 They say the daughter at birth has all the eggs she'll ever produce. Did you know that? The path is set at your mother's birth, as other paths unfold like a lifeline in the gradual, almost imperceptible, unclenching fist of time. Some of these paths will come to coincidence. It might be the accident of a flat tire that delays you just enough to miss the train that would have run you over. And driving home with your suitcase, stop at a bar to inspect the tire, then decide to have one. And you meet a brilliant executive who takes you into her confidence. And within a year, you're flying in a private jet, riding in limousines with faultless tires and tuxedoed drivers who know the quickest route and where to drop you to celebrate time saved by such smart travel. At times you think you're controlling the path. How else would anyone be so lucky if not just playing brilliant, maybe even a brilliant executive, but you crave time so you can climb into the tuxedo and take yourself for a spin in the limousine, ignoring the snooty stairs at stop lights from people in normal cars who think you're just a lowly chauffeur sporting about in the boss's rig. Driving home at midnight, your headlights catch the eyes of a cat working the roadside. It panics and runs a path diagonal under your left front tire. At midnight there's no finding an owner, no one to comfort and thus make yourself feel better. The teary master in a night shirt telling you between sobs, it was only a cat. Arriving home, you slump from the vehicle and feel your way in the dark. You know the path can swing in front of fortune and misery or zag between the two a whole life long. That's why I keep my fingers crossed. It's a form of prayer. The couple parking on the motorcycle. Up the street as if to tease me, a car with headlights ekes forward, thin beams coming closer to the couple parking on the motorcycle. I lean from my third story with eyes glassy as a window straining at the dark. Love on a motorcycle. How grand to have a girl so supple, so open to the call of April streets that she can relax on triangular seats, lean back and offer you herself legs smooth as handlebars under the chromium moon. How often love could catch you in the windy night, balanced like a captive engine, screaming to have its clutch let out, if not for those damned headlights drawing closer. The mid-truck stops, signs that litter the walls. Work fascinates me. I can sit and watch it for hours, plan ahead. And the waitress so sullen, you want to tip extra just to show her how wrong she was about you. White dress with little bumps all over the material, making it look almost gray, and you see through to the bra doing its thin job, and she wants you to pay up so she can go home, sauters over and yawns between chews. You threw, and not to be mean, but because you're lonely, you ask for another donut. She extends it with aluminum pincers, so it seems germ-proof, but you watched earlier as she emptied the bakery cellophane damn near fondling each one as if here at last was something she cared for and licking all the extra sugar off her fingers at the end. To hell with aluminum, let's dance, you cry, and twist her hand over the counter so she drops pincers and your donut. Hey, cut that out. What's the matter with you? Are you crazy or something, Joe? And she starts yelling, but you've already passed through that critical tunnel where you decide, this is a dream. I'll do it, I please. And one of the truckers looks up from the coffee. He's stirred with his eyes as you think of your mother who told you about them and how one would kill you someday, just like they got your father. And you dance with her back and forth over the countertop until Joe comes out, at which point the trucker gets involved, too. And both of them have you by the legs and the waitress is saying, why, Sky, why, Sky, over and over and the pincers and your donut are on the floor. And if you want to know more, go do it yourself. Remember us to Eagle Rock. Billy Koenig and me at nine years of peace hiking one Saturday in early May way up past the house with half a pack of embezzled cigarettes and enough matches to light each one a dozen times. Remember us to Eagle Rock where couples in their cars pulled off the road to watch the New York skyline and make love as Billy and me dizzy from tobacco sitting on the big pavilion of the castle with its stoned out windows, wondering what to do once we felt better and how, as if we had no choice, we'd find ourselves each time working toward the place the cars were parked, provided by the town, a pressure seal for lovers prevented by circumstance from doing it at home. And picture Koenig and me, pockets stuffed with newly sprouted acorns we used to stone the lovers. I can't believe we stoned the lovers taking such liberties with our health and how when we did get chased, we'd run and run and run, half laughing and half very scared, some wild yelling, cursing, half dressed, passion victim in pursuit. I hated the trip but often did. Billy usually way ahead of me down to a cave we knew where we'd heave and choke and get our breath lungs aching from the cigarettes and from the chase and laugh and swear we'd never come so close to getting caught. In sadness, I started for a place I had hoped to avoid, a place I'd branched away from ten years earlier and had to retract. Ten years of backtracking, I hated myself for the twenty years I had wasted until at the source of my sadness I realized the only years wasted were those spent hating myself. Loving myself for that discovery I forgave the years spent hating. Blithering proud, I started down the same wrong path again. Jenitson, my son, at the time he was four years old called me by my first name and he was coming in from the Han House and he wrote this poem. It's very short so listen fast. I gave it the title but his words are the poem. The poem is entitled Ben carries the cracked egg. This one's for you, Jeff. I think they'll lay my egg tomorrow. And he wrote another one called Ben plays hide and seek in the deep woods. Don't hide too far, Jeff or I'll have to find you all over the place. Excited by the mountain range I pointed out to Ben oh yeah he says returning to his book how quickly children absorb beauty. The flies have wakened by February thaw and the first good hot stoked fire since New Year's when I never really got the cabin warm. The flies are still groggy so I helped them out the window and wave goodbye with a book of poems I've used to scoop them from the sill. God had a purpose for every animal. I remind myself and in the dead of winter and all else fails think of flies. Their purpose is to make you glad it's not summer. Wrestling to lose. None of us were winners like Armand Trout or Bebe the heavyweight who surprised opponents twice his size in the unlimited division flipping one who still scowled from the peevish handshake that had to start each match. During weekend my parents drove my date up from New Jersey and I wrestled the 135 pounder from Petty who took 30 seconds to pin me spring weekend the year before. My father clapped my back in the locker room and pronounced it a moral victory. Behind the gym two weeks later the hacks on the team smoked their first cigarette since fall and chafed at the gung-hoes who were still running laps. Where are they now? Well Armand Trout's big in business for sure and Bebe's a famous neurosurgeon. And us hackers? All hazard our wages per capita can't touch theirs. We were artists, idealists the boys who invented wrestling to lose. Slam yourself down on the mat with shoulders flat hold your opponent just three seconds over you helpless in the victory pose. So what kind of poetry you write? He finally asked after smoking in silence half the cigarette he'd borrowed waiting for my flowers and moons he thought up the one he wrote about a dying white horse in Vietnam how the mountain yards wouldn't let the Tennessee GIs put it out of its misery and they were going crazy seeing it guts blown out suffer. This was what he brought home and after hearing my credentials told me that if he could write it he would. Was I serious enough? Did I care? Would I just tack on a fourteenth line to make it a sonnet? I told him I think poetry is the language that shares experience of what is beautiful and I don't think I can use moon in my poems. Of course explaining it in a poem is kind of creepy. I'm delighted someone would read this far and I never believed he'd listen each word a new chance not to abuse an old cliche not to construct self-conscious language not to be beautiful not to confound not to take a risk not to discover, share not to be mystical that was what I was not writing for these days and I was sure to test it out at all. I told him I'd published in a magazine resting on your laurels, huh? He said, yeah resting on my laurels and driving home what I took to be the moon a smudge of light above Montpelier glowed like the top of a smokestack and I kept driving along and my poem said I never saw it I never said it I rush against the passing season try to get a start on the season coming winter, cut wood for next winter springtime get the tiller going hall manure and fence the garden right this time summer, pull weeds and build a chicken coop fall, stack wood and cut wood that didn't get cut last winter the sun inches lower in the sky each day back up before winter is even half started season after season eventually so far behind winter finds me cutting wood one day to burn the next until I build a fire to warm me in the woods and burn what I cut so there's nothing to haul home and in panic my family searches my flush face demanding me to prove I worked all day my young daughter sniffs where her nose reaches my belly and remarks I smell like cutting wood while my older son and wife looked me in the eye for a trace of lost confidence they have huddled at the stove all day waiting perhaps tomorrow they will be cold enough to help but for the night but for the night we sleep in the same bed under heaps of blankets pooled from our rooms I dream of my own importance in life until by some breach of common sense I feel that I have been the constant an incidental body on the run so I'm writing this epic that will change the world should I decide to make it public when this crow flies overhead and seems to hover which is something I have never seen inches from my upturned face before lifting its black bulk back to the sky so I go back to the epic when this car a green 48 Buick convertible with the top down pulls into my yard and three men in long coats jump out and call across the yard are you Jeff Hewitt? I tell them no and they jump back into the Buick and roar off I never see them again so I return to my epic that will change the world and I feel my attentions shift like a quick jolt in the earth's rotation it's like this indescribable what are you doing of the insides of one's body bones, guts, even skin and dirt would taste pretty good about now I've been through a lot you know, seen a lot of strange things it's delicate when we touch each other a careful mistake will do but nothing more it's delicate this love we carry and know that only what waits is separation and let the new people into your lives or is that just a bunch of hopeful crap it's delicate to this learning how even with degrees no one said there'd be a job but there is work oh, there is work how many times I vacuum each week is a measure of unemployment though vacuuming is nothing I do for enjoyment I want me one of them riding vacuums metallic green with special bumpers so I don't marred the furniture as I'm whizzing the room caroming off the pillars of the old upright piano and making the long run down the hall wearing the safety helmet that came with the unit and wielding the magic wand attachment and cobwebs as I glide by cobwebs don't make me think of them let me picture a spider's more symmetrical effort not the chaotic gathering of dust in strands that hang from ceilings let me think of spiderwebs the organization of desire a spider's fractal like construction to ward off starvation with plenty of space to fly through just to avoid the center claims the stupid moth that fouls the whole web and isn't anything the spider wants just a dusty pair of wings fluttered to a mealy core the cobweb of the animal world not to speak of the damaged web to rebuild for though resilient a spiderweb is delicate and delicate is like touch like love, like learning like the finest, most expensive tiniest chocolate you're only supposed to have one of let me introduce to you the concept of backwards evolution but first an aside words backwards tell a lot about themselves radar backwards is radar a one word palindrome backwards backwards is straw cab and get this embargo backwards oh grab me catatonic cannot attack dermatitis sit tight I'm red fairfield university eat this revenue deal and get this revolution backwards is no shoe lover I can say whole sentences backwards accurate unless you work one up ahead of time language loved and played with like a child reveals itself backwards evolution by the by hold simply that our entire perception of cause and effect is merely reversed think about an effect and cause effect then cause meanwhile our memories are upside down because provably at birth we reach up when we should reach down so our vision has to be trained and so I have no prophetic vision but say it all starts in the future as we see it with the big bang creation the sunlight energy the God that sets us spinning and we evolve to the day when you got born and then me or the other way around depending on which way the world is spinning which bounce of the big bang we're on free choice forget it you've worn notches in the grooves of bang prescribed human activity you are going to scratch your left temple tonight at beg time just as you will next bang around except on that trip through you will first scratch and only then feel the itch old 16 millimeter movies the diver emerging feet first from the center of the pool when the film is played backwards and she balances on the board and backs away confidently all dry except for seeing this on film we never see it oh never mind you'd never understand can't you just see the sense of pieces flying back together the compost recomposing into real banana peels the banana re-entering your body to put it politely as I can and being undigested undchewed and emerging from your mouth only to have the peel replace the whole thing plunged back into a paper bag and driven backwards to the supermarket from where eventually it is untugged to Costa Rica and hung back on the tree which resorbs it as it goes from green to whatever they are before then meanwhile presidents and kings are unwaging wars and back away from their jobs which fall into the laps of those who are ready to retire just a couple of recent poems what next nuclear terror natural terror or a bowl of chocolate pudding spilled on your evening jests just before the speech you haven't written gracious in embarrassment and choked anger for the haughty wait person who dodged the whole mess completely white and wrinkle free the little snot who in serving the moose caught the tip of pretentious crystal on your shoulder and apologized with a shrug stuff happens you take your troubles to the vernal pool and sneak up on the wood frogs delirious they skim the thin surface of the pond that will be gone by early July do they know that most likely all their pleasure will result in nothing crusty nets of seeded eggs clinging like droopy green spider webs to the base of the clumps of red osier makes you wonder about the mental capacity of wood frogs sun on their backs they croak and push off try to climb on each other and when they get lucky they clamp in the joy of anaplexis or whatever it's called clouds coming in from the west breeze picking up between the clouds a jet trail makes its silent progress towards some important destination so I'm tooling interstate 89 at the legal limit 65 which happens too to be my age and feeling good bright sunshine and light western breeze 80 degrees early September great cumulus like giant cotton swabs the super rest tempura pedic ultra queen top and tufted mattresses of the angels floating like hallucinogenic harps in the arms of cherubs allowing the sun to shine through and last night's nearly full moon still hanging pale in the western horizon man I'm tooling and getting all these fabulous words down at 65 I can still write though messily with the lines tilted diagonal up or down and sometimes crossing but I gotta keep my eyes mostly on the interstate at 65 one has to take care like notice that blaring horn over my left shoulder I guess he was trying to pass so I jerk the wheel to get my Honda back into the right lane and now he's completely parallel and peering into my eyes as I hold the pen below his line of vision and shrug into his upward extended full arm stretched across the lap of his gorgeous passenger middle finger I was wrong my shrug only in flames and above the wind in my open window at 65 I can hear the anthem of anger a one word aria coming through as if anyone couldn't read the lips of scorn asshole keep on shrugging but that guy cannot know short of an international symbol as pervasive and recognized as the cliche of his flip-off the all but routine giving of the bird the fuck you of the finger just a simple gesture folks let's think hard and devise it some way to say without words sorry pal I was writing there's some bees that know about this buckwheat patch just one or two that sneak visits while the rest of the workers are in the clover so many blossoms how do they know which ones they've already sipped or powdered their legs on and the cat admiring himself in a ray of sunshine no questions asked and I'll finish with butterflies probably mating not sure of the species or specifics I determine them by color patterns a hatch it's probably called a zillion Princeton freshman fluttering up from shaggy grass decked out proud in the traditional orange and black the orange a silk ribbon girdling the black small they are relative to the bigger one I spotted yesterday and now I'm supposing that one apparent or at least an older sibling Rob said back in college he learned fruit flies live only one day so soon as they're hatched they're horny capturing a virgin fruit fly was a challenge in the hands on biology course and Rob was an ag major so he had the problem in hand with no way to fulfill the assignment speaking of it here at my feet is a pair of adults one of superior size and possibly wisdom six inches from each other they seem to communicate in the patterns of their flapping back to back usually facing each other but sometimes back to back the flapping continues as they maneuver closer the gorgeous male now at rest the majority the majesty of his wings spread proud and relaxed he is an eagle a tissue paper eagle planning his moves as she draws closer and now they are two bowings on the runway as I look down from eternity infinity light years imagining who they are and what they want and he down there imagining himself not an eagle but a human big spread for stability gawking down at a pair of butterflies whatever they are hey thanks so much thank you Peter sure I'll ask the questions are y'all having a good time how many of you are first year first time here it's about not even a dozen of us newcomers huh how many of you are going to be out of here at the end of this semester and graduating with your MFA's what have you learned what have you learned one specific thing that really means something to you do you talk about writing process how you do it and everybody has their own way do you know how I do it can you guess from hearing those poems say it I'm sorry I drive a lot and eat a lot of chocolate too right somebody said to me boy you got to hang up on chocolate it's just a coincidence those two poems have chocolate in them you know I sometimes I sneak it from the you know plate that they have when you take your car in to have it there's Hershey kisses you know a couple of days later I feel this gooey mess over my heart so yeah you're cold you got a question alright I'm so glad you asked you know the funny thing is I'm not sure that I really imagine an audience when I'm writing I'm really just writing for myself and but when I started slamming about 14 years ago I thought you know I got to write some poems that I can perform some performance poems and so I wrote a couple of performance poems and they didn't do very well the poems that I'd written for the page were the ones that somehow worked in performance so I've sort of erased from my mind the possibility that I would ever write for performance but so many of my poems are only good on the page they don't perform well but a few of them are good enough that I want to learn them by heart and go around and say them and the reason I started with that they say the daughter at birth has is because I have this thing where if I come up to you at a cocktail party and say Nicole would you like to hear my latest poem you're going to go uh-huh but if I come to you and I say so I was coming around the corner and the car ahead of me has stopped and I'm on sheer ice and my car starts to skid all of a sudden you know you've been had but meanwhile I've drawn you into it and I think that's my aesthetic such as it is about poems about poem writing is that I want it to be conversational I don't want it to be poetic even though I sometimes write poetic poems for the most part I like to have it just be as if it was kind of a throw away knockoff I get more jollies out of that yes Baron well Hayden Caruth lived in Johnson Vermont for about 25 years he was 20 years older than I and when I first came to Vermont Hayden for those of you who don't know is the late great American poet along with Galway Cannell and others I could mention but both of them happened to have homes in Vermont and as a newcomer to Vermont I looked up Hayden Hayden's address and without the courtesy of calling ahead I just stopped by at his house in Johnson Vermont and he was very gracious to me and we did strike up a friendship a mentorship really and only come to discover that Hayden a member of the old school with all of the disadvantages as well as the advantages of the old school gentleman type took on more mentors than there are people in this room not informal relationships but responding in detail to the poems that they snail-mailed him in those days we didn't have the internet that they snail-mailed him he gave and gave and gave and I was among the lucky recipients of his patience his kindness and his generosity he died three years ago and his wife at the time in Munsville New York he'd gone over to Syracuse to teach there the early 90s and he and Joanne married and they stayed in this old farmhouse in Munsville in Vermont all of his loyal friends wanted to give a service for him and we invited Joanne to come and Joanne initially said that she would be there and then a couple of days beforehand said wrote to me and said that she just couldn't be there and this is the poem called J.A. when my dear friend died she called to tell me she'd blown smoke into his face dabbed whiskey to his lips both pleasures he'd been forced to quit under her perhaps relenting eye these last 20 years or so it's that she's Irish knows the blur a little whiskey brings and what's a drink without a good smoke something that declares this is the moment highlighted by these guilty pleasures another will harvest even more who's driving and she'd have danced at the funeral or in her words a grieving Irish widow screaming into the open pit and of course we understood but dancing why not don't give me any of this this is what he would have wanted stuff who needs that excuse just get your body moving splash some whiskey on our lips blow a little smoke our way so I don't know if I really answered your question would you say something about Hayden you knew him so well too and I imagine you had the same relationship and I think we can all take a lesson from that you know if you've benefited from that kind of graciousness I'm not saying everybody send me your poems and I'm going to respond to them but when it happens I remember what Hayden gave to me and I try to live up in some way to repay that I've had other teachers one other teacher particularly who made the same kind of enormous gesture and we are so lucky to have people like that in our lives thank you Bill, thank you Michael for inviting me and thank you all for listening