 My sons was on at the time, and my son was very interested. Every year they were very interested. But then the big boss said, well, tell him to write a novel for the children, and he was able to go on. So he did. Orders and shipments. Orders and shipments. Orders and shipments. Sorry, Michelle. No, you're good. You're good. You ready? I'm ready. Okay. I'm going to get us started then. You can go wherever you want. Good evening, everybody. I'm Michelle Saker. I'm the adult programs coordinator here at the Cala Cupboard Library. It's my pleasure to welcome you here tonight to hear Sydney Lee. Sydney Lee is a former Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry and served as founding editor of New England Review. He was Vermont's poet laureate from 2011 to 2015. He's published 24 books, a novel, five volumes of personal and three of critical essays, and 16 poetry collections, the most recent of which we're going to hear from tonight called What Shines. And it will be available for sale at the back of the room. Welcome to everybody who's watching live stream tonight. Thank you to Orca Media for doing that for us. It's my pleasure to welcome you up, Sydney, and we're so happy to have you back here at the Cala Cupboard Library. Thanks, Michelle. We happy few. Of course, they're all just thronging in on the stream. You know that. It's always good to be here. I was just thinking as I came through how I missed the spelling bee. I used to enjoy that so much. But at any rate, I am going to read, yes, from this newer book. And before I start, I remember and I copied him for a while and then I got out of the habit. The goal, we can always use to start as readings by reading somebody else as opposed to himself. And I want to read this poem by a man named Gordon Simic. It's spelled the same way as Charlie Simic. And like him, he's a Belgrade-born Serb. Although he had the misfortune of living in Bosnia and being married to a Muslim woman. So everybody hated him. His brother was killed by a sniper. Rough going. Anyway, I think he's one of the great poets in America. He's in the Oxford series in good English translation. It's called a scene after the war. I'd never been aware how beautiful my house is until I saw it burning. My schoolmate told me with 20 pieces of shrapnel that remained deep under his skin after the war. He wrote me how at the airport he enjoyed upsetting the customers officials who couldn't understand whether checkpoint metal detector howled for no reason. I'd never been aware I was a nation until they said they'd kill me. My friend told me who'd escaped from prison camp only to be caught and raped by gypsies while she was running in the woods. Then they sold her to some Italian pimps who tattooed the owner's brand and number on her fist. She says you can't see it when she wears gloves. I recognized them in a small town in Belgium. They were sitting and watching the river carry plastic bags, cans, and garbage from the city. She was caressing the hard shrapnel lump through his shirt and he was caressing her gloves. I wanted to say hello and give them a jolly photo from the times when none of us knew the meaning of house and nation. Then I realized there was more meaning in the language of silence in which they were seeing off the plastic bags down the river than in the language in which I would have tried to feign those faces from the old photograph that shows us all smiling so long ago. All the murder and mayhem in the air. It probably doesn't set a very upbeat tone but it seems so pertinent in a lot of ways. Well, I put this book together. A lot of it during the height of the COVID shutdown and during that period I got older, as one does, and then all of a sudden it was published and I found I was on the brink of pinching me 81. A lot of this book as I put it together I saw that it really, you know, you get to be admonished and you can kind of hear the footsteps on the porch hopefully approaching slowly but you get reflective and looking back over the various moments in your life and in this book I found myself going back as early as very, very early as my first poem will indicate and at various stages through my life and one of the things that interested me was the attitude toward these things when they happened when that was 9 or 12 or 30 or whatever it might be and the way I look at them now. This one's called Hi-Fi. My grandmother bought a, we lived in my grandmother's house when she'd been born in and my mother was born in down in Pennsylvania and she ordered a Hi-Fi. That was a cutting-edge technology in the early 50s. We had a, you know, we'll call it Victoria and she wanted one because she was a classical music enthusiast or so she said and so she could fall asleep to this high fidelity sound just as she did at the Symphony Hall but we also used it ourselves. This one remembers that. I think both little sisters were still too young for school, we brothers not many years older. I suspect what I say is more than a bit sentimental that may not have a basis in anything real back then so be it, but let me keep it. The five of us hearing the tune, the strings and horns so alive it's good to be where we are near our parents' new Hi-Fi which spills into every corner the fidelity, almost shocking. They told us about its wonders and now at last they own one. Having adjusted some knob they stand still for a moment as if in a sort of trance. Of course they're both long gone so of course they no longer dance cheeks touching or anyhow but as long as I say so they do. Indeed the song I hear now is precisely cheek to cheek. Now why would it talk about swimming in a river or a creek or maybe it's actually fishing, who cares? Strange bliss pours forth as long as the record keeps spinning. Sickness, regret and death will all arrive in time and rancor, I won't forget the rancor. This evening however we brothers just watched and chanted five children together on the couch with the fancy lace while our faithful parents glide in what looks like a fond embrace. The memory is a great editor. That's sort of the theme of this poem. I had a great friend when I was a young man in Pennsylvania a Dutch boy named Zebedee Fussschlugger who I found difficult to put into the rhythmics of what I tried to write so I changed his name and anglicized it, the poet's version. To prompt myself to remember cock pheasants that gleam under sun mid-Pennsylvania December and me a young girl boy with a gun likewise Amory Harris the two of us crept on all fours we clung to the rim of the forest our stalk seemed to go on for hours. This happened so long ago I'm sure I can make it sound right how emphatic they look those two birds in snow totemic against the cold white. Let my tense be the present in sunshine bright feathers shift and blend for the sake of an opposite end rhyme just here I'll call up a wind tired figure for inspiration for whatever good it will do trite theme initiation the wide world blood can show the wind keeps cantering toward us so the quarry steps to our coming later life looms before us or so for now I'm claiming I should add that this is the solstice a very short day in the year no apt for Amory Harris and me how grim, how austere whether those pheasants in fact are slaughtered or fly off doesn't matter I'll say that our pastoral cracks the steadying past with a clatter crashes to ground and we stand in a single moment diminished aware of our smallness but men and now before I finish my apologies Amory Morris so in fact I've changed both your name for dragging you into this chorus of post-lapisarian pain these days as an old adult you prosper I hear you're respected, content so they say Amory I haven't seen you for years I've managed to keep it that way I don't know why I got into that kind of sing-song-ballatic thing when I wrote that but I think maybe that's what I would have thought poetry was at that age in my arrested development I live virtually on the shores of the Connecticut River and that's a great resource I like all kinds of paddling I'm in my retirement able usually go down there during the week day and I don't have much competition on the river not many Greek big wake boats or whatever it may be and this remember is an experience as I was setting out to go paddling it's called eruption at dawn today the fog still slept on the river the sun of a seemingly endless hazy and heat wave had not yet broken through so I drove to the launch for a paddle Green Heron's smartest sentries patrolled one bank a beaver skull beside me blasé for a full 40 yard peel branches bright in its mouth I thought of Emily Dickinson's famous claim several of nature's people I know and they know me I feel for them a transport of cordiality she loves dull with such sentiment so that the poem concludes her chilled reaction on coming across a snake well it strikes like a snake I tried to focus on cordiality aware of my own delusion I willed myself to ignore an intrepid king bird's pursuit of an eagle bully who may have succeeded in robbing her nest and I looked away from the cove where last summer a doe showed a floating intestines coyotes having ripped her just as she made her leap for salvation by water I cycled such things this morning my strokes narcotic my breathing steady little else coming to mind back at the landing as I walked to get my truck I noticed a tree frog pathetically hopping across launch lots pavement out of its proper surroundings I stooped to carry the thing to mist moist grass then suddenly saw that this was one among hundreds an eruption in fact now what could have brought them out from their safety under the daytime earthen shelters if I tried to fetch my boat with a truck I'd crush countless of Emily's people no way around them so although I felt tired I righteously carried my kayak across that little distance and hefted it up to the rack on my roof and secured it balanced her when I heard the unmistakable crunch of tires I saw what racks me tonight four stubbled men in their own truck towing a monster boat through closed windows I heard them rowdy with booze already and here I sit hours later a man ashamed he did nothing to head off inconspicuous slaughter now I jump behind my wheel and sped for home where I write this feeling zero at the bone that's a crib that last line from a narrow fellow in the grass which I quoted earlier by Emily Dickinson that being zero at the bone is always kind of a second to me when I read it what shines title poem I was raised by a woman remarkable in many ways my father got quite young and she really really took to the to the alcohol and the prescription drugs and unfortunately was never able to get into recovery she lives a remarkable remarkably long life her 80s thinking at least a quarter of urban a day and it made life at home complex put it that way and I've long forgiven her A because I followed her footsteps but I was lucky enough to get into recovery quite a long time ago and B because she did the best she could with a fatal disease basically and she had her own story going back all these stories go back generations of disappointments that she had in her life as a woman a very smart woman whose uncle her surrogate father said women don't go to college for example that's just a little background it's called what shines astounding this never-ending effort to have had a happy childhood why does it matter now why will yourself into all that forgetting she may have been a good mother at least she tried or did she once again you're the one who's trying you contend you do remember moments that glow you picture her standing you picture her standing one day in the snow her teeth and a chatter no doubt and yet she looks quite cheerful or she seemed to be trying as you are the teeth at last were one the least were one good feature radiant to the end you're a poise at the top of the hill on a flexible flyer red sled that's shown your Christmas present at nine it may have brought you joy you're trying to alter the downslope rush to make it shiny too to bled out the icicles of snot the raw fingers, chill-blanes, pain a father was there a good man you're quite sure more than a specter whose presence is no more advantageous than it was that day or was it of some avail you can't remember you honestly can't remember perhaps you just don't want to you're doing well or at least you're trying with this your obstinate bid to sweep off misfortune to see if there's anything more than only sorrow or a certain instance you say I remember stones you say I saw a beach by moonlight and did those pebbles glint like stars as you insist you yearn to be sure clouds never came to eclipse them you keep on drying there's that pervasive gleam along the shore then you take a step and suddenly there's nothing that's another cribbed line that comes from Edith Wharton's Roman Tales I don't know if any of you have ever read any of them but they're extraordinary and I got to the end of that poem and I remember that ending to the first tale in the collection I said well I'll skill that without acknowledgement Elliot said bad poets borrow good poet steal so that made me a good poet almost instantaneously um I've wife and I have seven grandchildren mercifully every single one of them lives in Vermont so these are quite a bit of them um and uh if you had told me when I was a typical witless hockey player and Beerus Wigan 18 year old American male that they would become the joy of my life I probably would not have believed you but turns out to be true and um this poem takes off from a photograph that was sent to me by the the father of one of them whom I think Jeff knows I know his grandson does because he's a my son is a guitar maker in Burlington of some considerable note and he tutored um just one of Jeff's grandchildren into making his own guitar and that's a lovely thing from reading to contemplate it's called standard time as an unpredicted epigraph skateboarding's values have always appealed to those who consider themselves outside of society's pace from gentlemen's quarterly GQ don't ask how I came across it dentist office of course um anyway it's called standard time we just got a photograph of our grandson Cherubic at the local state park skate park his smile shows how he is pleased he was been adopted by the older so-called thrashers though he hasn't yet learned like them to be tough as nails or to look that way I'm not sure why I think of Buster except that his toughness is real he too looks incongruously Cherubic though I wouldn't tell him that and if I did he might not know what I meant he also might not like my explanation and then I'd wish I had somewhere else to go and quickly I passed Buster today he was mowing along if he hadn't been he might have been digging a grave or tuning his pickup or maybe splitting some wealthier neighbors firewood from winter I've never asked of course but Buster or so at least I'm guessing doesn't consider himself a rebel though he did quit the highway department 10 days before he'd been entitled to a pension he was that pissed off at his foreman's high-handed conduct I call that genuine brilliant Buster's face is weather bust which lessens the Cherub effect I'll grant you the kid to our grandson's right has a skull tattoo on one arm barbed wire across his neck he shows a nasty expression whereas the brim of his hat points backward Buster's point straight ahead I noticed the scowling tattooed border is stripped to the waist as ever had on the shirt the laborers seemed to wear all over colored army surplus green with blotches of sweat at the armpits and on the back from shoulder to shoulder Buster I think embodies the very meaning of what's called eking out when I passed him this afternoon the light was dying because it's November I know something better than I did at the age of those thrashers and surly let alone of my grandson or even Buster that the cold comes on at a pace nobody can keep outside of forever and the darkness shows up early I had a fabulous a fabulous neighbor 8th generation Vermont I think my nearest neighbor our nearest neighbor he was a wonderful neighbor there were no filters he would say what was on his mind when we first moved there it was 35 years ago he drove up and said understand you're a writer I ain't going to read anything you wrote all I do is read Louis Lamour and once you get done reading him you don't want to read nobody else then he told me he lived to be 97 he told me in his last years I have three Louis Lamours now it's the time I get done the first one I can't remember what it was after I finish the second one I just go back to the first and I keep going that way he says no problem takes up a lot less space anyway this Tink he was called tiny little guy tough tough tough guy mere humans Tink shouted hear my bad news it's different he looked a tough old Bantam neighbor a rascal but solid a stone here stood a suddenly tinier version no one in town would believe he'd cry things had to be bad he told me why Mike's gone some business called aneurysm I caught my breath Mike his grandson dead before 40 Tink and Polly had raised him up from a school boy there were troubles in the in-between generation Tink's gone but I see him back 20 years red oak saw us pulled at his feet I still can't believe he actually weeps two stroke exhaust smoke loiterers on air although yes I've choked the saw dead quiet mosquitoes strafus now I recall Mike passing in front of our house last fall trailed by the six-point buck he's shot two flecks of blood have dried on one cheek and in spite of November's chill he sweats from dragging that white tail out of our woods for years he's been bigger than grandpa Tink so is the deer Mike will give our family good venison backstrap later this autumn who'd predict I'd go over to Tink and hug him not even I it's surprising he lets me how long has he soaked my shoulder like this long enough it seems for me to sense something like splendor in this awkward clench by which I'll always feel shocked and blessed my wife established was part of a crew that established a mentor program but one had been tried before and Tink had gone to school almost to the end of eighth grade and he was a rascal obviously set a skunk loose in it one time but for some reason he was one of those lovable rascals and the principal really liked him so he came into school his final final June of elementary school and and the principal said good morning Tink it's nice day and he said yeah see ya and that was the last he ever went to school he went to work in the woods at 13 and probably weighed about 90 pounds at the time but he's he's a blessed soul in our family's memory this one is called Innocence and Experience first warm spring day a melody pours from someone's window unlike me the player is young no stutter from that piano the music more moving for that of course the child's youth hurtles away at dawning speed which the player won't sense until a later day up through thick foliage of village trees Plink, Plink, Plink the tune is one whose author and name I used to know I think I think of it in this time I have to tell one my favorite think story to give you some indication of his character when a younger son was in third grade we were going down to school one day now Tink in his retirement would buy furniture a big flea market oak furniture only and he would refinish it and resell it I bought one of his desks I use it to this day and his wife ran the food confessions down in Lebanon, New Hampshire and one day we were driving by on the way to school and I looked out and there was a plaster of Paris or plastic I should say a Saint Bernard on this lawn how you like my dog nice dog until the next day it came by and said how you like his collar you know orange collar the way I put it on our three dogs and then next day when I take a look at the dog had a collar and there was a tag off and said well earlier that in the summer actually another neighbor whom we liked very very much our great friends they had a dog that got into Tink's and Polly's garden and dug it up and they counted on that garden and it was a labor not only of love but of necessity because they were just living on social security and Tink went up a good old Yankees he said that happens again he says that's going to be a dead dog I just want you to know I'm just giving you a warning so at the time I like to I'm interested in bird dogs and I had one I was training was very young I had a blank pistol the dog in the back and I was headed over to a friend's where we kept these pen whales which you blanks at and they come back to the cage and I said look we're kind of we're kind of early for school and we'll stop and if Tink comes over you tell him that that damn dog's been up in our garden and digging it up and you're sick of it and then let go six rounds from that blank pistol see what happens Tink comes over and he leans in and my son says your dog's been up in our garden digging it up he says he has not he says yes he has we even have pictures of it and we're tired of it bang bang bang bang bang like that he was waning up in the mirrors here here's his head and there's the gun that old man never blanks he looked back at my son and said he missed him we'll never see that like again this one is called Zach's Mystery and Other and it touches on the theme of addiction and the tragedy that often accompanies it Zach's Mystery and Other we remember Zach's hating himself so much toward the end he became a walking no stumbling cartoon he left his apartment he left his apartment say to look for a brick not some hand-eared thing like a lamp or a frying pan not just any rock he left and found his brick and used it to smash his grubby bathroom mirror a cartoon bible thumpers was likely have shouted the end is near third poverty that was one thing the lack of beauty in life was quite another and people turning away from him the ones still willing to hear him soar as hell they remain so and something else he couldn't count the years that had passed and someone called him deer or whatever I guess that's a lot of things those bible folk I imagine would have been right if they'd met the end of Zach's pathetic world we remember how we drink with him and more than half our gang are dead as he is now but some of us gathered those thousands of little shards and managed to fit them together again like puzzles and so we all had mirrors that we could inspect without thinking of bricks or drinking but we did keep thinking not all day every day but plenty of Zach and how we were like him and how we for sure we weren't heroes we just woke up one day and we were alive and it wasn't because we were smarter or God knows better to look at than Zach and I say God by the way because what the hell else do I have for explanation before it all shattered Zach had a movie star's feature and smile an athlete's body I could keep listening not beauty or brains or courage none of that saved us but we did get saved and Zach and some others did I have to be I think my wife said she was going to stream this so I have to I can't do I can't step out of line too badly which I would not be inclined to do anyway unless you were here so I could really properly embarrass her but I am nuts about her I kind of say I really am and every day I think I mean this only happens in movies you know the clutch gets the prize but it's been going on for 43 years so I think it's going to stick this is called mythology we all have our family myth I guess that I had to stay out of the pond for half an hour after I ate that my grandmother selflessly rolled dressings for yanks who had been wounded in World War II that a uniform hung in our parent's cedar closet for years but somehow disappeared perhaps there were thugs in math who grabbed this in lambs no sure I invented my own little myth as a boy six decades back that if I thought hard about her in the shower a girl would appear by magic and she'd adorn me the spray from the head the very icker of Iros it never happened I never thought hard enough perhaps or couldn't picture which girl I wanted which changed that whoever threw the first punch in a fight would always win I have scars to disprove that claim that marriage went dull as physical fervors quashed by the passage of time depends on whom you're paired with I testify I wear two wedding rings the first for day one the other for 15 years and I'll soon need another for 45 if this is a trap don't set me free such sentiment was hardly the point if indeed there was one when I began I'll well all's well for the fabulous bard that ends well as I've found like a wondrous myth like a fairy tale the final one I go back and contemplate my remarkable grandmother she was just really a lovely lovely woman and really kind of a point of refuge for her grandchildren her five grandchildren and she was an amateur painter and a rather bad one at that and I think she knew that but then she she did one painting in her late 70's which was just brilliant it was a bunch of apple pickers it was a little reminiscent of Mie's you know the three women with buns and baskets picking up these apples and gosh it was really good and we had another member of our household was a a gay man who my father had known at the college a lovely fellow who who came, moved to Philadelphia he was from North Carolina and moved to Philadelphia to work for a medical textbook company I think at any rate there came a bad heat wave and my grandmother said well let's invite that young Ned Boone out here where it's a lot cooler and he stayed for 25 years until my father died at which point he thought well it was inappropriate of him to stay there with my wife my mother recently widowed so he he went back downtown and got an apartment down there I think he bought and I had argued with him about this painting I wanted it and he said no she said it was for me and I wanted it and he was a very accommodating lovely congenial man so he was unusually adamant for whatever reason and so in 1966 I helped him to move into his apartment and the last thing we brought in was this painting and I said where do you want this we called him Uncle Ned where do you want this he just put it in the hallway there and I'll figure out where I'm going to hang it later 16 years later I had a reading at Penn and my wife and I stayed with him because it was downtown in Philadelphia I walked in the door and there was that painting in exactly the same place I had left it a decade and a half before but he still wouldn't let go of it as it turned out he was not a very good not a very good housekeeper at all the abandoned painting was the least extraordinary of his inattention to basic housekeeping that's too long I get to tell these stories some people have to sneeze when they're amid ragweed I just don't have to tell these stories but anyway this is called compensation the apple pickers for my grandmother as ever she studied the paper with her left hand the right one a nub of charcoal this time she worked on a sketch for what soon became her painting of 11th hour apple pickers no later too late but she wanted November frost on grass ghost white fragile as silence against which her figures would be stations the pillow of leaves below the tree umber gray several shades she rightly considered a challenge but then everything challenged her because and she likely knew it the brood fact was she painted poorly and thus her grandchildren all believed that a marvel after the sketch gave way to canvas and oils that the picture proved brilliant as if crossed by magic it implied unseen things for instance crows which showed nowhere in what she produced could still be heard nearby and raucous outside the frame and we caught the scent of the windfall fruit rather I did as I never told my siblings for fear of being taunted all of us loved her and laughed at her too we'd spy on her as she studied the easel on her sun porch biting her lip shaking her head then dabbing again at the palette lost in thought no doubt may our laughs to be forgiven we were ignorant not callous like her if only once in our lifetimes may we be gifted with something that transports us beyond mere chronological measure as she was by her one good painting which compensated her for ongoing griefs losing a son to the flu epidemic and shortly after her husband the apple pickers seems to have been her stingy gift not just for her valor but for her persistence for simply putting in time thank you well he's my uncle Ned has passed on and I don't know what became of that of the painting really I mean I it's got to be somewhere but it's not with me I wish I did know as a matter of fact I'm a little embarrassed that I've never even thought about that and so you just mentioned it now I think I became resigned to the notion that it was not mine to have it was hers to bestow where she wanted and he could do whatever he wanted with it but I don't know he didn't obviously have any children he had one sister very bright woman down in North Carolina but I don't know if she was a physicist I don't know if she was interested in the painting or what but so who knows anything else anything else I'm glad to answer any questions as long as you're not insulting this I'm so sensitive you're not going to pull it I'm curious how we go about your writing do you do it when it just comes to you do you set a set time how many do you do given a week month a year I'm just kind of curious how that comes to you well I don't think there's an absolutely blanket answer for all of that I did a reading with Ellen Bryant Voight earlier in the spring and she said something that I really liked and Jeff you may relate to this too you know poems are just looking for excuses to be written and in my case I never know where a poem is going when I start something catches my attention or maybe a couple of things catch my attention and then I just start writing in the faith that if it's going to amount to anything the language will lead me to what it is that it's about and say if if I saw an animal track that intrigued me and then got news of a school shooting or something awful like that I assume they have something to do with each other internally because I was the one that noticed them that they caught my attention so I just I work in that way and it's it's very improvisatory I just keep doing it until until I'm finished and when I first started out I was an academic at Dartmouth and I decided fairly late in life I was in my middle 30s that I really wanted to pursue a different different track I was extremely disciplined I mean I would just I schedule all my classes for late afternoon and evening and I work every morning until noontime in part because the oldest child or the second child took her longest nap or longest sleep including night time in the hours between 9 and about 11 so I they've got so much great gear now I look around at my grandkids and the things they have baby monitors and picture and all this stuff so I rigged up this thing I had a couple of chairs and a broom and an old wicker basket and I put the girl in the wicker basket and put the handle the broom through the through the handles through the basket and then I put them across the chairs and I would sit there like this and work on my poetry and I did it every morning like a tiger even if it wasn't coming well I just kept going and going and going I don't I don't do that anymore but I do a lot I mean I write a lot but it's not for the quality but the quantity would testify to that and I do it it has nothing to do with discipline I mean discipline is not doing it discipline is stopping and going grocery shopping or whatever obligation you might have for the day it's just what I do and here I am on the cusp of 81 and no one seems able to stop me I keep doing it but there's no set way I love that that comment of Ellen's you know poems are looking for an excuse to be written and I you know if something intrigues me and I don't know why particularly then I want to I want to find out why it intrigues me and my method of doing that is to try and write about it it has some urgency to me no matter how banal it may seem because it just stopped me figuratively in my tracks and sometimes literally in my tracks so that's my approach to call it that is a pretty big actor and the payoff for doing a lot of writing is that you know I'm I'm kind of an addicted reviser too much so I think sometimes fortunately my wife was a good critic you know you're just spinning your wheels now because you're afraid to go on to the next thing stop it's as far as it's going to go but sometimes you get a freebie you know you just sit down and you write it and you think yourself at any rate you don't have to change it and oddly enough this happens to me three times particularly in my life in a very improbable way those are all the longest poems I've ever written the first one was called The Feud I sat down and I wrote it at white heat and it goes to 15 type script pages all in blank verse words were feeding kind of a sound to it and I took out a stanza I remember that but I mean being a good puritan you know I sat on it for a while and I said I'll get back to that and I felt a lot to revise and meanwhile I showed it to a couple of friends of my old friend John Engels and David Huddle and some others and they said they thought it was pretty good and I said let's just give it to me and I have a theory as to why I came so quickly but I won't bore you with that then I did another one and I cut myself with a chainsaw and I wrote a poem called To The Bowling because I asked how far I went and that was long and that came in exactly the same way. I did a little more revising with that but not very much and there was another one that was inspired if that's the word we want an old neighbor of ours she was quite eccentric and very she was an unwelcoming woman but she had a bull calf that choked on an apple a property next to ours and I saw her out there looking around trying to figure out what to do and I just started writing about that so that one's called the Blainville Testament and that's of equal length but I haven't had such luck with any other long ones since but you do get the freebies which are kind of pay off through all the sits time you put in on other things what did you read Free Couch oh oh Jeff you're a friend yeah I have a a poet friend named Steve Blusone who was in Brooklyn and he read this poem and he said you know if there's something set out for free on the Brownstone neighborhood I live in you know it might be an espresso machine or a blender or something like that so it's a very different ethos whenever I see things for free around here I always think that there's a story and not always a very happy one behind it Free Couch Free Couch I can brood on things which is why it's always the poor who fashion slapdash signs saying free and stack their detritus outdoors who'd want it I wonder as I pass a certain house I know the people who live in there they'll know I don't know them not in the least there's some mystery in everyone of course but souls like these some sounds seem more inscrutable and dense than their dismaled willings we make our grim surmises about their behavior mother tense greetings perhaps the store where they empty their pockets to buy up futile tickets megabucks, powerball whatever slim gyms and beer what do I bring to all this is it sorrow contempt compassion all these to be sure and none or more as I get out as I drive by this back country place in whose mud and gravel yard just wants a couch the color of their mixed breed brindle dogs graceless scribbles bleed on a cardboard placard in rain but I see that yes it's free this hunk of fabric and particle board which even the dispossessed elect to reject drenched by ruthless downpour the couch sparks my customary inclination to conjure up metaphor but I keep myself from making the thing an emblem of perfect despair because whatever disorder or spirit the sofa stands for whatever kind of psychological clutter is it really theirs not mine physician healed myself alright well thanks again for being here you too thanks Michelle good to see you good to see you thank you goodbye we never know what to do I remember when I was invited to read Central Canadian State Policy and I remember it