 I'm Charlie Barish, and I'll be reading from my second book, Home Movie. I'll start off with a couple of baseball balls. Curveball. That curveball, that terrible hummingbird, dropped over the plate so soft, so real, like a pear or a breast, striking me out. I love the pitcher. I sit on the bench cursing him. That curveball was the wheel, was wine, was cooked food, was stonehenge. 21, 32. Not many men. What? Not 34. A man and a woman are lying in bed. His leg stretches across her belly. His hand is a weight on her breast. In five minutes they might be making love, or they might be asleep. If ten years ago he hadn't turned down a road scholarship to play baseball, he might be living in a tutor cottage by a heath. This had been one of his dreams. If his arm hadn't broken down in the minors, he might be in a hotel room trying to sleep, thinking of tomorrow's game. If his boss's wife hadn't gone into labor this morning, two months early, he'd be in a meeting in Chicago. If her husband hadn't left her a year after they married, if there hadn't been that party, she'd be watching TV now, and there'd be two or three kids upstairs sleeping. If her father hadn't gotten drunk, hadn't been so insistent that night with her mother in the Chevy, and if her mother had taken her mom's advice and gone to that doctor in Puerto Rico, each of their lives has been a series of miracles. In other eyes, meet each things. This is the moment I've lived for. Which one? Secret. This one is secrets. Patty, when you became New York City's 1934 Marvels champion, the first girl ever to win, defeating the top boy before 500 screaming children, knocking nine out of 13 ducks from the ring, showing skill and long distance plunking, which the New York Times declared virtually impossible for a girl. Did you decide right then you'd keep this a secret? And later when you played baseball, barnstorming in buses through cornfields, past factories, did you make plans to bury away this part of your life? I was at the 30 years with Marguerite in the suburbs that made keeping secrets natural. The years you coached softball and smashed tennis balls past college students too young to know about adults loving each other. So that when I rented a room in your house one summer, I would never even wonder whether you and Marguerite shared a bed. Only after she died and you showed me the photos, you and bloomers carrying a baseball bat, you and Marguerite camping in the 50s, or walking a dog, did you teach your greatest lesson, not just about the heyday of marbles or the baseball glove in the attic trunk, but how much you missed Marguerite, how much you loved her. Patty and Marguerite were the, visited the Department of Sara Lawrence College when I was there. And I was doing some research years later on, I don't even remember when I was researching, but I saw the microfilm, Girl 13 went mobile championship, so I had to look it up, and it said Patty Smythe, and I knew it had to be my Patty. Blueberries, the blueberries are dying, young plants four weeks in the ground, the leaves are falling off, the nursery can't tell me why. My friend said, did everything right, broke up the soil, gave them a bed of pine needles, knelt under the moon to pray, to water them with tears, and watch them grow. I was afraid they were not happy enough. It's like the time I married a young girl, washed her clothes, built a house around her, better until she disappeared. A young woman, by the way, is completely different from, the whole movie I'm describing is completely different from the cover of the book. Home movie. A young woman sits in the background, a man holds their baby, presents him to the lens, dances. The camera follows, the frame cuts past the woman, we catch the side of her body, legs bend under her, the back of her head, her hand picks at the grass, she is 19 years old. The woman rises, spread her open palm across the lens, her fingers appear on the screen, a blur, the camera shuts down, there is an argument, he will love women too much, the man says, the way I love you, the baby is crying in the grass. When my father was a little boy, his grandmother ran the household, the key to the pantry jangled from her apron, there would be no snacks. His mother lay in bed at times reading about Joan Crawford, her grand and garbo in a movie magazine, at times recovering from electroshock treatment. The day before my father died, he threw his head from side to side, like a horse refusing a bridle, in the macaroni and cheese, I brought to his lips on the spoon, so I said, let's try the applesauce, but he clenched his mouth shut, opening it just to say, I want my mother. Impressing my therapist, did I ever tell you I DJed an oldie show on the radio I say to Mary, my fourth therapist of the year? Amazing, she says, I never knew that. The next session I tell her about the Bearback Barrow Race, I won riding a Pinto mare. I got a blue ribbon, Biggest Lord Fontleroy's tie. I still have it. In the following weeks, I began to make things up. I caught a home run in the right field grandstand at Yankee Stadium, bear handed. The crowd cheered as if I were making mantel. I bet you didn't know I wrote a computer program that finds the rational roots of a polynomial equation. I think this really wells her. I once won a pining contest. Charlie, you're incredible. Am I your favorite, I ask? You're very special. But am I the most special? Can't you just pretend? Everyone brings their own unique story, she says. It's time to find a new therapist, I think. I do the nature efforts, I'm going to do a healing one. Yeah. All right. Are you doing nature effort and new hope for elegy? I'm not doing elegy for mice. Elegy? Elegy for mice. There have been many. I carry the bodies outside and leaning over the fence on spring them, depending on the season, into a bed of snow or wild daisies, luffins or asters. Yesterday's lay on its side, limbs stretch forward like a bar relief runner on a Grecian urn. Today's rested on its back, well fed in plump, legs played open like a confident pup expecting a belly rub. Its round black eyes stared at me after the night's carnage with wonder, not anger, like someone who's received nothing more than a little bad news. My wife puts on her bra. You might think this is too much sharing and my wife, who put this poem I'll call Irene, which coincidentally is her real name, would probably agree. She opens a magical drawer, takes out a bra, and rather than pulling it around herself the way someone might put on armor, bends forward, her back curved like a swan's neck. She lets her breasts strap into it. I imagine waterfalls, tempany. And I'll read one more. Tidewater? What pages are there? Oh, it's the first one. This is my last poem. After my honeymoon with Andrea in 1991, The Tidewater Motel. When the next Bible is written or the history of the world, The Garden of Eden will be the Tidewater Motel outside Ellsworth, Maine, where the portable sign says, Blueberries and Lawn Ornaments, Chocolate and Fishing Tackle, featuring Ruth and Wimpy's Kitchen, home of the 495 Lobster Supper, where Wimpy with a busty Betty Boop tattooed on his bicep, not a cheap one either, and on his other arm a woman with a snake, stirs the lobster pot outside of our softwood fire, and Ruth serves it all in the dining room, with real wood paneling and pictures of Elvis and John Wayne, and paper placemats that tell you wrongly the state bird of Maine is the blue jay. And then gives you the key to number 6, where the concrete floor is covered with a thin green carpet and the glasses are sandy clean and the toilet seat has a ribbon around it and in the morning you can make love, watch Sesame Street while you get dressed and give the key back to Ruth, who'll bring you blueberry pancakes while Wimpy gets the fire started, while the sun rises over the ocean and the state bird, the chickadee, whistles in the pines. Please make sure my children know how I've been there and my children's children. Well thank you. I brought some books and you're welcome to buy one. Well there's also his first book, his free, it's called Dreams of the Presidents, and it's the first edition which did not include the Obama poem, but it's tucked into the household. He didn't write any after that. And there's also bookmarks. Sorry, I don't know how to introduce you. No, that's great. Thank you. It's a privilege to be able to read with another poet and to meet them at the same time. Thank you for coming. I'm Daniel Lusk and I'm glad for this opportunity to talk to you about my book called Every Slow Thing. I was raised in Northern Iowa and this first poem is called In My Hometown. She sits on the curb stone picking a scab on her knee. The boys are watching haircuts through the window of the barber's caravan and pay her no mind. At the corner Rexall store, teens sit on the steps out front sipping fizzy cream sodas and cherry coques. Now and again a matronly Buick or austere Lincoln continental ghosts by like a premonition of time to come. Coach says we are better now the season's over, if only. In the sound booth at the record store Chet Baker plays every time we say goodbye. After the last plate of the boozy trumpet a little rift of silence like the purple aura of our mother's arms as she tells us about a prayer circle around a neighbor's sick bed in my hometown life in a minor key. It was an era of radio and Sunday school and this is the culture that I inherited. This is called Legacy and there's a little epigraph by Jill LePore from the New Yorker an article she wrote called In Every Dark Hour. Sometimes a whistle is all you've got. The reason is to fear the dark. The stories we were told not meant to comfort. How lonely to be inside that whale. The warm barn smell grown nasty after weeks on board that arc. Never mind the woman who gave herself to an enemy general and in the night drove a stake through his head like that. We believed in a holy ghost so tangible it could knock you down the stairs with the back of its hand. I learned to whistle when I was seven because you never know. One time the guy who whistled the theme for the movie The High and the Mighty came for a school assembly and did that for us whistled and with just a doorknob, a plunger, a microphone and a pan of gravel showed how eerie radio sound effects, creaking doors, clip-clop horses hooves and such were made. Sheet metal thunder. We paid attention. You never know. Night also has its reasons to listen up. Its languages, tree frogs, crickets, owls, screams of cats. We lock our windows, doors, sleep with the light. Try not to dream. When I was working on the final edits for this book, something came to me as things do from your memory. Sometimes you don't know what you've remembered and I suddenly remembered something I'd never written about which was that maybe I was 40 or so my mother had told me that her little sister, her younger sister and her husband had both been killed in a terrible accident. I didn't know them well but I remembered when I was a teenager before they had boys of their own I would go to their farm and stay and help bring in the hay crop and I remembered that while I was there sleeping on the floor or on the sofa or whatever at one point my uncle came out the door of the bedroom and said if you wake up and we're winding around don't be bothered we sleep naked. That's basically all I knew of my uncle and my aunt and here they were dead. I needed a big title for this poem I tried to make it a formal poem. I'd never written a successful poem in my life but I wanted to repeat that line so I called it Occasions of concupiscence bliss that's sort of a big word what I needed because they slept naked the train keening the crossing far down the mile like wolves like themselves in their hunger and sleepless langer on country nights days in the field she walked the stubble to bring him a cold beer in the shade her fingertips wet from the mist on the can touching the dusted hairs of his arm the stubble of his jaw when they kissed because they slept naked except for hard rain and thunder the windows ajar the engine sobbing its climb to the trestle whelming their limbs like an oral skin mocking their yes and no intake of their breath said a sudden cry splitting the hot space between them recalling the dare and the carefree race to the homeward crossing the spit and roar would sleep naked but throbbing music and the rain kept them to last call at the roadhouse homeward glad they had danced and drunk to the moon that moonless night for lightning and a daring road as it happened their wheels first scryed the crossing the blinding glare the train I most often don't write poems about myself almost never confessional poems sometimes I'm so struck by the things that happen to other people that I borrow their lives or their stories and this poem is one of those kind of poems at the time that I worked on this poem one friend had lost a friend and not long after that another had lost a child and because I learned from Robert Bly that the best way to come at a poem that you don't know how to handle is by indirection sideways so this poem is called Circus and it has an epigraph I like epigraphs they're helpful by a well-known famous even potter named Soetsu Yanagi who said or wrote beauty with inner implications is beauty that makes an artist of the viewer this is Circus that was a storied summer hawks were haggard and the girls untamed I heard them before I saw them round the bend of a hoof-worn lane two women nut-brown and naked to the waist wielding axes and dazzling syncopation we do not want some stories to end because the pause that ensues will be endless we want the Harrier hawk to keep circling the rabbit forever we want there to be a next birth when a child has died a next wife next lover a next finch for the cage-left empty next pup for the house next door with the wrong name over the door but a new story will not end that silence these trees, those women my father and mother perhaps even their disappointments their regrets will be reborn as paths in the garden as beard tongue and stone crop by the path as blue butterflies or clouds of smoke Angela and I lived in the woods near Jonesville near Jonesville, part of Richmond for about 13 years and we learned a lot living there we knew nothing when we moved there and especially about long driveways and long winters and whatnot but this poem is sort of indirectly about that it's called Night Walking and there's an epigraph by a French chef Andres Solner on making sauce bernes whatever you would put in you would take out leaving only the residue of taste I thought that was appropriate for a poem Night Walking the woman in my dream led Night Walking and spoke in tongues said the kale of assassins were turned into owls said the pelican nebula is composed of ink enough to write until the end of time said a dust pillar at the room of Karen and Nebula resembles a man fleeing a burning house said morning's children would awake to clouds of curds and whey and the knowledge that our son is just a garden variety star and I woke to the white eyes of shadowy deer bedded down on snow at the edge of the woods and saw they were ghosts of ourselves asleep in the moon moored house standing barefoot at the window I heard the confessions of owls and other ghosts hum of trucks on the distant wire of the highway size of a midnight train racing its shadow on the river I'll read one more I was reading an essay by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker just yesterday and today and learned for the first time that he had actually done a great deal of scholarship on T.S. Eliot and one of the things that T.S. Eliot he said, said was that average poets borrow beginners borrow and mature poets steal and so I've stolen the title of this poem from Angela and from, it's an Irish saying ah now and it's a poem I wrote to myself for my birthday a few years ago ah now look at me a drop of the best and smoking an old briar pipe left me by my father half century ago warm cap-to-toe and old woolens recalling my old dog the philosopher Macduff my old main coon cat Moshew with his princely tail gone rogue to sleep in the woods in abandoned cars and old time religion good enough for them all my cousins and brothers for Grandma Winnie at the pipe organ in the Little Brown church in the Vale my old Chevy car from before the war dear mother said it would run on fumes look at me lifting a toast to the flaming light in the tops of beaches at sunset wood smoke curling from chimneys in the hollow geese bleeding overhead migrating sparrows mobbing the lawn woodpeckers and finches and tits at the feeders gorgeous wife giving me sly looks you'd think I was old what's his name with the glasses and pen the laurels and titles and feathers in his cap the silver this and golden that a home and a passport money and three wishes still unspent in my travel bag thank you I'm sure that Charlie would be glad to answer questions about his work if you'd like to ask and I would if you have anything just found just found just found just found one each one each a bonus form you can read a bonus poem for Nikki Nikki's in the poster group with Charlie and you know, Angela is in the break of June each hour hi I'm starting to tell me what are you doing? are you going to read another one? I was waiting to see what Charlie would do I was waiting to see what Charlie would do thank you I would like you to read healing for a new home no healing but can you can you really read without the microphones? can you really try to do that? I'm going to face you out I do hear him not without a microphone then you're going to have to get this microphone over there I'll just take it out we'll just if you can hold the mic for him healing we want to heal you the teenage boy said there's a gaze from the 17th century monastery's observation deck across Chiang Quaterra to the Mediterranean from what I thought then realized he'd seen me walking with my cane five people encircled me the boy's father introduced his wife the other son and daughter but from Colorado's father said would be honored if you'd let us heal you you suffer from events? no it's Parkinson's I said you're welcome to give it a try go ahead the hands were already fluttering over my flowered shirt like a plot of birds the father implored Jesus to free me from affliction then asked if I were Christian I said no Jewish he shrugged and said that's okay you never know thank you the family hugged me when I entered the gift shop the wife was buying a postcard of St. Francis I just get this pointed at your job I was talking about how things come back to you this is actually this poem was inspired by my first girlfriend when I was six and so I borrowed things from but this isn't about me it's on me you'll all remember the one we all said playing hide and seek Ali Ali Aux and three that's the title Alice awoke from a dream of hide and seek where she was hiding blind and naked in a place she knew far from the house down the skipping orchard lane where no one would find her she knew how she could run away to a remote and secret house from long ago moon faced owl for a companion hesitating wooden creek a staple door a jar near the combing dark also hesitating the way she knew between dissolving shapes of bear and apple trees their scented blossoms soft saddle blanket on a bale of hay if only she had a horse at least a hairbrush a brother who could teach her boy things she could teach him how to put on lipstick crawl behind the bed and hold your breath to kiss or put on music like her mother hold your arms out one two three and dance smell can tell who comes stale cigarette and sweat is uncle grandfather is pipe tobacco in scotch west is wind from the river crayfish smell and mud east is faint chlorine from a neighbor's swimming pool here is foxy rim of a flower bed outside the door leather horse and pigeon poop inside shiver of green ginkgo leaves whisper of rain others talk as if she's not there as if she didn't know what shade of girl her skin could be a hairbrush would be nice she has nice hair what if no one had called her again I feel very privileged a personal meeting so what's the part about you holding your breath and kissing behind the bed sorry yes I figured as much she doesn't know all my secrets very curious I really liked that in the beginning poems you read if it hadn't been for I was thinking what a great poetry prompt that is certainly in my life there's so many things that I just haven't done that one tiny thing none of these things would have happened so I really liked that looking back at any given time everything seems inevitable and you can only see that backwards yeah I also liked my wife putting on her bra I have to tell you I have a friend in Burlington a young woman she just opened a lingerie shop and she wants me to contribute some bra poems or body poems she's going to have an opening and I'm hoping maybe I could give her a copy of yours anyway this should be fun we'd be honored to have you you should all stop quickly writing your bra poems oh yes well I do happen to have one so you have one too oh yeah well that's kind of what started it yes great but I love the one you wrote I love the one you wrote where you started each score every other stands with it and they back them being naked because they slept naked because they slept naked I thought that was really beautiful I was trying to I was trying to do a villain now but initially which of course I've never written it was too hard but I wanted to keep repeating that line so I just made it up well it's a refrain isn't it refrain at the beginning well I think when you do that it's so memorable you know I think that's a good I'm going to borrow that maybe I'll steal it I have a question for you either of you or both of you about new writing presses I had this book I don't think it had the artist's life or something and she talked about writing every day so do you wake up in the morning and you know along with your calisthenics and are you going to write a certain amount or do you just wait for the inspiration to strike or how would you talk about your practice I wait for the inspiration and I don't write every day and actually I haven't been writing much in a long time but I mean I'm in trouble with metaphors I'm in trouble coming up with metaphors and because of parking things whenever you have a poetry workshop coming up you write a poem how about you Dan I was just saying also that I've never read a poem a successful poem or a I knew where I was going I don't know I mean the writing is the I can discover yes the truth is that I don't think I've ever written a poem that works that where I kind of knew where I was going that's true for me too back to the train poem what I knew what I wanted to do was I knew that the that the poem was going to end with the horrible accident accident but I wasn't there and only I have imagination in my head of how horrible it would have been but so what I was trying to do with the first line the first line of the poem was actually because they slept naked at the train and that's what kept me going through the poem was knowing that I had like had a place to land at the end but I just answer your question I just show up every day I got most often show up with the book to read and mostly it's not poetry it's fiction I don't want somebody else's another voice in my head when I'm trying to write but I love stealing work from fiction writers who write beautifully so often there's an epigraph in their books that I can borrow and I can take off from that and you show up early in the morning I do Angel's not in the lead words so I get the house to myself it's quiet I like your idea about silence too pardon me I like your poem about silence silence quiet living in the woods helped the pandemic didn't turn to that garden I didn't leave the house for a year and a half because I was afraid being vulnerable by a lot of jealousy I was really afraid and friends would come and leave things at the door for us and wave missing all of those people who were like they were like fictions they'd show up they weren't real there's a metaphor probably I'm very intrigued by your saying you're having trouble thinking of metaphors and maybe this is like totally out of line but can you imagine a whole different kind of poetry that you wouldn't be writing now but just without metaphors just direct totally direct it's not like I've ever thought of metaphors they just were there they were there in the background I'm thinking yeah I could see that but it's interesting that as you go through life and change your thinking process is going to change and your poetry is going to change I'll be watching thank you all for being here with us it's really nice to hear someone read poetry and their own poetry because we can read it in a book which is it's so important we have a friend an old friend of mine who came to visit last summer and he called me on the phone before that and said I never call you I really care about you but I don't like poetry and he said I just don't get it I can't understand it but when he came to visit he asked us both to read to him and he closed his eyes and he could take it in hearing it but he couldn't deal with it on the page and I completely understand that the expression in your voices and so on