 Hey everyone, good evening. Welcome to the Kellogg Hubbard Library. It's wonderful to see all of you here. Come on in. We've got a full house. This is fantastic. Welcome to the library. Welcome to Poem City, the Kellogg Hubbard Library's celebration of National Poetry Month. And we do it better than anybody else just like I just said. Thank you. Thank you. Let's also hear it for Michelle, who is part of the Poem City. We've got 450 poems up this year in 50 locations. We have 35 programs. Yes, exactly. It's a wonderful celebration of poetry. I'd like to thank our sponsors for Monhumandes, Hunger Mountain Co-op, Rootstock Publishing, and thank you to Orca for live streaming us tonight. Hello everybody. Out on the interwebs. I don't want to take up any time. I just want to welcome you and say we're very happy to have you and give it over to the poets. I want to just start by acknowledging that I think a lot of you are here because of loss. And we're going to talk about that in our experience of it, but we want it to be an experience in which we all get to breathe together, to share together, and strengthen each other together, and just acknowledge that at the beginning of our reading. When our daughter died suddenly in November of a heart attack, Tom Schmidt was one of the first people to call me and offer support, love, and a chance to talk and be together. And so it's also his idea to create this event. So I'm going to introduce Tom Schmidt, who is a former Humanities professor. He and his wife, Mary, moved to Eastmont Puglia in 2013 to be near grandsons. Since 2018, when Tom began to submit poetry, more than 50 of his poems have appeared in journals, and he has published two chapbooks, copies of which will be available in the back, enough to drink or drown in 2020, and like a metaphor, is that the right way to say it? While he shops around additional collections, his muse occasionally inspires new poems, several of which were here tonight. Thank you. Thank you for being here. In my segment, I'll offer a few poems from my first collection, Enough to Drink or Drown, which is a response to the death of my only child, Susanna, who drowned in 1997. And it's pretty intense to begin, I warn you. But I'll move from those to some more recent poems about grief, and then about companionship, hopefully offering a kind of progression. Tom, would you take it along a little closer? A little closer? Yeah. All right, how's that coming through? The Ant is an abridgment of a longer poem that contains much of what I would say about loss. In trepid pilgrim on three pairs of legs, she wandered on the sand along the shore until she found a fragment of detritus the sea had cast upon the foamy tide line toward which breakers crept ten feet away, now nine, now eight. She bore her bit of stuff around a small depression in the sand, two inches deep, up to the lip, almost, then down again, across, and so it went, while all the while the tide crept up the sand. I did not intervene. How quick the ant, but quicker still the sand, and quick enough the tide, together slowed to parable for me, a death to demonstrate a point, to teach the father of a daughter drowned as if God needed practice with cliches. I only loaned her to you for a while. She saved from all the hardship of this life. Such bullshit on and on ad nauseam. What is the point? The point is only this. There is no point. But people simply die, like ants, one at a time by accident. Some daughters, some in icy creeks, and all too young, too soon, too suddenly, too late. They do not leave behind a tidy God with reasons for the innocence he kills. No, not the God who lurks behind the stars and drops their fragments in a haze of dust, obscuring smoke and mirror explanations. Beyond our rainbows of complexity, God's means by no means end in pots of gold, but rather ashes. Gray and crumbling down they drift, almost unseen, become the earth, inviting rain, infusing fallow souls who insistently fix weary eyes on distances from which no visions come. Hear this, my summa theologica. God does not fix, God never will explain, in this life or the next, a single pain. Into each lifted palm falls only rain, enough to drink or drown, praise or complain. Counting and the three short poems following are from a 24-sonnet series that I began to write in the months following my daughter's death. Ten thousand days remaining, more or less, almost a million times my heart will beat. I calculate this sum rather than guess. It occupies more time to be concrete. I sleep, I eat, I seek benign distraction, dull knives to mark the days until the last, the time, the hour, the final benefaction when I will know or knowing will be passed. And all the while I'll finally watch the others turn ten, sixteen, then twenty, tall and fine though, bro, her friends, and one day they'll be mothers of girls who will not stay forever nine. I count on counting to remain encumbered until the day when I am dust unnumbered. The spell just passed the dragon through the thorn's thick riot. Here was her bedroom, first door on the left. My sleeping beauty's castle lies so quiet, princess's chamber now of life bereft. A spindled, sudden prick was all it took, now throbbing silence and a film of dust, a pen, a tissue dropped, a half-read book. I cannot break the spell, and yet I must dismantle the dreamscape of her return. The story leaps ahead a hundred years, a moment kissed and all awake to learn that youth is old and not as it appears. A children's tale we've called it ever since, but oh, let it be true and soon brave prince. Almost. My child was almost rescued, they said later. She almost did not drown. Almost. Almost. A small, concessive word. Interpolator between a breath of warm air and a ghost. A little puff would be enough today for her to blow her birthday candles out. A simple breath to sweep it all away, this airless void within, this haze without. So much on such a little air depends. Tonight she floats on music and surprises, a chocolate cake, a gang of giggling friends. The scene is vapor. See, it swirls and rises, then rolls away like fog from barren coast. Yet through it I can hear her laugh. Almost. The shore. Time passes and the misty shore recedes. I drift away, float helpless on the tide. Between us only water intercedes. Your face is fading as the space grows wide. But now and then there dances on the air a fleeting shadow of your voice or touch, as light as hope, as hope is light, is prayer, to make this world of sense not hurt so much. Now in the senseless void where you should be alive in all the moments that you lost, I come to you on lines of poetry until at last this timeless sea is crossed. Here, clearer than my echoes of goodbye, Susanna, you shall live and death shall die. Now a couple of recent poems, this one just a few weeks old. Breathing. From her marker I would look past the Monterey Pines lining the bluff to the Pacific, 50 feet below and beyond as far as the years without her. For months I visited daily. Familiar groundskeepers waved. Women on cemetery power walks looked away. I wandered the hundred acres, found six other children her age, decades gone, sometimes left a few flowers for them. Time passed, my visits became less frequent. Eventually I moved away. When I return, I sit on the grass of my own grave next to hers. I talk to her, summarize my life. Irrational, but you know, just in case. Mostly I'm silent. And that is when I notice in that mute gathering of the dead amid their unmoving monuments and markers the one constant, the one sound, the one great irony, the sea always, always breathing. This next one inspired partly by the themes of tonight's reading. Being with grief, being with grief. A boulder drops through the clouds into a pond the size of everywhere. Nearby a small robo rocks wildly, nearly capsizes. Moments later, not far away, boats near the shore nod against their moorings like cradles nudged by sleepy hands. Then are still, small white boats waiting in a thin fog under a pallid sky. The boats have no oars, for oars are words. None can row to the center of the pond to join those in trouble, nor could anyone bear to remain there. Waves will waft those unmoored boats to shore to the company of others one by one in measures of time. Those near the shore float, paint peeling, stained at the water line, gunnels worn by bumping one another, by other waves, by memories of boulders. They bob slowly on the gray water under the gray sky. Their bows reflect to form a pair of wings. The best the light can do on such a day. Carried in by the water, the newly stricken craft find among that silent company touch and something like harbour. Now and then one might hear, muffled by the fog, a faint splash in the distance, or the creak of a non-existent oar like weeping. The water holds them all. Lost is a hole in the ground next to us, a chasm never filled. But green things grow up around that empty place. So I like our third theme word, companionship, actually suggested by Scutter, because grief met companionship for me when my wife Mary entered my life shortly after my daughter died and brought into my life grown children who have since made me a grandfather. So green things have grown up around my chasm and Mary and I symbolize that by becoming engaged at Susanna's grave. So I end with a few poems about companionship. Book review. I held your hands above her tear-stained stone and in a breath between two seaborn sighs and treated you to take me for your own. Your answer swimming in your brimming eyes. The glimmer of that summer scene is bound together with two hearts, two storied pasts within a book whose binding has proved sound. Although the cover's worn, the content lasts. It may not be a page-turner for some, but we, enamored with the author's style, expect engaging escapades to come. Apped to be guile a while, a bibliophile. Now, 20 chapters in, plots still ascending, we read between the lines, a happy ending. Close enough, bare feet on the railing, steam wisps from two cups, breeze stirs meadow waves, tousles maple tops beneath cloud shapes we could name if we looked, if we were not cosied into novels we'll trade when we finish. That's all. Just an afternoon, I'll forget. But once upon a time, long before we met, in moments I wasn't occupied with all that got in the way, I imagined this. Well, maybe the waves were blue, the trees, palms, not quite so New England-y, but still close enough. Finally, 545 Center Road is about what I observed at that address and turned into a ballad that happens to cover all three words of our theme tonight in a kind of circle. I didn't read the book, but loved the cover. A little house, a garden full of flowers, where once a simple man brought home his lover, they wed and said, let's make this beauty ours. When I came here, they were already old. They waved to passers-by from garden chairs, then reached toward the other's hand to hold. The tenderness of pending loss was theirs. One day, when I drove past, he sat alone. A few more months, the house was up for sale. The lawn chairs empty, garden overgrown. No need to tell the too-familiar tale. The winter passed, the empty season turned. The sign came down, a swing set on the lawn. Another garden, old soil overturned. New songbirds in the trees, new light, new dawn. A stranger still, I paused to bless this place. The mystery of living things and who makes and unites them all in grace, in circles, overlapping me and you. It's my honor now to turn the lectern over to Miguel Fishman, whose poetry collections include Drive, 2001, At Work in the Bridal Industry, intriguing title, 2011, and most recently, Traveling, 2021. Nadell has traveled widely since 2005, living in Manhattan for 12 years, and returned to Montpelier three years ago, where she lives with her husband, Victor Rodwin, and their golden doodle, Kashi. Nadell. You can hear me? I thought I would start with these two quotes that I've been thinking about a lot. The first one is by W. H. Auden, and he said, a poem can provide a full emotional biography of a person without necessarily providing a complete chronology of their life. I think it's pretty spot-on. And this one I just found recently by John Steinbeck from East of Eden. Oh, okay, here he is. It's just awkward. Just put it near your mouth. We need to put a term in the word. This is from John Steinbeck, East of Eden. A great and lasting story is about everyone, or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting. Only the deeply personal and familiar. So given our theme for this evening, I'll start with this poem from Traveling Traveling. Two Hawks, Riverside Park. In the photograph of the two hawks, the male on the higher limb of the London plane tree has a bloody shred of a bird hanging from his beak. While beneath him the female pecks at a rat's carcass splayed across a lower branch of that same tree. The rat's thin black tail underscores its transformation, the leafless tree stark against a cloudy January sky. I've carried death on my back, father, mother, one following the other until I'm bent under the weight of it. I remember as I stood by the plane tree, the male stared back, not eating, while the female continued to peck black tail feathers pointing at the camera, then seesawing as her head bent down to tear and rose up again to eat. Time, I'm waiting for you. You do everything swiftly, but death you do slow as a swimmer through mud. I walked on from the tree and forgot the dead bird, the rat, but not the hawks. This is a newest poem. My father spent a lot of time in India and I was privileged enough to go there and this poem is called Traversing My Father's Footsteps. He walked through Delhi's burgeoning market, through the Taj Mahal, through Jutown in Cochin, his dark skin that of just another human in the throng. He said the heat was a presence, the heat of food much to his liking. He could have made it his home. There were people who loved him, a dear friend named Sudip. Before she was my mother, she had dreams. Living in India, a stranger in a strange land was not one of them. She had family. Brooklyn was her home. Jutown sounded like a slur. People loved her. She had six sisters, three brothers, and aging parents all living together in one house. Her parents needed them close. The temperature in Agra is 109 degrees in the shade. My feet are drowning in my sandals. A vast column of pilgrims moves in broad steps up into Muntaz Mahal's Mosulium, shuffling the only sound. Crossing and recrossing his steps, I carry a photograph of my father. For eternity, I slip it under the minaret's locked door. And this is a longish, it's a long poem that traces some of my travels. And it's in ten short parts. And the last part talks about a person named the Kohan. And the Kohan in Judaism is a descendant of the biblical figure Aaron and his sons. He serves as a priest in the temple, and he has special honors and privileges. This poem is called Synagogues. One. Mah never left the U.S. When I tell her where we're traveling next, China, India, Hungary, she looks as though I said, I thought the moon and stars, Mah. Go sit in the synagogues, she says. It will be as if I'm there too. Two. The first temple stood in Jerusalem, where the ten tribes of Israel prayed until they were banished by Nebuchadnezzar. Two. And the temple raised to the ground. It was 587 BCE. In 1945, 3,000 Jews were turned away at every port, then welcomed with nothing but their faith to Shanghai. For many years an elderly Chinese gentleman has been the caretaker and guide of the compound. We sit in the sanctuary and he tells their story. Each year, he says, the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of those Eastern European Jews return to the synagogue for a reunion. Of those 3,000, seven families are left. He speaks in combined Yiddish, Chinese, Hebrew, and English, with a generous smile and a nod to incongruity. Four. There are 26 Jews living in Cochin, India, in a place they call Dewtown, and it isn't meant as a slur. The synagogue is laid out in blue and white tile with colored glass lanterns dangling from the ceiling. You can sit on benches along the sides. There are services once a year on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The synagogue in Budapest is ornate and brightly lit with shiny wooden pews. The many rows held the hundreds of Jews who prayed together before March 1944 when the Nazis invaded Hungary. Six. In an Orthodox synagogue in Rome, the men and women sit mechitza, separate. The women protected behind a wall of opaque white muslin they chant the same prayers with the same intensity, but this way there are no distractions. Seven. In Venice, the tiny synagogue sits in one corner of the walled ghetto in a small ancient square. Its wooden beams darkened with age. The tall locked gate is gone now. Eight. At her table in Paris, my friend says after 50 years she returned to the synagogue where she was about Mitzvah. She was the first girl in France to stand at the Bima and read that day's portion of the Torah. When I walked into the sanctuary she says I felt I'd come home. Nine. God was already there when the Baptists bought the synagogue in Cambria Heights. They kept the stained glass windows, bright blue stars of David shining on the heads of a new congregation. It was the 70s and barely a minion gathered. The old Jews gone to Hashem, the young ones wandering the world. Ten. Saturday morning services were long and boring when I was a fidgety kid in Queens. I remember mostly old men in Talasim, bobbing from side to side, dobbling. A few old women in gaudy veiled hats. At the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, it was also a Saturday morning, October 27th, 2018. The cohen opened the ark and the gunmen opened fire. I have had, in recent years, written a lot of elegies, it seems. And this is one that I wrote for a dear friend who the book is actually dedicated to Bill Gozola. And this is called Elegy Two. When I come upon your photograph and remember you're gone to a place I can't reach, there's a flip in my chest. How can it be you of all the ones? How could you be gone? Your cheeks in the cold are already red. You wear your pea coat and navy beret. Yours is a whole body laugh. You drive your black truck with the Sherpa seat covers too fast on the highway. We're both anxious to arrive for years. We've been writers in a close-knit group. You say, only instead of only. I chop the vegetables you assemble the morning frittata. You give savvy advice because unlike anyone else I've ever known, your words are bundled in a flannel of kindness. Years ago, laid up by a drunk driver in an ICU, your leg shattered. I wrote, I combed Vermont, and there wasn't a cannoli for you to be found. I have this cornucopia of memories, 40 years of friendship, and I'm thankful for that. But the snow is falling. It's beautiful. We'd walk downtown for sandwiches. We'd buy cream soda because the store doesn't sell Dr. Brown's cell ray. And laugh, it's such a New York deli thing. I have your stories, people with characters who have goodness in their DNA. You birthed them. That way I can't begin to miss you because the page holds you fast. This is also a new poem. It's called How It Ends. It was a universe, vast and flat, room to run from one corner to another. No hurdles to jump. The basement was dry and warm. The furnace hummed. Winter was outside when the food came today. There was no sound from upstairs. The lure, the aroma of cheese. A quick grab in and out. Run, then eat. But whatever was the way in, there was no way out. Mouse, yours is a malevolent God. Your long, thin tail curled in on itself. Skinny arms stretched out cartoonishly into a getaway. But when the metal snapped back, you froze staring down freedom. These two poems that I wanted to dedicate to a friend who isn't here, but I won't read them anyway. They're both about a trip that we took together to Turkey in 2005. The first one is Voyage Out. No one is on the beach at this hour before sunset in Ismir. The restaurants are shuttered between seasons. There are no Chinzano umbrellas and no soft cushions on Rotan loungers. The palms stand alone, but the sky is full of biblical drama in blazes of purple and gold. We're traveling in Turkey, the first trip together in a long friendship. The wind whips around my ankles in tiny pinpricks. I hold the huge bath towel around her tall figure as she changes into her bathing suit, and she does the same for me. Naked for that moment in such a country feels dangerous and delicious. But I'm too cautious even to wade into the sea. She steps fearlessly into the frigid water, plunges in, swimming back and forth beyond the breaking waves. I edge the water, watching her take on the Aegean, and this is now and then. Even then, in 2005, we were warned not to travel east to Ankara, but Istanbul was safe for two women traveling unaccompanied, two friends sailing down the Bosphorus. The changes were happening slowly, happening as we walked along with women in blue and black burkas and tourists in shorts and sneakers, their cameras bobbing over protruding bellies through the bazaar. No one took notice of us in our tank tops and long skirts. At the blue mosque, covered down to our ankles, my head swathed in yards of fabric. It was an old woman who spotted my wrist, poking out of my blue-sleeved blouse. She tapped it hard several times and scolded an angry Turkish to let me know my offense. Ten years after the photograph was taken, a sliver of moon above a blurred water taxi's lit decks, the image labeled Nadel's Evening on the Bosphorus, pops up on my computer screen. We might have traveled to a distant planet for how little freedom resides there now. It was my evening, newly single and traveling farther than I'd ever been before. In this poem, I don't think I've ever read this poem before, but I thought it might lighten the mood. It's called Travis is 45. It was a shock when I did the math, because he was 13 the night my daughter was born at home. From the moment he opened the heavy wooden doors downstairs, he must have heard the animal-like utterances issuing through every crack and crevice of the old house. He came running. Was it to save me? To the door, breathless, upstairs that wound around to our second floor flat, his wet hand on the banister. He came to collect on the daily paper a rag we loved to search through to find hysterical errors. A lazy copy editor allowed to escape. Was he even paid? It was a rainy early November evening, chilly, but the temperature in the apartment, because the wood stove was cranked, was close to 90 degrees. Childbirth is a messy business. You pace, you climb up and down stairs, you shit on newspapers spread over the floors, and you howl. A knock and your husband opens the door, and there you are naked, a gigantic belly wriggling forth a baby. This is called road trip. I've heard it after a trip with friends to Cuba. Road trip. In the back seat of the red rented Renault, G and I bump along, husbands up front. They switch back and forth from driver to navigator. They've known each other since they were 15 when they met at Ecole Alsacien. Off the paved road, the dirt turns to mud, turns to chickens and goats, turns to dead ends, and we're backtracking to regain our root in the lush Cuban countryside. We pass billboards of Shea's visage, Pautria o Muerte, and Viva Fidel. When we spot President Rao's message, si se pudo, si se puede, si se pautra. The four of us talk at the same time. How do political slogans translate to the feeling Cuba is my homeland? Which we hear in the warmth of the Cubans we talk with over many dishes of rice and beans. Also, we are lost with spotty GPS and limited cell phone service. Over the past years, G's English has improved after watching Hollywood films on French TV with subtitles while my French falters with disuse. Together we land in Spanish, both having studied it in school. There, in words long ago, lived for me on the pages of textbooks. We converse in simple phrases and the sentences in the present tense where they are alive in our mouths. Read a couple of dog poems. These are actually in the voice of dogs. I hope you can get there. This is called One Dog's Story. Long before they stood over me in the whelping box and fell in love with me, runt of the litter. She dreamed. She called me from the back door, called my name, and I came running, just as I would later when she was awake. I was not the smartest four-legged in the litter. My mom, known for her intelligence and obedience, would not have been impressed with my shenanigans. Sweet as I was, I never endeared myself to him and himself loved his ducks. How could I have known? I was satisfying an urge. My dog nature in full swing that night as they pulled into the drive and there in the headlights, Armageddon, duck parts strewn everywhere, and I, the mastermind, the dead duck draped over my mouth. A smile on my winning face, I was proud. Himself furious, he took a two-by-four to my back side. Every creature has a story and for years they feasted on mine. Got laughs and the gasps they craved. Clever dog to leave them so richly provided for with my tail. And the reason I had Tom mention our dog Kasha is because this is in her voice. From a four-legged perspective, dogs are really the best companions. Sniffing around the kitchen, there are usually no rewards. They keep a tidy house. But this evening after my humans withdrew to their eating area and I was alone, I spotted two shiny gray morsels on the arm of the sofa. Her scent on two little gems. Cookies I thought, could it be? Not soft as I took them in my mouth. They buzzed as I chomped down and broke them apart. Not tasty, not cookies. So I left them in tiny scattered pieces on the floor. Later the uproar was loud. She told me I was that word. She says when her finger points at me. They're for hearing, she says. Then the two of them said it's her fault. She had a long day. She was so tired. I got a treat before bedtime. Tastes much better. Thank you. Scudder Parker. Scudder Parker's first volume of poetry, Safe as Lightning, released in June 2020 by Rootstock Publishing, was awarded the best poetry book of 2020 by the independent publishers of New England. Scudder's poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals including Sun Magazine, Crosswinds, The Lascaux Review, Northern Woodlands, Sky Island Journal, Vermont Life, and Twickenham. His poem, The Poem of the World, was selected as a finalist in the Tom Howard-Margaret-Reed poetry contest. His second volume will be published by Kelsey Books in the winter of 2005. Please welcome Scudder Parker. So I want to welcome my fellow pickleball players and friends from Burlington. It's really nice to have Chittenden County represented in an event like this. And thank you all for being here and bringing your hearts to join ours. What I think about loss and grief is, they're never done with it. You talk about a process, but the process is helpful to understand and accept parts of it. But the work goes on. And this is a poem for my father who died a long time ago. And I'm still writing about his loss. And I'm still trying to feel the grief that I want to feel. Even now is the title. The last time you let me comfort you was not when you were resolutely starving on your cancer, gliding away from us on your swift craft of holiness. Remember that morning in your parents sprawling summer home at Sonopee where you had sailed in childhood and the tides of family tugged us in. Polio and hepatitis had scattered us. We came together early autumn to recuperate from months of separation. I come to snuggle in your bed. The phone rang. You reached to answer. The pitch of your voice changed from words beyond my hearing. You hung up slowly, seemed to remember I was there. Your grandmother died this morning, my mother, Catherine. You turned to me unprotected, cradled your head on my outstretched arm. I held you as you cried. Even now I want to hold you that way, let your tears sink in my cotton sleeve, trace the lines of your face with my small finger, inhale the shutters of your breath. And this is summer 1966 again for my father. As for the land you left, it was like an affectionate divorce done quarreling with seasons on the farm. We came back planted trees each spring faster and more orderly than they could plant themselves. The summer before you died, suddenly you only wanted to walk the boundaries of the farm. Even jobs we'd planned together, cutting poplar, planting fir, easily postponed. We looked for old ax marks, faded splotches of paint, skeletons of fence posts, barbed wire pressed to earth, by 30 years of leaves. Tracking through a cedar woods you pushed past brittle branches up a slender stream that disappeared beneath a web of roots. Suddenly a small pool at the base of giant cedars lined with black forest silt, water almost invisible, except at the center where a spring surrounded by a cone of sand surged from a channel in the rock. A few grains dancing. Kneeling on the mat of cedar needles you reached to the other bank, bridged the pool with your body, bent your head to drink where the water stirred. Then I knelt on the bank as you had. My knees found creases yours had worn there over time. Years later I learned you'd brought each of your children here the place you loved an almost perfect secrecy. This is called distance, which is when someone's dying you have to admit, I have to admit sometimes distance is what I resort to. My mother cared less and less as she got older. She casually brushed food dust off the plates, put them back on the shelf, the floor a sand of crumbs. We'd chat across the cherry coffee table, I'd pick stale nuts from the blue bowl, sip sweet cherry, take dishes to the sink, stay too long scrubbing at gray slime. She'd call, don't bother, come sit and talk with me. I'd come back and we'd repeat a conversation I thought we'd completed when I left. Distance was the place I stayed inside myself, a kind of accusation. The house was so full of her leading. The voice he grew up with. This is for my mother again. Increasingly the names of things fall off like tired labels from manila folders. Lodge at the bottom of file drawers or float around the room like butterflies. This leads to lengthy explanations that are difficult to follow. You know that movie where the guy who was in this other movie. I feel a new kinship with my mother. Had dinner with friends, everyone else is full of food and conversation. I sit in awe of a painting, tackling and a clearing, aching with its solitude. Suddenly they look at me. A question has been asked. I've been turned to for an opinion. My mother's helpful whisper offers, tell him the quiche is delicious. She lives in a landscape without courtesy. It's not a terrifying place for her. She knows her husband's voice is gone. Her grandson visits. Talks about summers on the farm. How they stayed with him through all his wars. She has not spoken in weeks. As he walks out the door, she says thank you in the voice he grew up with. This is a poem for my favorite uncle in the world just the most generous and sweet person. Younger brother to my father. We are picking raspberries in the bramble tango that your carefully tended bed has become. After all those years giving, this was the place for savoring. This home you called summer. Staying there from spring to fall. You could not come this summer or the last. We phone to ask permission, your frail voice cheerful with consent. The thunderstorm gathers impulsive, strangely indecisive. We pick with familiar greed, sometimes plucked from the litter of fallen purple fruit, or pinch pink almost ripe till they release knowing we won't be back in time. We lift arches to find berry clans, pick them all at once so they stain our hands, turn back down the same path for the clever furtive ones. Strangers have already been here, trampled vines, two ash trees, a few bird oaks have moved in, even the bear may come. The rain releases just as we're done. All the time we picked, you were there with us welcoming, yes, to this place you're leaving with that other yes. This is for Susan's father, who came up with us from New York. Hadn't spent a long time in rural Vermont. Last visit, Susan rode up with her father in the ambulance. Death had visited once on Long Island, tried but failed. I'll die here, he said, but not just yet. We'd added a room with picture window right beside our woods a decade before. He told the nurse it had been built for him. Time and place he knew were his to decide. A few worn clothes, daughter pictures, faded quilt, photo of him as boy's national table tennis champion at 13, beside a trophy flashing silver guilt. His frailty, like a boxer's robe he'd put on, graceful cover for the bruise of his long fight, while he relived losses and battles won. His brothers see more gone in that terrifying cargo flight over the hump into Himalaya. Almost a child, sweet cheat, ice claimed, sigh held his loss tight. He had been a city boy, but said it felt right to be up here where it was wild or less wild if you learn to accept the dark still night. November he announced, all these tree hills are filled with empty trees. The joy of saying it in his mouth. Feeders, darting chickadees, brash jays, seed spill to squirrels, morning doves, turkeys poking through. He'd seized on chances like that in his youth. Fisher cat and owl unseen in forest brown, then present suddenly a shiver in the soul, staring back at us, no blink, no sound. Death, ordinary as a haircut, part of a hole. At meals he'd reach into his mouth, pull out a small coal of tooth, smile, place it gently with the others in the hole. I haven't written any poems for my daughter Emily, and yet the poem that I wrote her 25 years ago somehow takes on new life or death or presence. After her death. Naming God for my daughter Emily. The men I came from said none should speak God's name because its holiness would burn the tongue. At least that's the excuse they gave. The women suspecting this was just another rule to silence them ignored it. Finding many names for God using them all like the names for snow necessary to people who live in snow. The tough cartilage of rules that every generation thinks it needs to shield itself from the next was not something we could never grow between us. So neither of us is safe. You who know precisely where the sweet notes dwell can open your mouth and pluck them from the air then calmly disappear and sleep. When I start to explain the inevitable you say wait and I find myself waiting. When I tell you why I had to do a thing the way I did you look at me as if to ask whether Joy's needle has ever pierced my managed heart. Any time now you will find someone to love. You will explore his hands the sweet curve of his back the boy behind the ungainly scaffolding. He will never know what hit him only that later he woke up and has a chance to love you moment to bone. You roll me across your summer lake tugging the surface with your oars my fingers trail in the sacred water thumb opens the precious name slips gently from my grip. And this is from my brother Alan who in the family default tradition became a minister late in life. The strawberries are greatly appreciated by a committee of 12 cedar wax wings who elegantly adorn the wire tomato cages. They take turns sampling the goods paws like aristocrats celebrating after a winter of wizened crab apples and sumac. An elm is thriving as its neighbors raise arms overhead twining dry branch trips in elms gesture of surrender. This tree has woven roots in compost pile and garden. I'm content to share. No porcupine for years but here's one snapping elm twigs cobbling lush leaves preoccupied as a spiky panda 30 feet above its death. Once we might have said though we still think it sometimes they just come for the food as though scorn was our entitlement but you would love this every creature of it we'd share the light gift of their presence knowing grief is not just a human muscle though you have thinned your throng of groundhogs and appreciated fence to guard your family share you'd welcome them as you would have old friends at the reception after the service after the river erupted in your brain after that long swollen silence wrapping brownies for them in a napkin slipping finger rolls into their coat pockets as helpers in the kitchen watched knowing you would approve. This is a poem that I wrote at the time that Susan's and my friend Susan's best friend died a year and a half ago and then I read it again at Emily's Service and I'm trying to come to terms with it because in some dimensions it feels utterly naive and yet what I think it says to me is that if we're going to survive we have to do it by being company with our grief and learning to live with it as a part of life so sorry if this has a preacher voice in it it's called offering why not permit ourselves to live like children still fearless in their hope mighty as tide surging in the Bay of Fundy and each time our bloom of optimism and easy confidence ebbs bring passion to our daily work the close weave of intimacy with each other and our only earth patient attentive even when dismayed clear and charitable with ourselves brave with our beloved thoughtful intelligent with those who count themselves opponents why not cultivate our taste for honesty the fierce practice of truth why not let love's ambition fuel compassion wake our imagination unleash the startle of creation astonished the conspiracy of the universe makes this life possible for us let's claim riotous irreverence hilarity at the proliferation of absurdity the litter of distraction laugh at the pompous ponderous pretentious vicious mighty recognize the numbing ravage of oppression its smoke and mirrors of inevitability remembering those it has destroyed continuing rampage dismissing its glib accusations and excuse let's remember no self-appointed power can administer forgiveness though they keep judging and then bargaining and trying let us discover who we are taking up the work of justice with ferocious and determined patience join those who seek and practice wisdom and when its voice is found its know is felt its yes awakened our community returns prisons abandoned old lives shriveled like balloons together we can build the elegance we crave let's not live in dread of suffering and grief the peril of our fragile lovely bodies even our hard-won confidence just admit how much we need each other the stitch of generosity the heal of kindness even slowly welcomed why not forsake glib dismissals learned blindnesses that stumble and bumble us into each other cheating and shrinking our days what if we stopped cowering let life astonish in its vast detail its wild creating stunning us to humility stripping us to gratitude for this wellspring earth and our companions here who needs the craving for division the wasteland of grumpy entitlement the blight and cruelty of fear feel it if we hold each other in fierce tenderness not banishing or numbing grief but sharing it welcoming our tears courageous open-hearted daring to make music in the midst of pain it may become the brave parent of our joy our bodies and our good green home joined in a vast shared dream so um I don't know do we take yes I know there are books there are books and um please buy extensively and consume vigorously um but any feedback or comments or questions if you want thank you for coming well thank you for coming John and I the pickleball players who've made it to 80 and he's already made it to 81 anything thank you so much for coming