 Good evening, everyone. What a beautiful crowd you are. Look at all these people. It's where, you know, how many days into 28 days into National Poetry Month and we're going strong. This is fantastic. It is so nice to see you all here tonight. My name is Michelle Singer. I'm the co-coordinator of Poem City here at the Kellacobber Library in the city of Montpelier. Poem City is Montpelier's way to celebrate National Poetry Month and we do it in grand style. And you can see just around us the big signs. Here are the poetry that we had on buses last year, Green Mountain Transit Agency. The local roots all had a poem on them. Around the walls are the poetry of fourth graders from East Montpelier Elementary School. They're wonderful. Check them out. So I work with Rachel Seneshal of the Kellacobber Library. She's the program and development coordinator and this is her baby. Poem City is her baby. And we thank her for it every year. Poem City is sponsored by the National Life Group Foundation, the Vermont Humanities Council, the Hunger Mountain Co-op, Goddard College, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. We are very grateful to all of them for allowing us to present 35 programs this month. Readings, workshops, presentations, all on poetry. Poem City is displaying 400 poems by Vermonters at 100 venues in downtown Montpelier this year. The poets range in age from 6 to 91 and in experience from our poet laureate, our Vermont Poet Laureate, to first graders writing their first poems. Tonight I am very happy to welcome Baron Wormser and Kate Ferrell. Baron Wormser is a past poet laureate of Maine, the author and co-author of numerous books most recently in poetry, Impenitent Notes, and in prose, Teach Us That Peace. Writer and actress Kate Ferrell has been working in poetry, art, and theater in New York for over three decades, and her most recent book is Visiting Night at the Academy of Longing. We're so happy to have them here tonight. One little bit of business the restroom is in the back of the room on the left. If you need anything, I will be here. If you need a drink of water, anything you need, I'm here. We will also have books available for purchase and signing afterwards. So please help me in welcoming Kate Ferrell to the podium. Thank you so much for coming. See if I'm heard well, everything's okay. Thank you, Michelle. The first poem I'll read is entitled Four Quartets, and it's a dream poem where I meet the poet T.S. Eliot in the afterlife. I met T.S. Eliot in a dream last night. I'd gone to the afterlife to visit relatives, and he was stepping from a doorway very preoccupied and serious. I went up and told him how much I admired Four Quartets, that it stood apart in the history of poetry, that I wished I could write a long poem of that stature. He said, you can. Write ten lines of impeccable honesty, the next day ten more, and so on until it's finished. He said he was revising Four Quartets, and I could almost see, given the altered vantage point, where the changes might be. Hearing he was about to read the latest draft aloud, I asked to stay and listen, and he agreed. They set me up a chair in the hull of a large-ish boat moored at the lakeside to undergo repairs. Eliot stood on the shore, facing the lake in me, the new Four Quartets in hand, and began to read. The next poem, South Florida Confessional Waltz, begins in the Confessional of the Chapel of the Catholic Girls' School in Florida. I attended for a couple of years. South Florida Confessional Waltz. Rising from my knees at 18, I exited the Florida Confessional and pretty stucco chapel out into the balmy night, under the soaring palms with moonlit fronds tossing in the ocean breeze, and said to myself, I'm sorry, I should have said so before, but I can have nothing to do anymore with a deity on the lookout for slip-ups and lonely twosomes in mistaken embraces. No, unless there's a half-blind kindness to look up to, forget it. Hell's easier to forgive than a hard line, small-minded heaven. Why I didn't see it before, I don't know, but a trace of pettiness annulls all interest. There has to be at least the mercy, mystery, vast heartedness of those stars and trees, this wind, that dark sea, the deep down yearning of the slow dance music drifting from that half-open dormitory door over there. Maybe not these exact words, but I suddenly knew what I meant. I said to myself, I'm sorry, I can have no part. The woman from the islands, not till she dies do you love your mother as a mother or a daughter. The priest had come and gone. We'd sung at her bedside the songs she'd sung us as kids. And after my brothers and weeping father went downstairs to wait, the young woman from the islands the home health agency sent showed my sister and me how to wash the body. Told us of the need to give her time to leave it behind completely. And after the hearth strove back down the moonlit street, I rushed to the hotel, hurrying to sleep to look for her. Couldn't wait to see her. In the dreams I went from room to room, it took a week to find her. The woman from the islands having washed away all that obscured her first promise. Pure, immense, and unmistakable as a little daughter's. Success, the name of the poem is a success. Success is a house with big white rooms surrounded by gardens behind an iron gate. I used to go past it when I was a child, wishing I could someday walk through those gardens. The property belonged to a very rich old man. And one summer when his granddaughter came to visit, I was invited to her birthday party. The front door opened to a white marble fountain where a statue of a girl stood in a seashell, water splashing around her. Guests were taught rules no one wanted to know, for games no one wanted to play. Then seated for lunch at a long narrow table where women and aprons corrected their manners. And by the time my father arrived to take me home, I was a fidget away from being baked like the stone girl into the house of cake for twiddling her thumbs in the grand rotunda. The next few poems have to do with the time just after my first husband's suicide when my kids were three and five. This one's called The Ticket. The Ticket. One day a few months after my husband's suicide, I was on my way to pick up the kids at nursery school when a cop pulled me over for doing 40 in a 25. Did you happen to notice, he said, leaning down to my car window that this is a residential zone? The sort of neighborhood where parents like to think it's safe to let their kids play outside? Or can you not be bothered to look at the signs? At which point I burst out crying and uncontrollable sobs wildly disproportionate to the actual situation precluded any answer. Tears flooded the ticket on the clipboard. He put through the window for my signature, drenching his hands and shirt cuffs as he tore off a copy for me by which time the blue ink of the date, name of street, town and state, violation code, amount of the fine and other facts of the case including the officer's name and mine had slid from the ticket's saturated boxes, spaces and lines and washed away indistinguishably together. This next one's entitled After Lives and it's a prose poem a couple of pages long. It moves around a bit touching on the classes I was taking at the University of Oklahoma at the time, Jung's near-death experience and how the Russian poet Marina Svetayevna fell in love with Rilke one summer via their poems and letters. After Lives. My three-year-old grieved outright said she wanted to go live in the grave with her father. Her brother at five, more circumspect, stopped us one day as we walked down the street. Here's the middle of a story, he said with no beginning or end. A man died and was buried. His tongue turned to a seed and a tree grew from it. Me, back in college, minus a compass, thought sinking from the rocks I put in their pockets, afraid to sleep like other people did, head neatly on a pillow under sheets in the dark, jittery to the bone, the stakes high, the kids not yet told it was a suicide, a fact never far from my mind. Would I walk the same plank? Let some mentally ill sub-self take the wheel and drive. After I started seeing things, I drove a time or two out to the Norman Oklahoma subdivisions where a psychotherapist recommended I give up on love and have some fun. But could it be done? Or was it like going along with the poetry professor's unsuspended disbelief, but with a secret ear out for a way to be suspended? Or burying the feeling that the invisible self can't die beneath the opinion that it can, it must, but with the feeling beneath, still alive and breathing? Jung thought dreamers believe in the afterlife, whatever their waking minds think. Recommended that we learn to tell the actual dead from symbolic dream semblances. I think of Marina Spetaeva, falling in love with Rilke that summer in their poems and letters, never knowing how sick he was, never meeting him. After he died, a dream tet-a-tet in a series of candlelit rooms reversed her ideas of life and death. Others go to the kitchen for a midnight glass of water and get a calm, guest-like sense of more prestigious dimension right behind the paper-thin appliances. Jung once recounted a near-death experience in a fabulous setting a thousand miles above the planet. Traveling in his primal form, he gladly shed the phantasmagoria of earthly comings and goings, and was about to find out the secrets of existence when he was breathed back into his prior box-like life. Fears of the real thing are said to dwindle after such a preview. So in tune are its high hoped-for reaches with forest epiphanies, knelt before childhood candles, and the different luckier thing Whitman swore death was, no matter what adult shopping consciousness has to say about it. Maybe also in tune with the songs your mother sang as she cooked and cleaned, hinting why you too would want to have children with someone whose eyes light up at your sight. Then one day there they are in their beguilingly tiny soft rental bodies with the gathering question of whether the one with the lit up eyes has disappeared forever. By the time mine cornered me, I was a stubbornly unread makeshift agnostic, not about to let on what I have thought that were party balloons with our names on them, as good as gone from the start, drifting bossily around before it snagging, deflated on a twig beside a pond. Nor could I as yet say that their father and the rest of us were deathless beings on interlinking missions. Love the ticket back to each other, bodily matter, our least versatile set of clothes. No, no, my maybe this, maybe that fell from a realm so much drabber and smaller than their question of questions that I followed along ever after with my pencil cup of solaces, a street beggar who doesn't know when to stop. But that was later. Back at the beginning, a day or two after telling a story, my son asked, how do we know trees don't think? Maybe they're all dreaming, at which the buried man began to toss and turn and talk in his sleep and winter branches gesticulate like apostles with a gift of tongues and the town sound turned off and when leaves came back to Oklahoma that spring, rustling just this side of talk, I was half ready on lonely, strangely beautiful in memory, twilight in the park, to whisk, if need be, the kids out of earshot. I'm just going to get up. In this poem, sparked by a dream, I'm visiting my kids at the Academy of Longing where they'd been automatically enrolled at the death of their father. Visiting night at the Academy of Longing. A mild night on the grounds, windows glimmering here and there in dark foliage, with lights less identifiable, far away and nearby, as stray visitors on side paths walk off useless yearnings or trade old north stars for new. Climb the steps to the enormous library, silent but with a soft shuffle of paper and our own footsteps and whispers. Students at the table barely look up, each given over to some irresistible, one of a kind, wide as the world set upon rings. I find my two at a low table, no older than at their arrival years before, but with that preternatural calm you see in portraits of child saints. In one hand, a flower, book, bird, miniature castle, ladder, boat or other symbol to hint how the apotheosis came about. I beg them to come back home with me, promising that this time things will be happier and easier. They exchange a glance of embarrassed sympathy and pity. Would I like them to show me around, they ask. I could even stay. There are thousands of pasts after all, time and ocean, chances like waves. Did I notice those lights that look like windows in space as I came up the main walkway? The next poem begins in one of those two-story doll houses whose open back wall allows a child to reach in and move the furniture and people around. The poem is preceded by two epigraphs, one from the Upanishads, one from the Song of Solomon, lullaby of the miniature past. Smaller than the small, vaster than the vast, hidden in the heart, there is the self, Catherine Upanishad. I slept, but my heart was awake, Song of Solomon. Reaching through the house wall, the girl is the mother who carries the child upstairs to bed, removes a chair from here to there, as though this or that adjustment might stir to life the galaxy out the toy back window. A poem too has walls to break through, a half-known story it almost mystically holds you to. For years on end, not this, not that, word, line, mood, attitude. Then one summer night, a word like breeze shifts from there to here and lands you in a room where a little girl is sleeping. How deep the game, how to explain. For the room is in a house, on a street in a town, which happens to sit on a vast, whirling globe, where time rolls one way, space rushes another, in a collapsing instant of vanishing thinking. Lamps by the millions switch off and on, and all kinds of doors close and open, as promises, people, intentions come and go, so many cold sacs of stranded longing that all would be lost if the past weren't a house with one wall open, where lives suffuse, rearrange, make sense of one another. It's location, a quiet side street in the sleeping girl's heart. Thousands of summer night twinkling in its minuscule windows. This is called Poem for Dan's Departure and is addressed to my son Dan. I handed him the first draft of it one day in his early 20s as he set out for California. He now lives here in Montpelier and is here tonight. Poem for Dan's Departure. So much do we love talking to people we love about ideas we love that thinking itself keeps the conversation going. What luck that ours got so early a start, adding such a bright start to the constellation of conversations I seem to be becoming. For however far apart we are, your considered voice stays with me, altering every interchange, mental or spoken. You once told me, you thought, that every person on earth had the part of the truth you needed. I wish I could give you Perseus' compass, helmet, sandals and shields to take along with you to search out the pieces and put them back together in ways all your own. I wish you'd call me from time to time and tell the part of me that's you where your part of the conversation is going. The search. Then the moon comes up after all and with a glow bright enough to wake you through the bedroom curtains. The night outside, one vast luminous room beside which indoor rooms seem to belong to a preliminary rudimentary dimension. And her there shining, mother, daughter, friend, Anima Mundi. So still and low, it's almost as though you hadn't broken every vow ever made in the wayside tabernacles of the cosmos behind the forehead. Go back to bed. Close your eyes. Resolve this time to make it through to the other side of the dark. Find a place to set up shop. Work without let up by the light love supplies rid at last of mental fuss. Soon, you're walking down a deserted road through a nighttime countryside wondering if one of the locals is acquainted with the lesser known lunar writings. Houses are few. Everyone's asleep. The air suffused with a beautiful half light whose source you can't place. You're strangely unafraid and in no hurry. A stream through the woods out my window is a stream whose distant windings bring to mind the mythic town which so the story goes appears for just one day every hundred years and into whose apparition a stranger from this world happens on one such day to wander. In the version I remember, the question on which the story turns is this, will he remain with the beautiful town's woman with whom he fell in love on that astonishing morning returning with her and her town to who knows where exactly or not. Likewise, my stream can only be seen from a particular window for a short while and certain mornings when a perfect angle of illumination all at once reveals a flashing galaxy of winding light way off in the depths of dark hemlocks. Maybe one day I'll go back with it to the place it comes from a stranger called by love to a disappearing town. Three poems for Bob, meaning my husband Bob. The first of the three is entitled A Mood in a Room. A Mood in a Room. Seeing couples fight and show off for each other, you think love will be a breathtaking, heartbreaking commotion in and around you which then will fade to boredom and blame. So who dares dream of finding a combined state of mind in which excitement is peaceful, peace exciting. To be regarded as kindly as you regard me is a treatise in solace calming the clamor I once considered the very essence of me. I could toss away the wilted bouquet of interesting people I thought I should be. That too you picked up and put into water. Maybe everyone ideally wakes another in the others every two different from every other two each a laden crossroad of grateful multitudes but almost as thrilling as the voice of the tomb tells your weeping sisters you'll live after all is the silent poise adieu of two who've been in love for 20 or 30 years after the guests have gone. This second one is dated 8888 which was the date of our marriage. Double bubble 8888 the night before the day of our wedding I dreamed the universe had a party all the stars were invited beneath resplendent chandeliers the galaxies rejoiced millions of glass clinking revelers crowded high summer terraces laughing and talking all night in every variety of light opening a kitchen drawer a love poem a bunch of ordinary things we use for this and that I have everything I have ever wanted Revenant to open your closet on a January morning and see your clothes hanging there as on the day you die those you love will see them lopsided inside out sagging from their hangers the last pitiful remnants of a lifetime of struggles many if not most futile if not silly all of them flawed and unfinished then to walk alive out into the streets as the sun turns new stands gold and skyscrapers rose and to wait in the subway station where someone you can't see is whistling first Noelle out of season then climb the stairs as up swirls of snow from limbs and ledges light the air with igniting ice then rain around you in gusts aglow with banishing spangles of wedding rice yet another dream poem this one entitled Metaphysics Metaphysics for a while after he died my father didn't seem to discern dream visitors but I was amazed nonetheless to witness his swift and serene rejuvenation from time to time I'd find him dining outdoors in beautiful locales a multicolored grain on his plate I'd never seen elsewhere yes left the server it's a staple here a sort of national dish I guess like potatoes in Ireland pasta in Italy couscous in Morocco rice in Japan or Madagascar we can't get enough of it and it's remarkably nutritious what's it called I ask she replied Metaphysics in this last one the stopover wood ducks on a pond at dawn inspire a more entrancing mysterious way of living and dying the stopover wood ducks in the pond at dawn 14 16 flashing wings of a dozen more even the overnight ice islands gold pond glitter ribbons the base of the abandoned beaver hut and other shabby areas slated for apotheosis and the crisscrossing wakes of the little ducks are sparkling trains of queens with no yen for dominion who prefer we change our ways or leave the forest we could start by trying their more direct route from and to light growing older by becoming less and less visible a slow molting noticeable mostly toward the last your grown kids secretly mesmerized when they'd come home to visit startled to brush against absences imagining their turn like migrant birds landing and swimming past each other in and out of sight in the early glare of mists and pond reflections later they'd recount with awe the end of it how they'd arrived there one day and after a wonder struck glance their way by then a matter of a stray lumen or two you'd flown off with the others as if at a signal thank you welcome Baron Wormser thank you it's such a pleasure to be here tonight to read such a wonderful poet I I was reading I'm doing a workshop in a few weeks in Washington DC and it's going to be devoted to James Baldwin someone I've been reading for decades and I was reading a long essay by Baldwin which I'm sure some of you know no name in the street and parenthetically in the course of that essay he says that writes that a poet must and I quote excavate and recreate history and I thought oh that's what I've been doing for decades but no one had ever quite put it that way to me so I thought I'd begin tonight very specifically with a poem that's very much about history I'm reading tonight from what is actually my most recent book which is called unidentified sighing objects and painting by my wife Janet on the cover hey Janet and this book is dedicated to her as have a number of my books I've lost track by this point in time so this poem is called true places Paris France 1940 a little man no one you'd notice normally hops up and down behind loom stone buildings Paris is his once kings and cardinals decreed magnificence who knows how many were crushed or fell those graves are ancient the bells of Europe darkly knell people flee on bikes and wagons and cars and trains people walk as quickly as they can who knows how many days remain once the little man stood outside of history muttering his hatred singly bent on overcoming once such a little man would have been crushed by kings and cardinals and their buildings now he is the shrieking star of destiny two South Paris Maine 1944 a slightly stooped farmer in a flannel shirt and suspenders stands beside the post office and breathes in the tang of an autumn morning wood smoke and frost winter coming no letter from Robert jr. three weeks the farmer knows everyone on the street and they know him he wanders over to vise for coffee and maybe a slice of apple pie he always liked pie in the morning after milking something to sink his teeth into people ask him if he's gotten a letter he doesn't blame them he rests his chin in his palm then sips black sanka slowly avoids the newspaper he knows his history the title poem comes from a poem in here there are a number of odes in here this is called Ode to George Hansen in the movie Easy Rider Jack Nicholson plays a small town lawyer early Jack Nicholson who is let's say somewhat troubled and this is about George Hansen if you don't remember the movie things do not turn out well and in the movie Jack beats Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda has on this varsity sweater with a big M on the front of it Ode to George Hansen the M on his varsity sweater stands for meaningful means over educated small town lawyer means ingratiating pain in the butt boozer means understands the word irony means buried above ground but lurching through the days one pint to another calendar non coincidences means he looks up at the midnight sky of unidentified sighing objects beckoning to drunken small town lawyers wearing their varsity sweaters and waiting for the earth to turn in a different direction waiting for someone in muleville to say something semi smart M stands for some marijuana Malthusian momentary this small town lawyer tossed in the clink who scowled for his own good where he meets two L.A. hippies in search of the freedom which he knew without consulting any mystic text or atlas was not in Louisiana but somewhere inside him maybe next to his spleen or in back of his head where he can't see which was all the better and called for a drink man has a beautiful legal smile charm money out of wallets women out of their clothes rain out of the clouds but he blew it pouring bourbon on his shrewd thirst waking up in the clink looking around only half bewildered still on earth unlevitated by the venusians in their sighing objects George Hansen small town upright derelict lawyer buried above ground but walking and talking and stalking a good time beaten lynched, burned, shot blown up sitting around the campfire with two L.A. hippies explaining freedom lecturing the roaming lights the intelligent ones who live among us but must be silent when I was growing up one thing I grew up with for a while was the Beatles and they used to play in these big stadiums and the stadiums were filled largely with young women all of whom seemed to be losing their minds and that was pretty great and that sound is still with me so I wrote this poem decades later which has kind of fancy title it's called syllabic dithram syllabic means poets write in syllabics that count syllables dithram is a Dionysian song, a dark song and it has a subtitle which is much more comprehensible Shea Stadium 1965 the deep sky broods the ground shakes girl women cry the fab four have a date rocked out shrieks time ending orgasmic size girl women cry terror like joy girl women cry transfixed sort of die girl women cry tear their clothes pull their hair faint but rise mouths distended by eros girl women cry a pagan rite electrified virgin lust untouched ache girl women cry free but not free girl women cry take me satyrs take me when they went home and had dreams this is another road I love to write about the glories of this nation and so this is called ode to basketball it takes place in an urban setting a lot like where I grew up Baltimore there are five characters in here two guys playing ball a German who's here visiting guy in a wheelchair and then this woman who's involved with one of the guys there's some German in here that I've translated it ode to basketball don't bring that weak shit into my kitchen P-man tells Spice as the latter tries to drive right with no space only his unemployed will at work in the urban twilight where Werner strolls and broods about his homeland and how he wants to return and doesn't ambivalent as an ambidextrous point guard swinging the ball left right left right psyching out his opponent and himself unlike the guy in the wheelchair watching these proceedings and saying to all averted eyes my body is a broken temple as P-man arcs a jumper over Spice's long arms that bounces off the back of the rim one more misplaced thought in a galaxy of them like his longing for Sonya who keeps telling him he needs to get his shit together which is what he's trying to do when he plays ball except she thinks ball is play stuff for kids not men and women while Werner sends home emails each day about the game in the asphalt park now America is the home of the homeless which is his way of saying he can't go home because there's something hopeless yet earnest Hofnungslos Aber Ernsthoff keeping him here that goes beyond the guy in the wheelchair who's become a friend of sorts both of them kibitzing about how Spice is gaining how he's learning to move without the ball the way the coaches tell you standing around waiting for shit to happen a waste of time according to Sonya who is studying fashion design and intends to change at least one world Paris Milan New York outstretched at her non-sneakered feet or so she tells P-man after they have sex and are lying on his thin mattress sad broken window shades bedroom just as he starts to boogie off to sleep to dream of the NBA launching himself over bodies, benches, arenas headed for something like glory that not being a word he uses in his daily parlance it being a word someone like Werner is prone to missing as I in Deutsche does those centuries that have been made and cantered in the presence of majesty, a homeland that he can pine for safely since it won't be his warrior grave that time won't salute it won't be his sense of how shooting fouls on a Wednesday afternoon is okay as anything and better than most the sky of vexed cloud jumble and the air unhealthy but ripe with that city hang of bus exhaust and bustling bodies omitting little doses of perspiring feeling like stutter steps toward some distant emotional hoop like a fashion designer standing before a cadre of cameras and smiling a real fake smile and thinking of some guy she knew once how she loved him and how he never got off his even though he could leap through the air and seem to fly but there was no place to fly to no homeland no wheelchair no nothing only a ball okay let's stay in this downbeat mode what's poetry for right um so i want to read a poem called two failed marriages in her dream two men sit at a bare table mr first starts complaining but about what something about a rubber duck he's lost his rubber duck and someone he draws himself up when he says this like a taut vertical plastic someone is going to pay for this mr second husband sneers politely you have to look carefully because he doesn't seem to possess anything as accomplished as a face he doesn't talk instead frog like oofs issue from his chest yes there is a big mouth in his chest between his nipples suddenly the table begins to levitate the rubber duck man claps with abrasive glee the oofa pretends nothing is happening then a bewitched candle is floating through what must be air though no one is breathing or laughing or crying or singing okay I'm going to read another ode this country as you know is based on two tragedies which is the murder of the native peoples and slavery this is called ode to the ghost dancer some of you may know this in the latter part of the 19th century in the plains Indians there was a religious movement among them part of which was this dance which was basically to make the white people disappear and to bring back the buffalo and ghost dancers dance to dance to exhaustion it's truly heartbreaking when you see see photographs of this and just think about it basically so this is called ode to the ghost dancers I'm very fond as you may already have noticed of collisions bringing things together in time that weren't there in time but as a poet excavating and recreating history I could bring them together ode to the ghost dancers busy with time I forget out of time how to recall the stars shuffle in their reckonedight heaven to hear them I must be still to hear them I have to open my beleaguered head how much money did I make today the spirits watch and grimace thousands of Indians shuffle their feet a thin yet supple sound if you stand outside Walmart Taco Bell Eddie Bauer the shilling hearts of the fluorescent Republic and are very still above the cars starting people prattling broadcasting you can feel the tremor of moccasin feet shuffling not stopping dancing past exhaustion past hope and hopelessness to a place out of time but in life the concise moments of crickets beavers buffalo on a lush prairie talking have you seen the Indians they are almost all dead but they have plenty of ghosts no ghosts for sale in Walmart Taco Bell Eddie Bauer only those hungry ghosts buying 12 packs of paper towels extra sauce signature twill shirts chanting Walmart Taco Bell Eddie Bauer Walmart Taco Bell Eddie Bauer Walmart Taco Bell Eddie Bauer I forget how many died for this how many were scalped harrowed their ghosts are angry too but the Indians continue to dance the troops ride into the encampment at wounded knee and start shooting screams many screams everyone moves on nothing comes back but like sun and clouds and stars the spirits are undeterred they hear the shuffling feet the cries that pierce the squander of grief okay a couple more call it an evening poets are people who are obsessed with all kinds of form and the older the better often so this poem is based on old English which peaked around what 1100 or something I don't know it's alliterative you'll hear it you'll hear a lot of sound in here it's called haircut 1956 another excavation and recreation men must be mundane their veral vanity veiled in crew cuts critique of hair head honed to thin thrust of follicles fine flat land extreme the empty edge but bob the barber sharpened shears shook ample aprons aim tonic and talk tv ike illness invasions of countries by communist killers while the wealth of weeks fell formlessly the fix of lessen locks lightly combed the cunning clack and whack whelming wavy sensuousness samson's strength beggard bound bust I wish my childhood barber was still in the world would have loved to pass that on to okay let's end with this one I'm going to dedicate this to my sister sherry who's here tonight this is another ode and I want to dedicate this to a student of mine I teach in a low-residence mfa program not here but in Connecticut and I got a phone call this morning one of my students who was a little younger and I died in sleep two nights ago and I talked as my wife could tell you about every week with this guy the past couple months and one thing that infinitely touched me about this man was that he had he's a fiction writer but he took a workshop with me and he got very involved writing haiku and just deeply touched and one of the books he was reading what now is the end of his life was a book of haiku by the African-American writer Richard Wright which some of you may know in the last year and a half of his life Wright wrote haiku every day he knew he was going to die and that was his way of you know getting to that place of letting go so um thank you all for coming out this evening this is called out to speech still fumbling with words as if attempted eloquence could preserve you in my backward sight as if your death held other deaths at bay I see you emerging from the old 88 a bandage on your head that the scarf you bought at liberty of London on your one trip abroad doesn't quite cover and you shrunken inside your winter coat and moving very slowly tottering would be the word though you were only 47 and trying to form a smile of some sort a desperate smile a smile to rid you of pain and the weariness that eats my very bones a smile to show you were fighting back as you taught me to fight back when the world taunted me you halted on the sidewalk as if to take in the cold breeze as if after weeks away weeks in a small white room it was a pleasure the raw January air how it shoved and gnawed at a body's modest warmth you looked around slowly your neck creaking it lately having done little more than prop up your cancer besieged head and tried to say something maybe about the sky or house or a German shepherd lady who wagged her tail bravely but no words came out none only a rueful blankness more of that stolid fumbling that was the ruin of each laugh and kiss and exclamation you seemed bewildered to be there to be alive to be expected to respond when all that lay in front of you was your coming to a bed and waiting patient and impatient for what the words nothing more to be done signified you told me you'd overheard those words one in turn informing another I love you all you said then on the sidewalk to the dog and your husband and us children but you didn't smile your words were quiet and grave like the words in a speech but from the depths of words they're blind insides thank you