 Thank you for coming. After around 25 poem city events, we are still getting audiences. It's amazing. You know, the AP wrote this up. I don't know if any of you saw the article, which was on the front page of the Weekend Arts section, or the Weekend Edition of the Times Argus and Rutland Herald. The day after that story went out, it had 10,000 views. It had gone nationwide and worldwide. They didn't know if this was the biggest, but they said they thought it was the biggest poetry event in the country. That's the best, the best. And the best. Thanks to Kellogg Hubbard Library and Michelle Singer, a phenomenal organizer of this event. At the end, we're going to have a raffle with you. Whoever, I'll tell you how it'll work once we draw the numbers, but prizes, including an antique Robert Frost and further range. Several other books and electronic device. Phones, please turn down the volume. You'd rather hear us than a telephone ringing. As much as you may like us, hold your applause until the end of the reading by each poet. Please help us put chairs back at the end. If you'd take your chair back there or ask someone to carry it for you, that saves the staff having to clean up for us. We'll read for about an hour total. And then the raffle, we definitely have to be out of here at 8. Or the staff have to go over time. And we don't want to make them do that. Even for Poem City. Giza Tetralier will be our first reader, followed by Trishinal. I know Giza most from his poetry. I first met him when he read with Peter Fox Smith over at the Humanities Council. Ended up doing a blurb for one of his books or review. Giza lives in Barnard with his wife, Marsha. Welcome. He's a citizen of Hungary and Canada. In fact, if you read his memoir For the Children, he'll tell you of his family leaving Hungary, escaping illegally in the night and crossing through woods and fields into Austria. And eventually they found asylum in Canada. He's the only poet, in fact, the only person I know who was an Olympic fencer. He says at one point in For the Children that he was, I don't remember how you put it, a lackadaisical student. I don't believe that. He got into Harvard. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. And went on to the London School of Economics. And today he works on finances for an alternative energy ventures. He's written 15 books. But the ones I know best are his poetry, particularly Extinction and Extinction Rebellion. And his novel Arctic Meltdown, all of his writings are about social conscience, and especially about the environment. So we'll start with Giza, but I want to welcome my daughter, Julia, son-in-law Tim and wife Cynthia here tonight. I don't play any favorites. Giza, welcome. Thank you, George, for that introduction. And thank you, everyone, for coming. And thank you to Michelle Singer for organizing this and the Kellogg Hubbard Library for hosting it. George told you a bit about my books, but I have five poetry collections that have been published. And I will be reading from several of them, starting with Extinction, which George was kind enough to mention. And I will read a few poems from there, starting with the very first one, which is called The Witching Hour. Can everybody hear me? OK. Witching Hour. Is this The Witching Hour, the turning point when the simmering seas boil spill across the cauldron's brim to flood this verdant earth? Corpses of frogs and fish, seals and birds are detritus, plastics and rotting hulls wash up with the silt to bury my feet. Is this The Witching Hour, the turning point when wildfire spread raging across the land and consume forests and fields, roads and towns, killing with burning heat and accurate smoke all life they find in homes or barns or nests or frantically fleeing the fate at end? Is this The Witching Hour, the turning point? We know damn well it is, but do nothing. We continue our hedonistic lies complicit in destroying our one earth. Next poem is also from Extinction, and it's the poem that actually gives it the title, Extinction. I can picture the mighty mastodon, the towering, ivoryed, hairy beast that ruled and roamed this primeval earth. The fierce dinosaurs of the Jurassic, those huge cold-blooded reptilian beasts battling each other for primacy through the microscope of my failing mind in the imagined black hole of creation, I see tiny single-celled organisms, the chemical precursors to all life. I ask, when humankind is no longer, who or what will conceive this strange being that destroyed earth and all life, including itself, as if it had been preordained? Now, I've written quite a few poems about different species of life and how they interact with humanity. And so I'll read a few of these poems I call my Beastie poems, starting with the first one, Mosquito. I wanton Mosquito landed on the bare skin of my forearm, attacked my feeling flesh with glee. In a drunken stupor, it gorged through its proboscis on my blood. I swatted a little bugger with lightning, fury, and hate, and squashed it to oblivion. Unmindful of the perfection of a timeless evolved being, over the long torrid summer, my Mosquito's countless mates wreaked their revenge on humanity. Another Beastie poem called The Dragonfly. I found a dragonfly lazing on our screen door, a great blue skimmer spreading its filly gray wings, flaunting its dazzling long lapis abdomen, soaking up the warming rays of the noonday sun, oblivious to its Jurassic ancestry. I wonder, will my friend's descendants still be here 150 million years from now as we disrupt the equilibrium of Earth, insect outliving cocky homo sapiens, the destructive devil of the Anthropocene? Change volumes to my last volume, the abyss, and one little Beastie poem from there called The Spider's Web. A spider spins a spool of spit, that ever so fine filament into a tough filly gray web. A death trap for wayfaring flies, and other flying bugs and beasts that it will munch on with delight. Only the arachnid can scoot with its long legs along those threads to get at its perishing prey. Do not destroy its perfect mesh, this delicate but sturdy snare that both destroys and sustains life. The Beastie poem I haven't yet published, it's fairly new. And it's called The Kingfisher. A kingfisher perches atop a rocking chair down by the pond. He sits there, regally attired in his blue, gray, and white armor, surveying his Vermont empire. On the chair and the ground below, skeletal remains of crayfish. The king consumed our stoon around as he holds forth upon his throne with the occasional flutter of wings to pluck yet another crustacean from the dark waters. Torrential rain falls, thunderstorms. Yet the royal beast does not leave his post, drenched with compost. He stays to thrill us yet another day. Another little Beastie poem this time from Extinction Rebellion, my fourth volume. And this one is called A Rafter of Wild Turkeys. A rafter of wild turkeys frolics in the field, some toms and hens, young jakes and jennies. A few poles, the birds trot and prance, then go pecking and poking. They halt for a moment at the side of the road, and in the burst, vault out onto the macadam, hightailing and across the dangerous divide. Relief, they have made it even the smallest chick. Bravo, say I, rooting for the rafter to live. But in my gut, I, the glutton, think to myself, would that meaty hen not have made a tasty meal? The last Beastie poem I released is called The Bear. Trekking the Royalton Turnpike while squashing a pesky deer fly, I catch sight of a big black bear crossing the road 50 yards up. I stop in my tracks, dare not move. A penetrating look, the wink. Ursus licks its lips, pairs its teeth at the cowering spectator, and with a wag of its buttocks, disappears into the forest. I spent almost a year in Japan when I was 20, 21, working at the Ontario Pavilion at Expo 70, the World's Fair in Osaka, Japan. And there I became acquainted with the quintessential Japanese form of poetry haiku. And I fell in love with it, so I've been writing a lot of haiku. And I put some of them in each of my volumes, so I'll read a few of those. I always give them a title, even though haiku are not supposed to have titles, just to differentiate them from the other poems in the volume. So just a few from this. The Whale of the Wind. The Whale of the Wind wafting through wind-tree trees, the woodwinds weeping, angry clouds. Angry clouds tangle to the music of the frogs, those thundering gods, no stars. No stars cloudy night, a loon's tremolo portents, calamity loons. And I went from my very first volume, Cello Steers. This is called Wrinkles. The waveless water mirrors wrinkles wrought by the voyage of the sun. So that's probably enough haiku. And I'll turn to a slightly longer poem. It's still not too long. All my poetry is fairly short. It's called Karpuscular Shadows. Karpuscular Shadows cavored on the wall, pirueting in a ballet of wrought choreographed by Emperor Nero, Caligula, and leaders of their ilk, who fiddle as wildfires scorch mother earth, and floods and storms ravage our sustenance. These kings are self-centered, and like Midas, give all to get gold to add to their hordes, and pursue perverse illicit pleasures. While drought destroys our crops, our children starve, our trails and roads become raging rivers, and our homes and cities are washed away. What future is there for my grandchildren? What hope is there for human life on earth? The poem that gives this title, its name, is called The Abyss, of course. It's also a relatively short poem, so I'll read it. The Abyss. We wake from our wanton lifestyle, our consumptive ways. We poisoned the world around us, raised our primeval forests. Now gasp for clean air to breathe. Our reservoirs are dry, our lips parched. Rising seas wash away our towns. No food for our children, but our automatic weapons will kill them in their schools or homes. We stand not knowing what to do, and on the edge of the abyss, this self-wrought, válpurgis naht of humanity's extinction. Only want and suffering await, and then the eternal mehl. People say that my poems are downers and quite morbid. I apologize for that, but I'm actually going to read two that are morbid. This one's called The Cemetery, and there's a wonderful old cemetery, as many cemeteries are in Vermont near us, where we live on the north road between Barnard and Bethel, and it was inspired by that cemetery, the cemetery. The Methodist Cemetery on the north road has tombstones dating back to 1810. Jack Russo, Francis Du Bois, Ralph Rhodes, Ted Campbell, the dead long departed into oblivion. Its mossy grays are cracked or have corners missing, like those ancient books found in an antiquary, names and dates and epitaphs scarcely legible, the acid etching erased by wind and weather. Only a few new tombs in shiny gray marble, grave monuments to those whose extinction still pains, their still living friends, are graced by the stars and stripes, or dry bouquets, blown out candles, yellow ribbons. In the summer, the grass between the tombs is mowed by a large woman wearing shorts on a tractor, lovingly clipped around the stones by her husband. They too will soon lie there fertilizing the lawn. In the winter, lined in battle formation, only the headstones of the brave is there to raise their white shackled pates above the frozen snow line to see the living pass through this forbidding world, year in, year out, relentlessly, eternally. The cemetery gives only temporal stay to mortality, as death defeats all, safe time. And my last poem is actually also about dying, but it's also a love poem to my wife. It's called, When I Die. Sorry, it's great at the end. When I die, when I die, who will grieve for me? Who will shed tears when the bell tolls? When I'm no longer conscious, no longer feeling unloving, will you, dear, kiss me one last time, hold my ice-cold hand to your heart? And when my body burns to ashes or decays, devoured by maggots, how long, love, before you forget my face, my voice, my touch, my laugh? When you walk through the fall forests, swim in our pond below the falls, will you remember our delight sharing such sunny summer days? And when you lie alone at night or naked in another's arms, will you still evoke our great love, the ecstasy of our coupling? When our children come from afar over dinner and lots of wine, will you smile as your reminisce about my quirks, faults, and foibles? When you play with our grandchildren, sing them a song, kiss them goodnight, will you gently remind them, dear, that I love them with all my heart? And as you read these my poems, my cello's tears, soto voce, will you try hard to remember the joy of our life together? For there will be no more of me, only what is left in your heart. Cello's tears is my first collection, as you know. But thank you for listening to those poems, and I hope you've enjoyed them. And now I'm going to... You get to the floor. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Now I'm going to introduce the next poet, Patricia Noll. Some of you know, probably. I did not know her before today, but I'm very pleased and honored to make her acquaintance and to be reading with her here on this podium. A Williston resident, Patricia's a very accomplished poet, whose work has been published in journals and anthologies, and she also has seven published volumes, so that's very impressive. She will be reading from the most recent volume, one bent twig, which focuses on poems about trees. She loves trees and is worried about them, what climate change is doing to them. And she's also the contributing editor to the online journal, Verse Virtual, and has degrees in literature from Stanford and Yale. But please welcome, Patricia, thank you. Thank you. The question about our grandchildren is a very real one these days. Isn't it? Okay. One bent twig took me about three years to write, but I'm gonna give a little background to it. Oh, first I need to say I have a voice disability. It is not cancer and it doesn't hurt. So if you could just kind of let that float away, you don't have to worry about it. Anyway, 50 years ago, I moved to Oregon, which is a land of trees with a little bit of old growth and a lot of clear cutting and logging. And in 2018, I moved to Vermont to my several acres of land with a second growth forest and all of that comes into play in my book. Sometimes people ask us, why do you write the kind of poetry that you do? And I'm guessing that you get that question some days. But one of the poems in this book is called, I want to write. I want to write how quaking aspen memorize the end rhymes of creation myths, how dance classes for willow branches warm up by sleeping beside the mother. When the frail crown of a cedar senses when the crow grabs on, the size one maple in the sugar bush shares with its neighbor. I want to write the prayer wins that fan the kinko's gold, the sonorous eulogies of giant sequoias for each other, how the Bodhi tree knows that when it dies, another sprouts, how Joshua trees smell the Santa Ana winds. I want to write a diary of the bristle comb pine from the day humans invented script. I want to write my own life one bent twig among many. Second poem I'm going to read calls for a little audience participation. And I just need one brave person here to say two or three sentences about one of the first trees that you ever loved. Is anybody brave enough to do that? There, there, there's always someone. The giant elm tree in the yard north end though, I mean it's just one of, no other people remember the elms, but they came up and then they kind of branched out and were just astonishing. Thank you. That's. And there were aureol nests in it. And it didn't survive. Well, that from a woman who was planting native American chestnut trees on my property. So we'll see how that goes. You never forget the first trees you love. I hid in oak shade to practice air guitar to escape the divas aria over rehearsed in the dining room. I used branches to climb higher than authorities said I could for the silence of the ash confessional. When a tornado turned the air sick green, I warned lost limbs realized steadfastness has cost. I hoarded acorn skulls with straight faces and ruffled braze to throw at my brothers and made battle lines behind horse chestnuts and crab apples. I squatted on surface roots for rest. These friends are generous kin. Embrace the green where ever my forest clans. Somehow I've planted a lot of trees in my life. Really nice trees of native trees and flowering pear trees and all kinds of things. But when you plant a tree, I think there's a thought that it's gonna outlive you. And this poem is based on a real event that happened a couple of years ago on my property. It's called Funeral in the Forest. I mourn not only for you, all the dying lies lynching, my list is long, but we are here alone. You and I and you were gone and I am your wake. I postponed this 10 times held vigil on the porch. I had to think about the words of eulogy, what song, what recognition. The forester pegged your age at 200 years. So I assumed you would outlive me, grand sugar maple with tapping scars, stumps of lost limbs and brown ridges. A bark twisted to find better rooting to respond to your home in this second growth forest of fox, black bear and the thick silence of the summer moon. 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson complained of a broken wrist while writing a letter to offer to sell some of his slaves to Finance University of Virginia. 200 years ago, the Missouri Compromised allowed Missouri to become a state with slaves. Darwin launched the HMS Beagle. Prospectors discovered gold in Georgia. You stood here through Abinaki land claims, cholera epidemics, Jim Crow, hurricane Irene, world warps, women and the boat, sap flowed to syrup. You crashed in that storm a week past. Wind got slashed through your crown of new leaves. I heard you funk down beside that ash that fell last fall. I don't bring music below the ledge. We hear coyotes howl, mourning doves and hawks. I speak my litany of loss. I praise that you knew no malice. You were the forest lungs, shamed for the sugar man, the owls post, the fine was Earl's leap, what I knew of standing stature in repose. I wear what seems fit for your last rites. Blue jeans, writhing boots, unable leaf in my hair to sit astride you as I put an ancient horse. Bear back on your open air, sleep in wild wood, waiting for night to light your art. Yarsight, fireflies, my voice at moonrise. I'll ring the temple bell hung on the younger maple and bow to the vibrations. Your lonely place of rest in peace and mine. This next poem is from the Oregonian that will always live in me. And so 50 years ago, I moved to Oregon and there was one locking truck after another with trees that you couldn't begin to hug. They were so big and would not left Oregon in 2018. The logs on those locking trucks were like this. And so this is called See the Forest. We cannot see trees in sunken ships, cheerio boxes, hammer handles, altars, rocking chairs, postcards, pickup sticks, ton of depressors, toothpicks, kindling, splinters, dreidels, butter churns, toilet seats, arrows, school desks, origami, cranes, birdhouses, crucifixes, wooden nickels, baby cribs, fence posts, Louisville sluggers, cellos, bowling alleys, checkers, jigsaw puzzles, gallows, playing cards, incense, white paper snowflakes on schoolhouse windows, chopsticks, totem poles, salad bowls, railroad ties, lobster pots, wine barrels, birth certificates, sleds, guillotines, walnut unstocks, railroad crossing gates, drumsticks, jewelry boxes, grandfather clocks, price tags, Christmas beans, picture frames, docks, decks, matchsticks, marble, raceways, pitchfork shafts, ping-pong paddles, harpsichords, postage steams, report cards, an obituary, the history of wildfires, wedding vows, scripts, the air we breathe, and millions of bored feet seized to rebuild after ruin. The logging truck chugs by, chugs by in the fast lane. Chains and tubes, frames secure, full-size furs to a flatbed. After the passing at noon of a stretch hearse with headlights on, I have one more to read. It's actually one of my favorites. I have a couple of birches on my property and Oregon didn't give me birches. I don't know why, but Vermont has made me familiar with birches and I collect birch bark and send notes on birch bark to people. It's not easy to write out birch bark, and birch bark. This is a quote from Henry David Throne. I have heard of a man in Maine who copied the whole Bible onto birch bark. Before I knew what Throne wrote, a sensual letter from the dogs written on birch bark that asked you to snippet to know where they had been, how they wished you were there. It must have been like that for that man distilling. Certain words, be kind. Keep in mind how hard that is, but relish the journey. Ignore what is false. Smell the birch to remember sweet. Bend it into a canoe when you must get away. So, one bent tweak. So I haven't been a poet in Vermont very long compared to us people who have been here forever, but since I moved here in 2018, every poet I know seems to know George Longenacker. And that's been really fun for me to be able to get together with him this evening. He's involved in so many things that have to do with poetry, past president of Vermont. Poetry society and still doing a lot of work with them. He's retired as a professor for Vermont Tech where he was chair of the departments of English Humanities and Social Studies. And his work roots in family and outdoors and reflects his long commitment to the Green Mountain Club. I believe he's going to primarily read tonight from his new book, Star Road, which is just out from Main Street Rag, a publisher that many of us would aspire to. So, thank you, George. Thank you, Trisha. Tents sag under snow, home for people who have nowhere else to go at a picnic area a mile out of town where they've camped since summer in a patch of woods next to the Winooski River which rushes by but says nothing. Morning traffic, school buses, commuters, skiers on their way to slopes or second homes, 300 feet from the tents, a brown house with river view, 10 rooms, three car garage, fireplaces, bright Christmas lights, winter night comes early for those who live in tents, snow blows, rattles pines, river rolls over icy stones, bones turn to ice. To say I'm bothered would be an understatement distressed is more like it to see people who live on the streets of this city. And I've seen the same thing when I've traveled to other places whether for work or for family vacations. Pizza in a snowstorm. Snow falls on their outstretched arms outside a convenience store. Finally someone gives enough for two slices and a large coffee. They share a park bench, one warms their hand in the other's pocket. Snow flakes alight on pepperoni and onion, crystalline stars which quickly melt away. They share their coffee, eat pizza with tattered gloves, fingers poke out of holes, two crows circle in caw hoping for a scrap of crust. The scraps of their lives reduced to one shopping cart, a ragged tent and what's left of their pizza. The next one is from my book and it's set in California. Raw crude. A harder time is coming, Paul Salam. They hunch around a fire beneath the bridge, hazy faces lit in its glow like a painting by Van Gogh. Beds of cardboard and shredded blankets by the off ramp a woman with a baby holds out her hat. Good day, two fives and a 10 before noon when she hides behind a hedge to nurse. On Refugio Highway, we've won the pipeline from an oil platform burst near the beach. Raw crude gushes onto sand and into Santa Barbara Channel. Some nights we'd lie there on a beach blanket after dark, people with nowhere else to go would sneak into the park to sleep. One night we gave away our wine and cheese but it's never enough to hand out scraps to mop up oil after the pipe has burst to toss a few coins and a hat to bathe the dying pelican and detergent. Maybe there's no apocalypse. Just the end of another empire fueled by raw crude. Toss another denarius in a mother's hat. Mop up your spills and keep on eating. Some of you may remember when there was a redemption center in a convenience store down the street between the drawing board and Shaw's where there's no a part. Bottles and Victoria's Secret. Tim searches for five cent bottles and cans along the Manuski River, fills his sack, crosses the tracks to the redemption center. Lots more back there, who tells the clerk as she hands him $1.70. It's a good day. Look what I found. Tim shows her a damp Victoria's Secret catalog. Bronze model and purple-brown panties on its cover. My daughter would like this. Her name's Victoria too, but she left years ago with her mother after Tim's Vietnam memories returned like a grenade to the head. He pockets the money, leaves with his sack, and Victoria's Secret. Behind the store, Tim sleeps near the river under a railroad bridge near redemption. He says when people ask him where he lives, his mind floats driftwood on the Manuski. Kids walking home from school give him change and leftover lunch. One student wrote of Tim in a PTSD report. Pungent creosote stains the bridge, trains hauling granite rattle the tracks. Above his bed, rats on feather feet scurry by on their way to dumpsters. He sees Victoria with her alphabet blocks. TCDD, PTSD, 245T, CDEF. He hears bullets, smells defoliant, like oranges or old beer bottles, but it all blows away as red maple leaves and snowflakes drift onto his bed, Tim watches, ice, bones, and bottles in the river. Is it Alice, Amy, or Anne? Huddled with four other nameless people who sleep on cardboard and blankets in the entry of a garage alcove, just a block from Grand America Hotel, the finest place to stay in Salt Lake City. Soft beds in a chick's setting, the ad says. It's still Kua Dawn, but before long, pavement's too hot to touch. All day they rest on a narrow strip of lawn by a parking lot shaded by lindens, robins and sparrows nest in the trees, search for bugs or scraps. Behind a wall hotel guests rest on chaise lounges order drinks and lunch by the pool. All day people pass by. How sad, disgusting, lazy, addicts. Once in a while, somebody drops a few coins. By October, icy winds will slice down city streets. Who knows how many will be left after winter, though some will die in heat before them. Slow euthanasia for these castoffs who search for scraps and trash bins, hotel guests come and go from restaurants high above balcony lights come on. Together they huddle for another night. Maybe dreams will bring them a little peace. You may have seen this beautiful anthology of all of this year's poems, sitting poems, put up a rootstock publishing. You can buy it at the desk or at Bear Pond Books. I wanted to read one by another poet, Whit Dahl of Montpelier, Alfonzo. I catch him in the corner of my eye as I pull him to Shaw's in Montpelier. A big man stands at the exit. He has an American flag draped over his backpack. He's holding a cardboard sign. Cars roll by. Looks like slim pickings. It's cold out now. I hurry in to buy a few things. By the time I'm back out and in my car, it's too dark to read his sign as I pull up to him. He's carefully rolling up his flag. Rolling the window down, I hand him some money. I used to think this was encouraging bad behavior. But what evidence do I have to back up this theory? Thanking me, he mumbles something about the flag and politics. He's missing a few teeth and hard to understand. I ask him his name, Alfonzo. He says it clearly. I tell him mine. I reach out to offer a hand. He starts to fist bump. Then he grabs my hand for a shake. His hand is rough and worn. He says, I'm not a little boy. I am a man. Good night, Alfonzo. I turn right to go home. What would I miss if I kept the doors locked and the window up with doll of Montpeger? Where animals lie down in the forest. Someday I will die, as all animals do. This is the only thing I know with certainty. Though there are other things I'm pretty certain of, like my love for you. But most things I can't predict, like which of us will die first. One day we walked in the forest, and there was a smell of death near a bend in the trail. Perhaps a dead deer or moose. You wondered why we don't see more dead animals. Another time in the woods I found a deer. Its bones exposed in death. Happy chickadees chirped as they picked flesh off the skull. It might be comforting to lie down and decay into the forest floor. But I'm not sure I'd want to go alone. If you were still here, I'd want you to walk with me into the woods and say goodbye. Then I could lie down with bones of deer and moose. Viral. It wasn't the first time there'd been a disease that took out flocks of humanity. A virus which couldn't be seen, for which we had no immunity, polio, bubonic plague, influenza. We couldn't believe it might kill us. A few screamed and resisted quarantine, carried large black guns, said they didn't believe in vaccine, but bullets wouldn't protect them from the virus. Day after day people coughed and died. Probably not the last time there'd be a disease. And this one would leave most of homo sapiens. Homo sapiens still alive, despite those who'd rather ranch, chant, pray, and pay no attention to science. Perhaps the next pandemic will be the one. The one that will spare nobody, neither righteousness, nor sycophant, neither prisoner nor priest. One by one each will be taken down until there are none left to care for the dying. And humans become extinct, like woe mammoth and archiopteryx. Everything we loved and created will be left behind. Elizabeth Bishop's complete poetry. Walt Whitman's song of myself. Frank Gaylord's bronze sculptures of soldiers. A pastel yellow 1958 Edsel. A Rolex watch. Still keeping time. It wasn't the first time there'd been a disease. Winter nap. I'd like to awaken and find its spring. Windows open, breeze through screens. Calls of chickadees and wood thrush. I'd like to awaken and find its spring. Climate calm again. Deadly storms ever over, though I love breezes. I'd like to awaken and find its spring 40 years ago when we were young, climbing a mountain. Though I love you just as much now as I did then, it would be good to have another 40 years. Calls of chickadees and wood thrush. It doesn't matter much on Jupiter. You wake me to see Jupiter so bright, aligned with four more planets, Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Mercury. When the moon sets, those other worlds glow. All night, barred owls call back and forth from palms and pines. Breeze off the everglades, brushes our skin like moth wings. Carries scent of mud from mangrove swamps. So far to Jupiter, yet the planets tonight are as close as our bodies on this blanket, where we lie three feet above sea level. Palm fronds tick in the wind. For a while owls still call as clouds turn pink. It doesn't matter much on Jupiter that Earth's polar ice melts, or Florida slips under sea. Planets and stars fall to the horizon. A storm blows on Jupiter older than all of our history. Love, I hope, we can survive for one more night. Thank you.