Connecticut river so it's ideal for me there's no impact it's close it's good work out and sometimes sometimes this remembers a time when my wife and I were in an open canoe just doing something much more sane just drifting down and seeing what we could see she and Val and I in the stern wait being what it is and ability oh it's called my wife's back all naked but for a strap it traps my gaze as we paddle as we paddle the deer familiar nubs of spine bone punctuating that sun warm slot the slender muscles that trouble the same sweet surface we've watched and smiled as green herons flushed and hopped ahead at every bend and we've looked up at a red tail tracing open script on the sky so clear and deep we might believe it's autumn no matter it's August still another fall we'll be honest 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 now we're neither young anymore to put matters plainly my love for you over 40 years extends in all directions just now to your back as we drift paddle down the tranquil Connecticut River we've seen a mink scratch fleas out on a mud flat we've seen an osprey start to dive but seeing us think better of it two Phoebe's wag on an ash limb your torso is long you can't see your legs but they're longer I know Phoebe, osprey heron, hawk marvels under black mountain but I'm fixed on your back indifferent to other wonders bright minnows that flared and the shallows that gleam off that poor mink's coat even the fleas in its fur the various birds the lust of creatures just to survive but I watch your back never have I wished more not to die and finally the bookend the Starapulm began here at Saunders End I go to a poem called Here At Self that's got an inscription from the Eastern Maine Medical Center of patients report 821-2016 the eluting stent placed in the clues right coronary of otherwise fit and pleasant 73 year old male former poet laureate of Vermont Robin Occasionally we'll quote the pleasant part, but not being particularly pleasant. Yeah, I said, and pleasant mind, you know what? Here itself, I had a heart attack, something I kept on thinking when here is from others. In search of dazzling revelation, I'd wandered blind through the world, had begun to see as much. Having approached Paul's barbershop, for instance, down the same asphalt alley, and the same old hard-scrabble hamlet, and through the same old waiting room with those copies, unchanging of guns and ammo, popular mechanics would have you. I contemplated the ancient jug of Lucky Tiger, Paul's horseshoe pitching trophies, the snapshot curling around its tax of the 350-pound bear at his feeder, and Paul and myself right there in the mirror, as ever. It's 30 years and more, he's been cutting my hair as it's dwindled. Three full decades of identical questions when he's nearing the finish. What a dry. Shall I do the eyebrows? A little more off the top, trim the ears? Of course he knows the answers. It's the rightest all, and the very comfort. Wonder lies and minuscule things. I'm here. There's a tough, late solitary dahlia in our flower garden. A hooded McGanza Drake is grating like a rusted hen from our pond. I notice these things as it seems to me now I haven't before. I felt no fear, just wistfulness for wife, children, grandchildren, and friends. I had a dress rehearsal for death, but no terror. Strapped in a gurney, I went off to visit the wonderful Isness of Was, the Isness of Hout Forever. An Indian summer paddle trip on my beloved Connecticut River, reflected below crows across the water, to disappear behind a scrim of yellow leaves, cottonwood, silver maple. I can't quite describe it, but here I am to see it. I pushed through the windows of the lustrous fall foliage on the surface. There, above the village steeple, a cloud resembling nothing only itself. Not chastity, not purity, cotton, whipped cream, itself. Who'd wanted other? I'm here to see it, itself, entire. Thank you.