 Board of Trustees here at Kellogg-Hurray, the sponsor of Poem City for the ninth year. I'm happy to say Poem City was the brainchild of our programming and development director, Rachel Seneschal, and I'd love to hear Rachel. Chris, how many people in here have poems up somewhere in town? Excellent. Me too. I'm what Marilyn Cunan called a weekend poet. She calls herself a weekend poet. Madeleine Red Poetry at Northwest Church last fall as part of the Kent Museum art show and there's a reading series with that, which will happen again this fall. Those involved with organizing are working on that part of the program now. So I just want to say a few things and I'm a briefly introduced Jody Gladding who's going to take the program from there. Believe it or not, even on April 20th, here's the schedule in these booklets. If you don't have one, there's still 15 events left in the last 10 days of April. Yeah, it is pretty amazing. And it's a wide range of stuff. Some kids programs still to come, readings like this, a couple events at Down Home Kitchen, a wide variety of stuff. Hunger Mountain Co-op is hosting one Saturday. I'll mention too, as I'm thinking about it, because I was supposed to introduce the Irish music and poetry with Angela Patton and that was postponed because of the lousy weather last weekend. She's away this weekend, but it's going to be on April 28th at Baguito's at two o'clock. So that's one change. If you wanted to go to that and thought you missed it, you didn't. Yeah, anyway. Thank you. So, let's see. I think I've said most of my notes. One thing I do want to mention are our partner sponsors, which are on the front of the program, the Vermont Humanities Council, the Vermont College of Fine Arts, the Poetry Society of Vermont for the first time this year, Hunger Mountain Co-op and the National Life Group Foundation, all of whom give us really major donations to help this happen. There are a lot of people involved, volunteers and staff to get the poems sorted. George, thank you for looking at hundreds of poems and helping get them up. So, I'm going to introduce Jody Gladden, who is a fellow of Calaisian. She and her husband, David, live in East Calais. There's a whole row of Calaisians here in the middle. Thank you. We're friendly people, if you want to talk to us about our homeland of Calaisian. Jody is actually a former board member here at Calagory and a poet. Her most recent book is called Translations from Bark Beetle, which is published in 2014, but she has a new book coming out, when, how soon? June. June. Called The Spiders, My Arms. She's now the director of the writing program at the Studio Center in Johnson, and I give you Jody Gladden. Thank you, Craig. It's great to be here. Thanks especially to Rachel and Michelle, who have organized this event and the Kellogg Hubbard for giving us this space and all of Quam City, which is such a wonderful way to celebrate poetry in April, which truly is the cruelest month, in terms of writing. That's right. So I'm really excited about this evening. I joined the Studio Center community about a little over a year ago, and it's really a joy to be part of such a wonderful place. It's the largest international artist residency program in the U.S., in Johnson, if you can imagine. And each month we have more than 50 visual artists and writers from all over the country and the world. A few of them are sitting in the second row here. We feed them and we house them and we give them studio space and amazing things happen. The Studio Center is celebrating its 35th anniversary next year, and throughout the time it truly has been a place where artists support artists, so tonight's reading is proof of that. You'll be hearing poets who currently staff the Studio Center's kitchens and offices and administration and Johnson's extraordinary bookstore, Ebony's, or books without which we could not function. And so I'll get us started, and with me are reading, and then we're gonna do this like we do readings up there, which is just have people come up and give their names and start reading. So I'll just do short introductions first. I'll read, and then Andrea Martin will be following me. She received her MFA from Vermont College, Vermont College of Fine Arts a year or two ago. We actually got to work together there, so it's really wonderful to work together at the Studio Center now, and she's completing her first collection of poetry called So Intricate Elaborant, and she'll be showing you some of those poems as well as reading them. And then next we have Sam Hughes, who's currently enrolled in the Warren Wilson MFA program and has been active in the Burlington Poetry scene. He also has delivered mail for the US Postal Service, which figures into his work. After that we have Meg Reynolds, who's sort of the ringer in this group because she has been a resident at the Studio Center, but comes as a friend of all of ours. She's also very active in the Burlington Poetry scene. She runs the Litt Club at the Lamp Shop, that writing series, and she teaches creative writing at the Women's Prison in Burlington, as well as the Vermont Adult Writing Program. And then we have Kylie, I've never pronounced your last name. What did you talk about that? Galeigh Galeigh, who is a poet and singer and songwriter, and the only other thing she wanted me to say about her is that she is a reader. Which is absolutely true. Every time I go into Ebenezer, Kylie is reading the most interesting book I can imagine. So, and then to finish us off for the evening will be Garrett Clark, who's the president of the Studio Center. He lives in Johnson with his lovely wife and children, some of whom are here with him tonight. He got his MFA from the University of Oregon and he says it's an exaggeration to call him a lifelong poet. I don't think it was an exaggeration at all. And I want to say that Gary and all the rest of the people you will hear tonight, are lifelong poets and they let that orientation to the world and form their way of being in it. And I think that's what we all have in common and what you will hear. So, I'll get things started. So, I'm going to guess the lights can go off. These are poems from my new book and you can see why we needed a projector. There is a, well let me say that in each of them there is as in this one, a line that's a little darker that goes through the poem. But my idea about these poems is that you can kind of read them any way you want. There, so the reading of the poem becomes an active participation in the making of the poem and each time you read it, it could be a slightly different poem. So, I'll show you, I'll just read one way. Generally they do go across and down if that helps but really there's no way to go wrong. So, this one is up in the studio center in Maverick looking out over the Gi Han River and it goes like this. What does the river feed? As an offering, questions to ask the river before you die. As an offering, questions put words in its mouth. What body doesn't want to turn back to head water as an offering? Turn back to head water, dive in its mouth. A stiff wind makes them more beautiful. Stiff winter grasses how their angled shadows bend to the task. The arcs wind makes them trace in snow which is more beautiful. I like having nothing. I like it out here. Leaves stripping, thin clouds, my thoughts. Late crickets, puff balls on moss. I like my thoughts having nothing to do with me. This is kind of an homage to libraries. Many remained silently sleeping in the libraries. Many were left unshelved or leaned a little in their dark stacks. Many remained standing like horses sleeping against one another, silently browsing old books after the libraries closed. And this is a version of the Eurydicean Orpheus myth. Look back at me, my love, be long here. Says Eurydice holding a perfume to take the picture. My love, I can't, says Orpheus as he turns, goes another way. The old story turns here, goes not her way. And the last two are both in praise of things we often don't think of as praise worthy. This one, blandness, and the next one, idleness. And for both of these, I'm kind of indebted to Chinese thinking. This line actually, well, there's a book by a Chinese sinologist, Francois Julien, called in praise of blandness. And it's about just the aesthetic principle of blandness being really preferable to taste because with blandness, there's no interference, there's no drama. So you get the thing in its most pure state in some way, but not with the heightenedness of purity. So this is a line from that book, which is blandness is this experience of transcendence, reconciled with nature and divested of faith, which if you think about that for a minute, it's kind of a wonderful idea that it transcends, but it doesn't have to transcend nature and doesn't rely on faith. So in praise of blandness, blandness is this common elder, white flower, white pith, so familiar as scarcely to require description. This experience of transcendence, white hair, carte blanche of all those colorful ideas. After losing his sense of taste, my father still preferred white peaches. The last one, oh, on top of it's missing. It's interesting. Hold on a minute. I don't know what happened here. Sure, yeah. Yeah. Of course, now Christmas, the wine is spotless in the news, the wine is spotless. Okay, down. Yeah, make it a little bigger. No, they went to the next page. There's a, okay, this one's gonna be a little strange. Yeah, there should be a page break so you get the, think of the page break being between peaches and butt. This is what happens to these pokes. They just take off. It's all perfect. Yeah, it's all perfect. Okay, so the dark line in this one is, I still believe in the dark work of idleness. I was thinking a little of Addis Martin when I was writing this, there's a great documentary on her in which she says, I can always tell people who work by tuition because they will say, oh, I have to sleep on that. So I was thinking that's the dark work of idleness, those things that you have to sleep on. I could still believe in the dark work of idleness. Work while you have light, but I could still work night shifts left in the dark, night shifts, tides, washing up, something worth keeping, lighthouse keeping, okay, thank you. Andrea Martin, and as Doty mentioned, I'm working on finishing up my first collection of poetry. The poetry that I'm working on centers around the events of the Jamestown Colony, specifically the early years, so about 1610 or so to 1624, and I'm gonna share parts of the second section with you. I'm interested in history in general and the events of this colony in particular, especially I'm interested in the experiences of the women who were present, but whose voices were unrecorded. So I dove into the primary documents of the time period and in working with them and repurposing their language that became a way for me to make space for those women and to allow them to speak. So the second section, it's a little bit fuzzy, but I think you can get the idea, takes as its source text a marketing publication from the Virginia Company, and it was basically marketing spin to encourage colonists to come over and to convince them that things were not as bad and awful as they really were. So after looking at this for a very long time, poems started to emerge and what I find interesting about this is that these voices in poems were always there and it just took looking and listening for a long time to reveal them. So the bold face words are the poem and then I tear paper around them to create a shape, which is something, it was intuitive really, I can't say exactly why I started doing that, but I did. And I think really it came from the fact that I felt like the page boundaries were a little arbitrary and this feels more like it activates the page and makes it into a place. So I'll share a few of these. Scattering a face, an ear, a foot and a shin. The dispeopled by us planted, repealed the land unto this day. It's one poem that you're seeing too at the same time. We were bridled as their domestical examples. Our three heads ached as one body. Is it a sign, the dough, her foot branded with a foul mark of human blood? Partly because he will make a league with crocodiles. Partly because he violated the servants, but chiefly because he sold us for land that we turn from any man as if he were compassed with scorpions. Serpentine sting under fair leaves, a second and a third return, clawing to make me fall down with the devil. Providence calls her to stand firm and not immediately to be broken. But in nine months' space, she would suffer to be buried in the labyrinth of Ariadne's thread. A great secret, whereof I have handled and seen and often tasted the stock of sir R for garden fruits, roots, herbs and a portion of bread. As apples running on the ground, so in the womb lay elemental seeds of plenty and increase. As the wilds and hundreds fall and miscarry, so flesh will receive salt. She broke by drinking the brackish water as if it were rank hemlocks. Comfort me, Lord, deliver me from he that charges me with discouraged profit the time I lie in labor. For her discouragement in the heart, her comfort, her honor, her resolve. For her, I, with an open ear, harken after. That is all. So I really appreciate it. It's visible to one eye. I guess my powers aren't working right now. I don't know what I'm talking about. Generally, yes, I tend to be under a cloaking device. So I'm going to read two poems. Right now, the first is a poem of more general interest, one might say. The second is from a project I started working in the fall, which Jody alluded to earlier. To do with the post office, I was a postman in Burlington before I moved right into the studio center. I didn't stay that long. I really wanted to love that job. And it really did not, I believe. But it turned out I had lots of feelings about it. So there's somewhere in between a longish poem and a book. Anyway, first, this is Three Landscapes, one. I like Bruegel for the people and his paintings. So many of them doing so many ordinary things. And here and there, a Christ thrown in dragging his cross along as though that were just his job. There's the word made flesh going to be tortured to death. One of the painted peasant women might say to her child, as though pointing out any other attraction passing through the village that day. The hunters returning from the forest bearing game, a young red-frogged aristocrat and his retinue partway through a long and ultimately unimportant journey. Two men acting out an old folk saying, the gates of hell coming open to release hairy little devils with bulging fish eyes and spindly tridents. Two. I read once that Petrarch decided one day to walk up a mountain. There was nothing at the top. And he knew there was nothing at the top. He met an old shepherd along the way who claimed to be the only man to have ever walked up the mountain before. The shepherd, too, said that there was nothing at the top. It all began to seem vaguely sinful in the rigorous way people thought of sin at that time, not even a sin of sensuality, but one of pointlessness. Why spend all day walking up a mountain when you could be contemplating the divine? Petrarch walked up the mountain to its top and there was nothing at the top. He sat at the top amongst the nothing and thought of love. He thought of love until this, too, began to seem sinful. He read a book so that he would feel bad about this. Petrarch walked back down the mountain and went home. Three. I have been trying for years to write a poem about landscapes and architecture. The way they seemed to promise that just by looking hard enough you could penetrate into the numinal, just like the way that if you turn it up loud enough and sit there with your eyes screwed shut, you begin to feel your hearing through the music and deep into the truth a bit. I was going to put into the poem how fleeting these revelations are, how sometimes they refuse to come at all, no matter how hard you try to make them. I would sit there writing and think of the prettiest stretch of highway I've seen in Vermont and of how, no matter how tempted I am, it always seems futile to pull off the road to stop and gaze at the green mountains draped across behind the big red barn, the furry little islands in the river, the faded covered bridge crossing it. It seems always futile in the end to think of taking a photograph in which I would never get the colors quite right in which the secret significance of everything would never come through. I begin to envy the minds of medieval artists who cared so little for the sanctity of such a scene that they would fill it with grotesque human figures. We today, romantics or post, prefer to keep the country empty of everything except automobiles. I think what it would take to fix the errors of my country, I would have to go out to Williston every day to repay with a scythe, get drunk and fall asleep in the fields, build fires and skate along the river when it freezes, marry a homely woman and keep monstrous livestock in the barn. Till I had filled in the whole country for I lie down in the river and the beginning was the word I mutter to know one in particular as the dazzling flood of linseed oil, piss, ground stones and seeds washes over me. I will swallow this world whole, I think, as opening my mouth to do it. The current takes hold from under of my flesh. Very good. That's that. Okay, so this is pre-organized, this thing lately. This is now in section one, which deals with the male tribe itself. The search kinds of the poem, as you'll hear, but for information's sake, the funny little boxy ones are called long life vehicles, which is apt, the long life vehicles, which are, it's apt and somewhat ironic. I think they were built between 1987 and 1994, and they're still there, and that's a little bit horrifying to contemplate. Despite what dire familiarity I later was to gain with them, the trucks, or not trucks, either vehicles, as their dull official appellation goes, long life vehicles, despite too, what you will see here of them, let us first delineate them and their technicals, as technical, at least, as I can stand. Note first the size, the outward form, the little white bulb trundling down the city streets, dangerously rattling down the highway. It is undeniably proportioned like a larger thing. A whale, say, that could swallow you, that you could stand in, but no, it is only slightly larger, if at all, than a largest SUV, inside which I, for one, cannot stand up. That is to say, an object of completely unmarkable stature that is smaller than you would expect it is. That is, that peculiar charm of all things miniature, the tiny house, the tiny dog, the child. You see now just how technical I get. Can guess what sort of postman I would make. Look then at the styling, too, the shape, the socratic snugness of the nose, the slight camp forward of the cargo area, something almost communistical in its modest areas, utilitarian. All this on its broad side and blaze and with the eagle of the government, abstract, stylized, futuristic, officially the sonic eagle. Less bland, perhaps. They're not much less offensive to the sensibility than neuter carrier or vehicle. Some dreadful 80s garishness about it. They stopped production back in 94. This is more important than I thought it was. That loud and kitschy future, merely old without the chance to be old fashioned and octogenarian in sleeve tattoos. A sort of avant-garde, this statuary. For medium, aluminum, the cheapest possible, as though the artist meant to make some comment on mortality or in. Long life indeed, what we are promised here in these all too young United States. But I digress. Inside a not unhandsome Spartaness, the sort of thing a man might be loved for. None of the usual automotive flatteries, no fake wood grain, no leatherette, no armrest, cup holder or console. The windows work when they do it all by hand crank. The doors locking mechanisms and plain view, how little pressure they're required to set. A tangled mane of wires and fuses trails out from beneath what is not quite a dashboard, more bit of plastic over the wheel, a decal on it reads, avoid backing up whenever possible. The instruments, speedometer, et cetera, most all of them defund since at least 99 below. The fan is bolted, broken necked above. The AC too and heat have long been dead. No secrets, no superfluities. And let us not forget the right hand drive, exotic I know. The left hand side taken out by sort of sorting table. The door communicates between the cabin and the back, shelves bolted to the walls, cement blocks to the wheel wells to weigh the whole thing down. The signal lights, their backs exposed, two little vents high up. The back door opens scroll wise. But am I ever seeing a truck as earnestly as Melville seems a tale? In truth the things were simply awful. It wasn't just the videos they showed us, the ones where one gets hit by a semi and then goes sailing through the air over the intersection, leaking paper like a shop foul trails blood upwards as it falls to be found later, crumpled against a guardrail. The economical aluminum body torn open, balled up and cast away a massive ton of junk mail. Not quite what one would strictly call road worthy. But then perhaps this didn't bother me so much. Death in any case is death and I was young enough for it to seem remote. No, my horror and conversely love for really what is love without some fear came I think from somewhere else. Perhaps it was the strolled broad quality one felt on getting in, the guesses one would make, how many times each part had been replaced, somewhere a whole trials worth of witness marks. What speed one traveled at, what gear, how many hours peed in, the constant sense of backwards working to discern one's living motion, backwards from the past that is thus forward though it never felt so. I've not elaborated yet upon the mirrors, which in a complex halo everywhere projected from the body, the only way for a beer window there was none of seeing to back up. In general practice, we were discouraged from sitting above, but there I go again. I mean to say it was not fear of death so much, it's fear of one had already died and now it goes to sorts, still wandered the appointed rounds. I had much to do to know myself. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, great. It sounds like it is, what it is. Okay, great. My name's Meg. I wrote this first film while I was at the Vermont Studio Center and it has everything to do with Catherine Hepburn's brownie recipe. Let's give it a whirl. It's called Rising. When I try Catherine Hepburn's brownie recipe, it doesn't rise in the pan, but bubbles and hisses like the labrea tarpids. It's a sugar puddle, sweet, wasteful, though I haven't got this right. I was once very good at waste. Food was a bitter medicine to be taken and untaken and barren bull side rituals while this doesn't slender you or make you a leer. It does come with a numb lightness, stepping into another skin and a set of rehearsed over dignified lines. I'm fine, really I'm fine. Every night that I manage the narrow walk to my door, silvered, steady despite the animal heavy weight. I then remove my tunic and waste to the day. I might mutter and effected, am I good, good enough for loving? And believe that I meant it down to my unruly hairs, to the right fist that ached from clutching starlight in my sleep. I dreamed of becoming an actress. I took on the same role as my grandmother whose movie star good looks were maintained with same muffling, wrenching and magnanimous charm. Where else does a girl look to learn how to eat and lead in her own trailer? Today, a man with a ponytail winding down his back like a girl down a grand staircase placed a piece of chocolate in a woman's mouth as they stepped off a porch in my neighborhood. She slowed to let it happen and he turned, blushing rose hip to give her the sweet satin waltz as good, isn't it? She took the morsel silently, warming as stage lights, a promise success and adoration and her athletic reception astonish the sidewalk. It is not just her. It is the dust of sugar mouthing on a lemon bar. It is the bee suckling at a flower's soft throat. It is my mother stopping at the bakery before middle school to buy maple rounds, bake and saccharine as September suns, who, but her daughter deserves a sap sweetened cream on a Tuesday. It is my own hand feeding me raspberry, raspberry. And what is it? That certain something that you can't teach, the panache, the over the shoulder glance, the perfectly spaced drage on a wedding cake, utterly senseless love or style. I reinvent myself. New, a new role at an age where I am thought to be ancient. I have an opinion on the steak, the wine, the density of the dessert, which is now cooled to a chocolate block. The audience may observe on my teeth the granular fuzz of Catherine's fallen brownies. On my tongue, another woman's good example. I bake up into my body, lawless. The rush comes, sugar like a flock lifting its wings. Good? This tastes good. I will eat what I've ruined. I'll eat and ruin. I can't be, this can't be kept hidden from me. I was bound to find it all and take it like the modern woman I am. I only have two for you this evening because I have this affliction where all my poems are getting longer. I like it, so it's happening. So, this next one's called Cellular Elegy. Also, it's worth mentioning, my mother, so I'm very close to my mom. She's, I think people like her should be worshiped. So I'm trying to do it in poems. And she was diagnosed with muscular, sorry, multiple sclerosis about four years ago. And so I've been processing that in writing recently. So this has a relationship to that and is certainly always much like everything else dedicated to her. Cellular Elegy. You rent somewhere that only one in 10 of the cells in the human body are human. The rest is a city that climbs the latticework. We walk up a hill, porous and unfeeling. The night dies the hill purple and there are diamonds in the valley. Then we climb down and you climb me. A hill arching its shoulders in the ink. Sitting on your hips until you lose feeling in your legs, I rock and wander. You are in a crown of burdock spurs, tangled with toothed seeds. I loosen each burr from your long hair, tender each hook as though opening an infant's fist. I let you tie my wrists with black silk bindings. This is what passed for feeling. Our double numbness, double binds, blindnesses, we glitter against the quiet inside us. You don't believe in this poem. I believe you're what's called a husband. Handsome and punctual, clever at board games, listener of the news. Any mother would love you. Friends insisted I try you out like a sturdy raincoat. You were even there, hand on my shoulder when my mother got sick. We were standing in a snow bank and my father said, it's nothing to worry about but her legs are numb. The winter climbed her knees. When smoothed blankets of snow, I got an urge to get pregnant. My mother said I could do anything I set my mind to. A near invisible baby followed us home into the kitchen where you declared you only bothered with three spices, salt, pepper, cumin. I sat on a stool chewing the definition of spice and the absence clapped its hands. The baby climbed into the shower, into bed, to strum the bindings as lesions split and thickened the swaddling sheath around my mother's spinal cord. We got a snow day, so you tied me up as always and then sent me home. The baby crawled behind me in the snow like a cat. I was calculating. If I could ignore you for moments and years, I could earn my mother a grandchild. Baby didn't ask questions, such are women's desires. They are actually about their mothers. I invoked the biome you said I possessed to look at you. I often didn't feel like it. Mostly when you looked flavorless or when I drunk a half a bottle of wine. Just touch him, I said, shrugging the inside of my body against the you inside me. We often walked through the low frozen marsh and you led us as though the path was hard to find. I let you because I didn't care. I focused on where the wind carved a snow way to reveal the grasses. Blades as sharp as sun rays and ochre as my mother's gilded nerves. She deserves more children. More children deserve her. To be clear, you are a gift from my mother. This poem is about her, not you. See her slipping into the foreground on smoky feet. Could you feel me not looking at you? How could you bear the hard button eyes, the hardening fists of all the tiny nobodies where all the fascia they floated in trembled with threat and sorrow? I pointed them at you like a mother leads her child's eyes to the edges of the world. Maybe I could make a baby from my stowaway cells, make them condense into a lizard slick body and let them slip from me all lightning and indigo. I would stand over them, half there, bent and hushing as an empty corn stock to teach my monsters how to sing for her. I'd be her daughter, thin, gold, brave enough to keep living just like she has. We wouldn't tell science, I wouldn't tell you. I could build a seal pup and set it at my mother's feet until her heels alight with feeling and prove that I wasted nothing. I am sad. When I did my own research to find your theory was debunked. Scientists said there was no way to measure the size and scope of whatever else lives inside you and the city leaves my body like fogs of snow lifting through conifers. I blame you for your limited imagination. You could never see me for what I was, a gumball machine filled with pearls. So what am I mourning? We broke up and my mother is mortal. Who cares about the miles of bacteria and mossy microbes coiled inside anybody? I do. They filled the shadows with survival, a phantom force for good. Now, so many sweet cold little nothings are gone. You tell me, you liar. How am I supposed to stand? Thank you. I think I'm supposed to welcome up Kylie but she just ran surreptitiously into the bathroom. So I don't know if I'm obligated to tell you guys a joke, maybe. I accept to say happy National Approaching Month to you all. It's quickly coming, my absolute favorite time of year. Christmas does not have the same shine since there's no hope of anyone giving me a Barbie big wheel anymore. So if any of you have one, you know, I'll sit on it. So maybe we'll take just a couple of deep breaths between all the poems and Kylie will make her way up here when she's ready. Thank you so much for listening. Unfortunately, I am only qualified for corridor construction. Yes, a hallway or a space between the outer walls of two rooms. You'll see that with a corridor, one can pass by any number of spaces without ever entering. Think of the privacy. But it seems that isn't what you're after. Maybe I can stretch the definition to accommodate your needs. One common request has been for a moat, a popular barrier throughout history. You can always remove your castle from inside the moat or just let your kingdom fall and then you have a trench. I did a lot of trenches. No, no. Let's try something more abstract. Think of a corridor as a divide. Do you need one drawn? Is there a dog stalking you each night that I can keep at bay? Your teeth seem crowded. What, a gap help? I once laid an entire house of hallways in brick for someone who needed to learn to move on and on and on and on, or I can simply part of C. I'll give you some time now to make a plan, but please keep in mind these two things. I am not a licensed surgeon and I cannot make anything come together. Thank you. So my name's Kylie. I just like introducing that with hello and then jumping in, because it's funny. This one was a collaboration I did with my father who was showing a body of work in Miami during Hurricane Irma. At a number of times throughout this, I will seem like I'm commanding you to clap your hands. I like it better if you don't, but you can if you feel so moved. I think that's what they're there for. And so this is just an excerpt, but. The ice, the scout, afloat. The glimpse, tropic, calving, phallic, desolate. Community, naked, exposed. Beast, creepy, vulgar and filthy. Innocence, bare, pristine, pristine. The queen, the rowers, the neighbors, the threat. Afloat, trespassing. There's a monster out there and a beast in here and I need to give it a vision. A reason, a threat, an ambassador. Boundaries, resources and storms. Attitudes, clouds, minimalism. White lies, views and sheep. Ores, a desinic overlook. Then we can join together in a little row boat. Clap your hands, clap your hands. The pioneers were determined to build a community in the wilderness, lead in hand, glass of water, blood down ankle and arrow in the head. Come what may, come heller high water, shit in high water hell, hardships aside. Round and round we mine the mind, digging from dig to dig, an archeology of the self. Our collection, our savings, redemption, the wheel and X on the spot. Of course the destination. Motherland, scenic overlook, sweet delight. The round goes round and round. The monkey enters the wheel and chokes. Neighbors and refugees, bellwether. Wood crashes through the door. Clap your hands, clap your hands. 10% used, 90% unused. Super ego, singing praise, melting, throwing off the shoes. Super ego, singing praise, changing climate, rolling boats. 10% above, 90% below. Rising waters, taking the wheel, hitting the lights, loving your neighbors. Rising waters, talking in rounds, taking in refugees, loving your neighbor. Wisdom teeth and mercury's rising, refugees. Today's hot air, tomorrow's deadly sin, neighbors. Being the first to notice the water rise, refugees. The lessening number of sunsets, neighbors. Flying, harvesting, refugees and neighbors. They took this and joined together in a once non-existent narrative. And for a moment the sails filled. While the geese drank wide below, they bore down the door above and all went to heaven in a little rowboat. Clap your hands, clap your hands. Frozen assets, boarding the Dutchman. Thaw and watered line. Pool burlesque, tube burlesque. Mother and child, the boat. Mother and child, the little rowboat. But no one sees it. It rolled once, the blue glass eyes looked up at the blue rock heaven. Bottoms up, they cried, bottoms up. But making it to land was never a plan and they all got together in the little rowboat. Clap your hands, clap your hands. Count to seven, and then 11. 20 feet, 80 eyes, James cared, deadly doctor, Stamcombe wills. Lifeboat capacity, come what may. Ores with holes, ores studded with teeth, ores made of broken glass, ores with eyes, ores with anchors, ores with a memory, ores for land. Three, six, nine, the goofs drank wine, neighbors. Angels and sailors, chains and charms, refugees. Apples float by, the ambassador sits on ice. Neighbors, what crashes through the door, refugees. Clap your hands, clap your hands, clap your hands. This last one is part of a triptych, the final form of which may not be a poem, so it's called part one left panel. I am afraid of the dark. You, every sound from it. Yet a visceral silence contests for your height of fear. Always ready to recoil against a sudden thrash or spark. For comfort, anchoring of a harbor, an innocent solace, we keep a fire lit with soft music playing. We cannot say we lit this hearth, we wouldn't know how, and a strong wind downpour or sudden high altitude would be enough to reduce our agreement to rubble. So we sing constantly, a burning from each of our throats, an immense harmony baked in a mere duet, producing air steady enough to keep embers hot. Our songs are generous and we are unselfish in them. We feel sincerely that we deserve to be safe. Or just make it through the night. Days come and nights pass, the fire does not weaken. We've got nothing to be afraid of, but we've got nothing. No food, our water will not stay above. Our water stays simmering just below a boil. We've grown weak as the muscles in our chests and throats are the only ones being used. Outside of song, I do not speak. Your tremors don't rest, we cannot sleep. This Faustian arrangement, whatever it is, cannot go on. We are unsafe here. This fire is a living being, and the words we sing, we do not mean. I'm gonna read a poem called The Disappearance of Indian Neck, which is a place in Connecticut no worthy of me because it's the one place on earth that I've had a connection to my entire life since the day I was born through my mother's family. And so I just go back a long time at this place and the people who live there. The Disappearance of Indian Neck. That's the part of the ocean that's part mine, by which I mean a part of it is actually mine. By which I mean each time I disappear, a part of it disappears too. I mean really and truly disappears, as in never seen again. Seen as in today, you see someone. Tomorrow you wait to your own hands shaking. The blue fish you could never see is now not even there. And I mean more than just nowhere. I mean actually not there. The way when I'm not there, the ocean, at least the part I have in mind, is no longer there. There was something different this morning, my people said, something new about the way the water looked. It reminded them of something, that feeling that now nothing would be the same. That when faced with a disappearance, particularly one that comes so close, even oceans cannot hide the way they feel. This took them all completely by surprise. It wouldn't be easy to live here anymore if they were thinking to come home here, to touch each other here, to take to the cold floor with this new absence in their midst and somehow make their way downstairs to where the juice is, the juice and the glass it goes in. It wasn't confusion exactly, but it did call almost everything into question. Why us? Why now? Why no trees between us in the window and the gulls gathered so happily together on an island made entirely of rock? Why this rock shaped like a submarine? And why these feeble tides today as if someone won't be with us anymore? At least not in the way we knew. Nothing's happened, they kept saying. There's been no news. Why this feeling then that everything is far away and gonna stay that way? Our hearts half here and half there. The dog, a dying reminder of how sad we still are, they said, slowly to themselves. And yet without me, the ocean actually sang, was not like a voice, but was a voice, a brother's voice, his songs rising in syllables of perfect silence, particularly at night as they lay there, not recognizing what this was they now felt and now heard singing, the salt air seeming almost to resemble them. In my absence, I can picture them like this. I can think for them, can hope their world is not quite what it might be where I there, the part of the ocean that sings them fast to sleep, which is what I am, a part of that certain ocean, which matters now that I'm gone. And this time, I mean really, truly gone. Gone as in always wanting to be there, but for the distance that makes me, me. No more blackfish, no more diamonds for free, and now the end of warm water. Why would this unfamiliar water have anything to do with him, they said. He was always somewhere else anyway, they said. We loved him, but learned to live without him. He was never here when he didn't have to be, like yesterday, how clear Long Island looked. His absence is the wind we get used to to live, they say. We adjust. We want him there. We want him here. He wants us here. He wants us there to see his boy chase flies along the window sill. From his white chair, he wants us the way he wants no one else on earth. Whatever this strange disease, today he, meaning me, has nothing to do with it. And I know whatever it is, it all adds up to how we talk, to pure distance, and the way it feels to be so fond, and still so far away. Awake, the cottonwood so full of starlings, the potatoes also full of bugs, and me in this mannered way feeling brushed, and blown, and overgrown. This is called heading home with my new trees, and just, there's a couple of things. Just, et cetera in is et cetera in, saws all is saws all. Transparent is a kind of apple tree, and Matt Denlinger is just this guy I used to know. So. Heading home with my, you know, this poem is really written on a day a lot like today. Heading home with my new trees. I've always been things I never wanted badly enough to be. I could do this, and I could do that. I enjoyed something for a while, awoke a new enthusiasm, and sent links to people, et cetera. Then the food goes cold, and the apple in my eye won't keep. Like invoices arrive the absences, and the underdogs, and the et cetera in. Not mine, but sometimes. Not always, but from time to time. Try planting a transparent where it doesn't belong. It takes a moon's light to understand a life of wanting things requires a shovel, or a saw's all, or advice. Things that make things happen. It takes an absent son to understand that when the key can't be found, there are other secrets to want. Other buckets of time, other tantrums, other boredoms to be discovered. I made a note to remind myself to write down the light among the red pines. Up hill was like a sermon of red light, spoken gold, unable to be cold, unable to be blue, a final toast to you, to you and to all the ways you feel. Sometimes it's down upon electric hands and knees among the sweet tips of grass. Other times it's just blowing off steam, bloodshot, yellow mouth, fingerling, trout, a flash, where sissy fingertips, trespass, shoulders and eyelashes and cheeks, and finally the toes of our imaginary and fantasy and made of being empty tomorrows. At the end of the day, I just don't have all that much to say. We refuse to admit it's basically cold all year here. Cold dreams of neighbors and how we taunt and justify their lives. It's still yesterday now and there goes a dirty horse drinking from a puddle. There goes the electric company, a man with a wheelbarrow. The red house where Matt Denlinger used to mow. There goes the flag I was a boy for, the pile of wood I wish was mine. There goes the house that whispers an entirely new quiet, the one from whose weather vane I could cross over crying the Gila Canyon, the life I wanted so long behind might still be there. The rain returning to the sky as mist off the asphalt, belly of the road as disappearance, the pleasure of these bird-like satisfactions, this nap before the holes need digging. I have one more poem I would like to read and it is shorter than those and I'm reading it because Murray asked me to read it and it's for my friends, Sebastian and Brian. And it's in four brief parts, a relatively brief parts and it's just called Dispatches from the Willow Road for Sebastian and Ryan. First part, it's not one, two, three, four, it's just, anyway, first part. We came to love the road and the miles of being missing we found there. Only there were there the distances on which our enthusiasm's fed, rose up and flew to new and higher homes. Inevitably shattering like an ornament on the pavement, we placed our palms upon and kissed. There were the toenails we learned to trim, the forests we learned to enter, we learned and we forgot and we got better. We felt ourselves achieving an oblivion. I came to taste the alienation I used to know, the pleasures of disappearing. I remember the liar and the prude. I still nursed the distance I discovered on my secret walks away from the city streets of my first friends. I'm sorry, I was only pretending to be welcoming to say thank you. When I see an apple tree polluted with yellow light, I regret everything I learned here. It's the best of all impossible purposes to pierce all the reasons not to go with a cold soda, fizzy with the faith required to go on. It's the trust of placing mountain shadow at the center of your life to not know if you did that or if it was somehow done. Faith in knowing it may not matter. Arrival without beginning, departure without destination. Take your place beside the golden raven dozing in the yellow birch limbs at night. Watch as the headlights in the notch below puncture the deepest secret sorrows of Franconia. Someday, when I may understand, I will climb the stairs to bed and be a boy again. Like a friend who freezes snowballs in December to feed his colleague in July. Like the trout who swims back and forth along the length of me, both brook and brown, I savor all the ways I've failed myself. The pictures help me see how wrong I always was. Long ribbons of confusion escaping my nostrils, my ears, the holes from which the snakes emerge in spring. I'm pretty sure I'll never understand. Thanks. Thank you.