 What's your name? I don't know. So that means you're here. Do you feel like it? No. We're all here. No, I don't hear. Okay, let's just get with alphabetical. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. And then, okay. You know, I don't know what this is. What is that? It's like they're a deity. They're very happy. And I wonder about that. We're steering lights up there. But they're all in the mean and they're not. You sell a rock star bike, thank you. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. What do you really think? I don't know. Does it ever come off? Yeah. So we can just see. See the light here. Okay. Okay. Let's see here. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Good. Okay. Okay. Yeah, we're all here. Okay. Okay. You have protection there. Oh, okay. Thank you. One more time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for coming to Seen and Unseen, Poets in Conversation. I'm Diana Whitney, and I'm going to do just a brief little welcome introduction. Nothing formal, not maybe like you're used to in literary events where I read everybody's bios. We're actually not going to do that. We're going to go in alphabetical order by first name. So Allison Prang will start, then Bianca Stone, then myself, Diana Whitney, Elizabeth Powell, and Karen Gotschel. So this is the eve of the Total Solar Clips. We're going to be doing reading thematically and traversing themes of presence and absence, light and shadow, illumination, and maybe whatever the opposite is, and seen and unseen. And then after we each read, which will be pretty brief, maybe 10 minutes per poet, there'll be an opportunity for some audience Q&A, or the poets can also have a little Q&A among ourselves for a few minutes. And then we'll send you back out with a sunlight. So thank you all so much for being here, and please join me in welcoming Allison Prang. I'm really bad with microphones. Is this working? Yep. Everyone can hear me. Thank you so much for being here. It's so nice to see all of you. This is a special reading for me. I appreciate being a part of Poem City, which I think is such a wonderful event. And this is a special reading for me because actually this group of poets, every single one of these poets are particularly dear to me. They have been my inspiration. They're uniquely talented, brilliant writers, and have really supported me and inspired me and mentored me in my development as a poet. So it is like a huge honor to be here with them today reading. Other reason why this is really special to me is because this is my first chance to read from my brand new book that just came out. Last week, and this book just got published and you can buy it on Amazon or from the press. I haven't actually gotten my own author copies yet, so I couldn't bring any to sell to you. But they're in the world. They're coming out. And hopefully I'm going to plan some kind of a launch celebration in the next month. Stay tuned, come and celebrate with me. It'll be fun. So I'm going to start with the first poem in the collection. And again, thank you Diana for making this happen for us. The first poem I wrote, it was the first winter of the pandemic was bearing down on us. And it is called Before the Time of Distance. When I didn't hunger to hear the small talk of strangers, words handed off like buckets in a fire line, serious thoughts confided to an infant, a hundred rains across the surface of the sea, my mother's silhouette against my night window. The season moves towards us like a lid about to close, a dream of a white field, moments before snow build up within us like a saw. Just a curtain, I don't know if I silenced my phone. Okay, good. Portrait of the mother I don't remember. Her brother told me she looked like a movie star. So that's how she tends to move. Slow dancing with my father on a night thick with honeysuckle under flickering stars. Not long after she died, her mother tucked me into bed in her south side apartment and sang me a song so sad I forgot how to sleep. The images slowly sway between there and forgetting. All the bits collected from the cutting room floor, smell of developer, stop bath, fixer, grain of the image's rough assault. In the end, every portrait is about light, where and how you find it falling. Somewhere in a white room there is an old notebook with a portrait of my face. I sketched with a soft pencil. So many years ago, it looks like someone who could be my daughter. Only no one could. Drive home. From the passenger side window, I spot a bald eagle, shifting in high bear branches above stiff brown fields. We are trying not to talk about the family or the past. The sky finally clear after weeks suspended between rain and snow. I see an old brick house in the rear view near a half finished renovation with torn blue tarps flashing in the wind. A year before he died, our father took us to an aviary where an injured bald eagle was brought to recover and sat flightless for years in a glass enclosure. What does it mean to be rescued? Let's pretend this isn't a memory or a cage or a house cold with sadness. An eagle can live 20 years longer in captivity than in the wild. In one version of my life, no one left the house and nothing happened to us. So everything happened within us and it was just as bad. Is this okay with the microphone? Hush. Walking home that day, I pressed my face into deep fresh snow piled high on a pine bough so I could see the print of myself asleep. I met her at my house. Down in the basement, I put a record on. I lay beside her on the floor I touched her hair. There in the contours and shadow we recognized each other. Our bones nearly grown. She closed the door. The taste of cherry chapstick, the clutch, the release. Upstairs my stepmother's wooden sandals clipped across the kitchen floor. The dryer buzzed then stopped. The music uncoiled and filled in. Everything worth doing is worth being terrified by. In the static silence, she reached out and dropped the needle to the groove. That became the refrain. We couldn't turn away from the threshold and the decade and the nameless thing we'd done. Inside this hour a hundred snow geese landing in a field. Inside the field a barely perceptible intake of breath. Inside the breath a cathedral of doubt. Inside the doubt a shrine of broken watches. Inside the broken watches an hour. This hour. I'm going to read one more poem from this book and then end with the poem I wrote last week. Far Northman. Spring rolls in hard. Swift. Brash. Heedless. Boxelder saplings. Blackberry and burdock. Bright ground. Any place would be alone. A dozen dark purple tulips sprang up by the front steps. Did we plant them? Another gesture I can't remember. What I conceived. Things I once said with such conviction. How I got from there to here. I am not the person who moved here from Pittsburgh decades ago. But I feel her inside me. Ernest. Righteous. Drowning at want. I find a broken blue egg in front of our house and I want to ask my wife if she believes it is an omen of loss or beginning. Sometimes I find her crying in the shower. And I'm struck by all I can't take from her hands. But the water right in between them. So I've never done this before. I did want to say it though. I can't sell you my new book which I wish I could. I do have copies of Steele which is my first book back there. Along with Diane's book and anyone else who brought books if you want to see me after. So I've never done this before. I'm reading a poem that is so new that it is... Looks like that. I don't know what came over me but it's like an eclipse poem. So why not? Where will we stand when the sun goes out? I want to hold your hand. Our names are inscribed together on a gravestone. It didn't seem strange when we did it. Let's stand in that cemetery and listen for the birds to silence. Wildflowers on the forest floor know their time is before the trees awaken. The forest floor brown with things that have been sleeping, shed or died. I will never run out of awe or sadness. Last week we walked the empty shore for miles in a mist and fog you bending to move the surf clams back to the water. I will never stop being washed over by your goodness. It was just us, the surf clams and two coyotes at Herring Cove. I was pulsing with fear and wonder, sand and fog, worship and numbness. A surf clam can live up to 35 years so it must be glad for your gentle gesture as I am. There are warnings that during the eclipse there will be no way for the emergency vehicles to reach the emergencies or for the phone calls to touch each other and the crowded channels to the sky. Loving you this much has always terrified me even before that first touch that changed my body forever. The coyotes stood and watched us watch them us all asking each other the same question. Thank you. Welcome. If you guys need a chair you can grab one from back there if there aren't seats I can't tell. And I want to welcome the amazing Bianca Stone to read next. What's this little mic? Let's play the winter tarantella. Maybe love in midnight hours on a white iron bed like a dog skeleton distinguishing the essential and unessential moments shared between ordinary lunatics and screaming over a bird in an apple tree until an elegy has to be written to resuscitate the relation. Those who look towards the defeated wildlife of their neighborhoods with tragic relish to see somehow ourselves disappearing about ourselves. Once in New York City years ago the internet technician finally arrived. His teenage apprentice stood in my living room over a trans trauma book and he said it looked kind of cool and he wanted to know what it was. Poetry I said. What's poetry like? He asked. The treacherous inadequacy with which one finds oneself explaining in a few loose deficient words something with lungs and no face the immortal freak of language you haunt and hunt which is the original state of language you're trying to get back to from within poetry whose rare geniuses come as bittersweet suicidal explosions on the tongue. Randomly felt during long tedious meals award winning but already forgotten all the emoting of unanalyzable fragments all the surrender and detonation of precision and reckless insight and references to hidden wisdom and co-cams conversations across time and slips into truth and obscurity of thought altogether blissfully the form itself at its best a stream of dreams in the waking life overlaid like unobserved clothing the words that sing stillness the silence created by perpetual auctioneers that which is not the tale of an event but itself an event you know what just take the book I said pushing it into its hands thanks he said I took it away grinning a little but later with snow in my head and a thunder in my right eyelid I was worried as I was so dangerously then about dark yet unspoken things it frightened me that shiny black and white book wafting around New York City in the back time Warner Cable Van waiting to be opened waiting to torment him thinking of it changing his life so this is a really new form and it's called memory palace which I think we all kind of know what that is memory palace every memory palace should have a wet basement with frozen pipes and mouse bones every memory palace should have my childhood basement at the dead end of Elm Street with its rotted beams and dirt floor where we stored a mannequin named Greta who scared us shitless every time they went down to reset the hot water Greta purchased from Paquette's department store closing sale in 1999 the same store my feet were measured by those amazing people from all over the world who knelt down in front of you like supplicants kissing the feet of Christ and pressed your big toes through the leather and told you just walk around the little field everything khaki and ketchup red and frosted glass Santa Claus lips there at the top of the staircase and I sat on him suddenly aware of how grubby my winter coat was and how crooked my gaze Greta watched the palace in her prime from her corner in the newest sweater and pantyhose and pencil skirt not knowing that later she would be purchased by us with 40 bucks not knowing she would end up on the floor naked dismembered her boobs bared for no one but the spiders and the plumbers her arm lying beside her and her hand with three missing fingers that were kicking around somewhere upstairs I have no memory palace I have tomato paste cans bloated on a sagging plywood shelf memory my botulism exhibited my lock jaw my de-clawed cat come over and you'll trip on a cement statue of a cement bag that got wet before it was even opened all its creases perfectly preserved when I look back there's an axe in my head and a ripped tarp line there's a white mask hanging on the wall with no eyes just more wall looking out so angry it's frozen in a red toothy smile guarding what can either see nor hear let alone remember let alone make a palace I did this seven eight, nine, ten I wonder if you could wear that little thing a little mic on your it's too late now does it sound good? no, no, it sounds great that's for the the film art oh, okay it's not going to work because I was just trying to give you another hand freehand this is your work something's happening um, yeah I'm going to read this one last and I guess I'll read this one yeah, because I wrote this one after I was supposed to get a reading in Malkylir and there was a snow storm and we postponed it until the next week and there was another snow storm I came anyway but in between I read this poem and I think it's called old bio and snow there's always a snow storm coming and I've always booked a cafe on the other side of the mountain driving on bald tires to give another lecture on Hegel's vision of the infinite hole and at the last minute deciding to lecture on wind and snow and their effects on newspapers you know, wait this lecture was about repeating the past there was always a snow storm coming and I'm always booked at a cafe on the other side of the mountain and I'm driving in the dark and I'm insanely happy weaving along the winding cliffs careening down the other side of the summit in a little blue car parking sliding a quarter and a meter bouncing off my vanilla folders under my arm my garbanteen overcoat flapping open like a hospital gown to give lectures on vision and snow and repeating the past and if they introduce me with an old bio so be it there's no need to mention the latest gummy and linguistic situation in words on my recent award for laying on the rug and staring at the lacy, vacant spider webs and the petty coats of a glass covered now forget the laurels, what matters tonight is time and blizzards and saving on your next purchase with a coupon from your unconscious now, snow that form of water which haunts it follows you indoors in obedience to air until it feels fire then it looks for a place to lay down with fire only to elope with the earth and move slowly to the sea I just thought I knew something and light was pouring through me onto the floor let everything shifts one moment to the next and leaves a dark stain where it was I remember something that panic sets in a metaphor no longer holds like it used to I mastered no single existence in the past yet here I am with my name and my mutant face it's not real they say the past that is even if an ember cherries dropped from the tips of cigarettes fallen many, many years ago back before they put phones in pockets and people wrote numbers all over the stairwells and no one stopped reading a book to take a picture of one of its pages ridiculous instead there were long uninterrupted hours of reading and smoking and talking and crying and your own eyes wept trivial things as they do now though looking back you're not even sure who was weeping and who was watching the weeping time is also about waiting for an almost imperceptible change in a single tear a mother's textured silence the disturbed neighborhood kids coming together in the woods to echo their own households it's never really about the why in crying is it I mean in terms of narrative it just comes resembling meaning like an old Baidu resembling snow and holding in your mind the object of a spruce tree at whose base a kitten is buried wrapped in a tea towel and everywhere there is a white soil coming carried sideways by wind and down by gravity a pale inflection on its many cold lips and it doesn't need to know where it came from to know it is part of the whole and it is snow and it falls on your face and ends thank you so much looking at yourself is up next wonderful home so far I see the three-hand situation just give me a minute okay so I actually do an eclipse poem not a solar eclipse poem but a lunar eclipse poem because that's the only eclipse I've actually seen as a total lunar eclipse and it happened a long time ago in the 1990s and I saw it from London and we were young and we threw a party for the eclipse and afterwards I think we used to do a thrown party so we could write poems about them but this is called blood orange the night the moon turned to rest we opened all our doors brought strangers to our kitchen and danced in sheer dresses we wanted it to change us the planet's shadow moving like a spread of iodine over white skin unbearably slow dulling the clean bright round night when it crossed back again on my tongue the taste of your lipstick sweet and metallic you made me so beautiful I couldn't speak all night and stayed close to the glass so the moon could touch me my cheeks cool and matte with powder my face a pearl in the strange light I couldn't look at you when you did it when your hand drew my mouth and widened my eyes black coal on the lash line scarlet filled lips in the morning his kisses flowered on your neck like plums a little blood coaxed to the surface in whorls delicate as fingerprints startling as scars dazed and unclean we drank tea in the noon light and you lay on the grass while I peeled an orange digging under the hard rind piece by piece until the fruit was bare in its soft skin my fingers opened the shop of crimson bright and unreal in the white air I put a section in my mouth and felt the color run everywhere so I'm going to read a few poems from my book Dark Bads which came out in October and like Allison said there is a little book table back there hopefully all the poets will have maybe a book or two if you're interested see us afterwards geography the house shuttered all day trying to cast me out but I would not abandon the wind ravenous gusts arrived in gasps through chinks in the plaster rattled door jams spit snow shards on channels filled with ice a whole geography took shape in a king bed vast continent of quilt where we played nice turned and hugged the coasts caught in a net of half trues I thrashed like a landlocked panfish slipped with perilous hunger and the story paid out its unseen line thoughts unwinding in dark sheets phantom lover like a barb in the gills rasping, ruin me, take me sink me in the water again I'm going to stay with the winter theme a little bit longer and actually Bianca's poem about the snow and Mount Peely reminded me that one of the last times I read in poem city I came just it was April but it came in just the most tremendous blizzard up from Bralboro but nothing was going to deter me from coming up to read so this is in three parts and sometimes I just hold up a finger but I'm not able to do that so I guess I'll say the numbers ice house, hazard lights in the breakdown lane three semi-stuck halfway up the Searsbrook mountain the state trooper bending to set flares on treacherous ice roads winding slow east west over the ridge where my mother is relearning how to knit her marled stitches furl into a ribbon loose scarf for an imaginary child another project she'll never finish she carries the soft cowl from room to room couch to chair with the mystery she's been reading since August two why aren't the windmills turning when we pass they raised the ridge line but those giant blades stand sentinel above the riddled snowpuk tension is just chapped energy the teacher says rubbing the knot at the nape of my neck I want to believe her I breathe into the interstices imagine I'd be different with a different man would soften like a rag beneath his grip three out on the meadows the fishermen arrive in darkness live bait in littered buckets they light the wood stove in the nuttle house bore a hole through the ice revealing the netherworld murky reeds and black mud the promise of slow perch in cold water they hook a minnow below the dorsal fin and it swims around the hole all day tethered to an invisible line battering the smooth walls the only way out is to be consumed the only freedom a mouth darker and colder than this frozen river I'm going to move into summer season and I realize this if I can find it oh this is a poem I've never read out loud but I was just thinking about darkness and light unless this has both of them it's called summer solstice cresting the hill on a high tide of buttercups daisies susans a convergence of storms from near and beyond you swore you would never be so free with yourself but you were wrong the strawberry moon waxed like clotted cream and there you were again loosening the girdle twining rugosa in your hair decking the blackberry arbor in a gauntlet of stinging nettles rough thorns clutching your bare legs but never mind you're invincible in your silver link chain mail a number of cherry stones and slid it up your thigh you can survive for three days on dew and red clover you cast a spell of protection on the forest gate and consecrated the ferns with your nectar little moon cough let this run its course if you let your imagination like a torch forgive him and keep burning you could be curled in a sick room under crimson sheets on the velvet floor when out the back door and up the green path there are crowns to weave petals to pull he loves me loves me not fingers quick and patient parting silk from stem the last one placed in the old hollow apple where you offered the violet and lilac in turn binding june's spell with three opium seed pods a poppy bouquet in an iron horseshoe twisted with mint under spires drawing down the moon one more time while the fairy man waits at the river of oblivion holds his pole poised in the milk dark balance the questions drip dropping like water in a cave what you'll give up what you're willing to pay so I'm going to read a new ish poem not like written last week that's really really cool maybe they'll be in a fix poem next week but I actually heard this poem has the international space station featured on it and the NASA's description part of that description is a complex of laboratories and habitats which is the title of the poem and I just heard a massive late engineer talking about the eclipse and how they have to when they're sending things up to the space station sending things up to land on the moon they have to take into account eclipses and the lunar pathways when they're making these calculations I thought that was cool so here we are actually it takes place right in mud season a complex of laboratories and habitats the dirty iceberg by the back door won't melt until April but today's spring season is over no more clear cold sap drunk straight from the bucket elixir flowing like an alpine stream my face pressed to the metal lip the veins of spring open the trees offering up their sweetness for days weeks the holding tanks full of it as you boiled at night by headlamp and starshine as the space station arched above us burning like a meteor at seven kilometers per second 15 sunrises per day were the astronauts up there floating or sleeping running on treadmills or eating silver pockets of space ice cream did they dream of us below standing by the boil wreathed in wood smoke and maple steam we are specks on a blue green planet march was cold sweet and brutal then it turned sudden heat I gather sap bare-armed in a cotton tea haul the wagon through boggy mud ruts in the pails a scattering of drowned ants and beetles the last sap is cloudy and oily some yellow as piss it's not like love or childhood when it's over you'll know it's over thank you so much Elizabeth Powell hello everyone thanks for coming it's really nice to be with you all and with all my friends and poets so I'm going to read some new poems about I would say the divine feminine and the liminal space between the divine feminine or another way of thinking about that might be Mary or Eve as mother of the living sort of what the yin-yang or the serpent's tale what the divine feminine is becoming and it's based on an article I read in the BBC it's called the plastic bag lamb womb the plastic bio-bag womb is a mixture of warm water a homemade amniotic fluid to support the lilliputian sized lamb inhaled swallow stewed in the womb this fluid is flushed through the bag each day a continuous fresh supply of moonshine the lambs begin to develop lungs the heart pumps used blood to the placenta machine replenishing the tiny lamby body once again the lamkins open their meek eyes grow a woolly coat scent glands in their faces appear comfortable living in their nouveau polyethylene homes after 28 days released from their bag they breathe on their own in the lab then the long lead to the slaughter room only one lives a favorite of the janitor the others are killed by injection in the jugular after a shearing so the researchers can see exactly how beautiful they've grown there's a poem I wrote for my grandmother about the holiday known as the birthday of the trees on the fourth year after planting do we eat the fruit today we remember why is it that we too are trees in the field emerging from winter sleep about to bloom bright star of apple blossom a memory in my pupils cascade of pink white in this bright kitchen where I have loved my children feeding them double cream and cherries cooking spring lamb with figs fresh peas I give thanks for the years in each ring of the tree as they put on their leads so I put on my ghost grandmother's coat I have enrolled her blue veined hands now in the old country she did not celebrate her birthdays her only certificate the tree of life I head to the upper orchard to read the sacred text of bark in these hands she has lent me this is the title poem of my new manuscript it's called too late to stop now this week I dragged the Christmas tree out like a corpse I was homesick for mutual assured destruction in 1985 love was a meeting of solitudes the thin tissue around ornaments and in the neonatal unit I drank junk-sick babies I drank oolong tea in bed red de lilo had a neck ache let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart I rocked some creamy babies made new cells a couple of poems and in the hospital lymph nodes, margins 10 inches of snow I didn't take anything personally except when I did my neighbors telemarked skiing bonfireing their vanities and lost numbers words, minutes space, knitting needles life there was still a god and the maple apple bundt cake went stale I realized everyone was my dead mother acting in a becket play I accepted this week all previous weeks had prepared me for with its nervous dirges and the Tibetan bulk of the dead I was still this Elizabeth and the soul who claimed this Elizabeth this week loving my pantry on my doorstep on my tongue the ice cats kept melting a terrible sun and I'll read one more it's a series of poems based on clouds and the clouds it's based on an Indian epic poem where the clouds are sent across the mountains to deliver a message to the beloved but in my book the clouds are sent with messages sent by me as a child to me in the future and vice versa cloud song why don't you open the red gingham curtains now it's morning again get your hiking boots laced coffee percolates the scent of your homemade life you can surrender yourself to your mistakes I'll be your witness isn't that why you sent me from your childhood sky across time and space I set sail on the sky over the Catskills over the green mountains traveling out to go in the trail map left by those who came before each blazed blue marker painted on a tree where the route turns toward the summit is where you can leave a mistake behind go upward over the ridge of falling stones the closer you get to the peak your mistakes will sink into the carrion and moss and make you stronger and more mystic why do you think I merely hide the presence of God you can be yourself in any tense you like when you lie in the grass and look at the sky youth's mistakes like wine that ages well makes blessings out of fermentations don't ignore storm signs the more you become the moon the more responsible you are for moving the tides pay attention to the magnetic force that is your compass that's how you will find your direction so stop trying to understand the difference between obsessions and prayers where has it gotten you thank you and I'd love to introduce my friend Karen Gatchel please help me welcome her we're delighted to be here and to read with my friends it's been really beautiful to hear your work okay I'm getting the signal here can people in the back hear me can everybody hear me um and I want to thank Diana for wrangling us I know sometimes I'm especially hard to wrangle so I really appreciate your efforts in putting this together so coincidentally the manuscript that I've been working on I have a couple of manuscripts I'm working on one of them is actually called Eclipse Season which I came up with that name a while ago and this thing that's supposed to happen tomorrow was barely even on my radar at that point so I'm not trying to monetize or sell out or anything like that but um anyway I think in some ways my poems lately are all about middle age which feels like eclipse season in some ways so this is the title poem Eclipse Season clouds darken and spoil over the hills then crab apple petals come down with the rain in the house where the glass blower lived in the field beyond the radio tower horseshoes and ashes I once stood at the curve of that road eyes adjusting to darkness to witness the comet a controlled burn when she was dying a guitar kept her warm music is time expressed through human bones animals look into our faces and are gone I hold my breath and begin again and this one's called orbit I knock about in my space station a bean in a rattle aging out of my high tech suit there's no way to know what transpires on earth now that the dials have frozen my few possessions a silver necklace that turns my throat green a pistol and a pie recipe though no apples grow in the exosphere I remember long ago back home watching my mother on her own mission her light moving slowly cutting its curving line across the night sky's dome I'd wave as she passed it seemed so austere and important that life in the cosmos but I was pulled back to earth by hunger and homework then my own lift off I don't know how I survived so much weight my rib cage a straining chariot they call it long odds the sound of drums one can live a long time on static and broth it's the loneliness that reminds me I will do my duty from the porthole my old life floats below that blue and distant curve this one's called survival when the blizzard deepened its wedge against my door the wifi went down and the plow didn't come far away pine spent low around the house and told me it's okay if you disappear I slept most of the morning that made coffee on the stove I've always just wanted to know how to live with myself I think this is a common problem I hadn't quite made up my mind but I thought I should at least shovel a path to the wood pile lately there's this owl comes around and it floated down silent and quizzical the pine's were quiet and the owl just watched wondering how I'd manage my survival some days I don't want to be responsible for one single thing the snow was deep but light I remembered as I cleared the way to the shed how when my mother was dying she made up country songs to give the nurses a laugh and later when it got so bad she could go I know I was doing my best I said it's okay if you just stop now and she did the 12th century I left myself asleep in a hotel room in Montreal a spacecraft bound for the edge of the galaxy grainy film with burnt out frames the taste of the monkey bars in third grade a feeling that everything good was denied you except I was able to hold so quietly it was almost a form of theft the house across the street is all lit up at midnight a shipping container the raw material of plastic dolls, laws of dress laws of acceptable speech how many eye washes how many eyelashes awash in the ocean climbing into a cabinet to rest climbing into the 12th century with burnt walls the river is a girl playing solitaire blue ink on her sleep my tall grown son walks wordless past me in a dark field where crickets chir and the wind carries a smell of burning wood he wears a Spanish wedding gown stiff black lace over whale bones cinched tight hem scraping the dry scrub of the field I watch him move toward a white dress as higher than I can see I think I could still follow him and realize that is something I have always believed even though I can't remember my son's name or what it was to give birth to him I watch his still face behind the veil the pale skin of his hands I should go to him and offer the lemons from my palms I should offer to climb the ladder instead my son this bride so grave as he climbs slowly higher until his black gown vanishes against unbroken black above this one's called the stones an hour or so along the railroad tracks chicory and queen Anne's lace I come home with a tick on my knee who decided on the sound of the dial tone when was the last time you heard it time isn't spent like pennies it is the fountain pennies are thrown into the neighbor's motion detector goes off when the fox walks across the lawn last thing I remember before I died was dropping a needle with a hiss onto the spinning black disc of my mother's favorite stones album I feel like I've been reading forever um I'm trying to um the vanishing point was I really born of my own bold mother all ferocity and diving underwater I stood shivering on the dock while she crossed the lake I watched her strong tan arms and four decades past before she remembered to return she was back by sunset and then she put her mind to other things I put my own mind to nights of childhood so dark my body threatened to dissolve into deepest sleep the damp thumbprint of the summer solstice I've always been old it's a trick I learned to keep from aging how could I trust such depths and currents from where I stood she seemed to slip in all her youth and energy below the horizons curve if I had a hundred daughters to swim away from I still would never be that young skip that one um two more the last ice age I have a habit of withdrawing into the place to see an epic I empty all my language into the fire and my skull grows large with silence at night I fall into the sky I take a dog to bed and sleep until we both need meet the stars tell me nothing I do not need to know everyone I've ever loved has been keen with hunger everyone I've lost has been buried with their bone beads and there's no need to visit their graves I am on the wide plane with the running horses my body is a simple instrument for the wind to play this one's called the lake I row my small boat through the shallows the universe ends where fog begins on the rocky bank nothing exists except one crow rattling above the outcrop in all my time on earth I have learned one word that holds it like a coin almost soundless water ripples where my ore dips pulling the scent of copper from the lake eddies open in the wake all I cannot say my arms pulse with the weight of it thank you amazing poems I love that we ended with eclipse season it's really like that your book happens to be our theme so we could do some audience Q&A the poets could come and sit on the entrance but there's also no pressure if you just want to either slip out the back or let us ask questions just a random applause for all of you listen to the group which was when we were thinking about poems to read that sort of loosely orbited this theme was it challenging or did you find that you almost had too many that could apply anyone who wanted to can you guys hear okay without the mic okay should we just turn it off I literally felt like every single poem I wrote would fit into that scene and unseen I feel like it was very easy yeah I think the scene and the unseen are probably the biggest thing for me in poetry it's taken a while to articulate that to myself but poetry as an object on the page is really like an incredible individuation process of like burning this scene and the unseen together and the inner and the outer world into harmony of a kind and that reality of the unseen is seen in a way but it still remains unseen which is the incredible thing about poetry does and I I mean I didn't have to think I had a newer poem because I didn't have time but like it was meditating more on the unseen idea but I think well like the old violin snow one which is all about a lot of things but I think the idea of the whole with the W right that is bringing into harmony we are as people like W. H. John said the poem is like a pseudo person and I always think of that when I think that he or all pseudo people because there's so much unseen at work in our consciousness that we to make it whole and seeing we need something like the event of the poem in relation to the reader poem and poet together so yeah yeah yeah so I love the theme yeah everybody just pulled together some ideas for the theme I think that was maybe before we knew that we had one poet who was actually reading a book on that I mean I'm actually interested in when your eclipse sees you can answer the question too like when your eclipse season project took shape for you um oh well it's just that it's a manuscript that has about 20 different names over the course of it's lifespan and that's where I kind of like did now with that and it's kind of stuck I don't know it was probably I think probably Allison Allison's my like the person I text and I'm like what about this I don't know it's probably been a year and it wasn't really I guess I knew that this was on the horizon like I've got a friend who's been obsessing about this for like three years or something so it was like in my mind but um so when you were choosing poems like around the the theme was it was it hard to also like winnow down which one's to read well because I really do think like when I think when I think the title for me is representative of midlife which is like where I am and feel like I've been forever um and what's that one um that you've always been old yeah yeah sorry yeah so I think since like my poems kind of are on I mean they feel very concerned with that with you know the the weirdnesses of midlife and loss and everything that comes along with that so it felt like like yeah I mean I just pulled out a bunch of poems that like a good variety I mean I haven't ever thought I'm thinking about both about midlife and about the eclipse season because it's just um everywhere but I haven't thought of them together until hearing but I'm really enjoying that let me see a question about how you share with us the original question about yeah I think a lot about the left brain and the right brain and how it's kind of a yin yang and the things we want to say that our right brain can figure out and the left brain wants to just blurt out stuff that the right brain holds back and that tension and um I'm really interested in that tension because it just feels like I keep hearing everywhere people say they can't say what they really think so what does that mean um spiritually when people have to not say what they think or lie to exist and so I'm interested in that tension the things we know and the things we don't know that we don't know and I feel like I'm kind of kind of snowboarded over middle age I've become a grandmother recently and um and it's like a friend of mine said oh 60 is really nice and I have to like agree that it's okay if there are no answers and there is the silence but to be free to speak um some sort of human or spiritual truth and that that can always change and nothing's black and white and so I don't know I keep saying to my husband Hans was like what's up with the eclipse why should we care like I understand it it's a natural world it's metaphoric and everything I just having a lot of trouble dragging myself to witness it feels like a forced witness so therefore maybe it doesn't need me but I'm sure it's going to be very beautiful and um I'm worried about my dog weirdly and my grand baby like should they go outside I'm really glad that you organized this it was so nice to be with you I just wanted to do something for really the only time available was like the time the day before the eclipse and I've been interested in the whole like media frenzy um astrological meetings of eclipse season like the astrologer I followed talked about being a time of just wild instability um like the usual um energy of things disrupted and I guess the ancients were very frightened of eclipses and in fact it was not believed to be a good thing to go and witness um obviously that's right right probably wasn't a good thing so there's that but I think there's like some battle that might have happened centuries ago like in Chinese if there's a story and please correct me broadly but where an eclipse happened and there was you know anything that was tragic or violent was blamed on this so I've been thinking sort of metaphorically um so the astrologer I followed was like it's best to just stay in bed and not like go out into the eclipse which I thought was interesting but in terms of the wild instability I've been watching the media talk about the traffic and even the librarian at home city was like maybe you won't be able to even get into Montpelier before then so it's really but here we all are and then I was thinking when you talk about divine feminine how there is something interesting if you're going to think about the luminaries of the sun and the moon and the moon you know traditionally feminine or emotional basically blocking out the sun which is more like the like the day world and the rationale and that being really frightening for our you know our world of rationality and patriarchy and all of that so I was wondering if that was why there were all these dire predictions about running out of gas and no cell service um if it was something about some darkness occurring in the middle of the afternoon and what was what are the animals I've been wondering about my dog too um what are you, I haven't been worrying about my dogs and now I am concerned I'm going to let we talk about her dog just that the animals are going to be very sensitive to this period of totality and that we I don't know what like the day animals are supposed to do but it's mostly the night animals may start calling so I don't know what you're thinking about her dog that's so badass though I want the night animals to start calling me too I mean I feel like there's all this good energy I feel excited about it I feel like there's a binary of course in the sun and the moon and the feminine and the masculine and all the symbolism behind each one and then they're coming together at once and that's a really powerful even just symbolically powerful but it's something we can witness and look at and I keep thinking about it I didn't read the article because I just didn't but it was like so nice consciousness and everyone was like retweeting it making jokes about it and all the pilots were like yeah you know I mean they should be like yeah but I keep thinking about that and I keep thinking about the like again the unseen aspects of consciousness that are so manifest in our planets and this is a real moment so the uncertainty is really exciting but I feel like there's some great positivity in it because we are in such a shift anyway in our culture in our world and the weird weather and like the global warming and the locusts are coming I don't know it's just like it's kind of exciting this is the end and we'll be bored I also think it's exciting this thing about humans having an experience of wonder kind of all at the same time and like putting their phones down because you actually can't I'm taking a picture of it right? Yes you're not supposed to I went to the eye doctor and they were selling like a special thing that you have to put over if you want to take a picture because you can't look at it. But it's in New York Times Yes. No. Let's just put out our glasses and like it's like the line from your poem about people used to be able to read a book without stopping you to take a picture of it we're to actually bear witness in community whether it's like your loved ones and your dog or like maybe people like on the side of a highway like looking at the heavens which is what I imagine like the agencies to do before people could even read was like tell stories in the sky and the constellations what's interesting to think about how we respond to things and because of what we're told like we're information is great but sometimes it takes away from just experiencing it so we're thinking about what the traffic is going to be like there's an interesting article in the Vermont Digger I think about a guy that's 104 who experienced it but he was 11 and they asked him was that like and of course he's just like we're just minding our own business I had a moment today where I know how many other people have done this where I took those eclipse glasses sitting in the house for months and put them on and looked at the sun it's this big it's a tiny little thing tiny little thing it's going to be a very interesting thing for people who haven't done that to say wait a second in the newspaper it's this big so there's going to be this all this expectation and then there's going to be some I think the appointment I think it's going to be much what I imagine is such I don't know that it's going to be visually interesting as it is going to be energetically interesting I mean it's like all the feelings of dust that I mean we live with these rhythms and it's going to be like the afternoon and then all of a sudden it's going to start feeling like it's cooling off and it's going to feel like it's nighttime and I don't know what we're going to feel like how long has this last the total is the three hours span which means when it starts to I was with this NASA guy through it where this shadow the lunar shadow starts to cross and then the actual totality when the shadow fully covers the disk of the sun from our perspective will really only be three and a half minutes but then by the time it crosses the other side so it'll total three hours span so it's going to get darker but I think that just this feeling of darkness coming and then growing and then momentarily to be dropping darkness in the middle of the afternoon and then the the birds quieting and animals shifting and I think we're going to feel all of these things that we I mean it's not like I think that much about like what is going on with the birds but I think we're going to all of that is in our awareness it's going to be happening in the middle of the afternoon I hope I'm somewhere where I can hear more and not just be in a big crowd but I think it's going to be something that we feel and I don't know that it's going to be that spectacular in terms of like that's disappointing I think it's dark but your tiny sun will not be as interesting as what's cool here a little bit of clouds I just wanted to tell you don't worry about your dog I instantly got anxious yeah you're outside every day and don't look up at the sun so there's no reason to think they're going to do that and I don't even want to meet the high school you live inside and also I didn't get to hear all of this wonderful being but I'm really grateful for the last three readers that I have from here I just throw up here to see my friend Greg from New Hampshire because it's the weekend on vehicle okay well that's really sharing about the dog yeah I asked that my niece about her baby you know she's two she's not going to look at it yeah I don't think any babies dogs get blinded all babies like levity I'm actually more worried about my 16 year old he's a real risk taker he's the kind of thing wow well thanks everyone are any other thoughts or yeah I just had a question though where you all came from that's right because we didn't read bios or anything do you want to just start and why did you come from East Middlebury I came from Brattleboro but I'm actually up in Craftsbury common for the weekend I heard your interview on WBEV oh yeah I remember you said you were going to be in Craftsbury that was great yeah it was interesting because you asked me a question that I felt like he should have answered which is like why do we want poets to tell us about the eclipse well you are me yeah so anyways that kind of humbled that I drove over here from Brandon Vermont which is just over the Brandon Gap Rochester area it's not to have snow yeah it was very sunny and beautiful and there's lots of snow on the sides but not over it I grew up in Vermont moved away from my years and now I'm back I came from Burlington today but originally I came from Pittsburgh I came from under hill it's just interesting I came here from Vermont people come from out of state we're from New Jersey oh great how about that earthquake that was terrible oh we've gone for two years quick it's down to an accident I came to Michigan for the last seven years but I was in Vermont for like 20 and now you're back at home you're here with your grandchildren but here for prom city oh great good there's some astrological concern because the earthquake was a magnitude 4.8 and the eclipse is on 4.8 oh oh oh I didn't hear that how's that made it 4.0 I have a little tip there's a really amazing book for children called A Beautiful Moment about the eclipse it's out of print right now but you can Google and how does somebody read it to you and it's just really lovely about a total solar eclipse beautiful moment and it talks about how we're experiencing it together some of the things you all said also like once upon a time I was falling in love but now I'm only falling apart you have the microcarous what I'd like to do total eclipse of the heart I think we're finally with them