 Homes here politely paint over their age and turn it into money. A new crop of children regenerates the greened-in playground. The afternoon flowers and the leftover pumpkins frown down on by gray skies. Gravity pulls me down into the valley and draws raindrops from the overseeing clouds. Now in the neighborhood plexus my memories begin to shine through the autumnal present. Hollandaise glistens on the face of some lovely old young flame. Loveliness abides, the waitress at the wine bar, the bank officer chumming with her tellers. Here were coffee houses where we scribbled in our journals towards girls with theirs. Here were bars where we put shots into our courage and coins into our anthems. After a long detour of years, I got married again at the church up there. Catered by neighbors in a short block, brogy Irish publicans on one side, goading Greek greengrocer on the other, one sweet daughter carried as a babe to the bar and grill there, tunneling later to the cleaners here. And going on, quotidian gravity grabs hold again towards lower anonymous crisscross traffic. I think I'll have to hop on a bus. Thank you. Now I'm going back to Maine with an ecfrastic poem, an assignment from City College, to write a poem based on a work of art, and in this case the work of art is Andrew Wyeth's, Christina's World. I've loved that poem since I was a little kid. She lies down, downhill from the clabbered house in the barn, far from her bed, and she rises to rest down left on Wyeth's canvas. There she stretches along all our memories where she may stay if only she can, long past the sea-cooled day's dusk outside the town of Thomaston, and long after, after she's gone to ground in the town cemetery, and the artist has been laying beneath a worded stone way down along the rolling hills of Pennsylvania. For now, with us, she feels with a brief short life of a Maine meadow in all its amber multitude. Her eyes, a wave mowers, watching the waves of simple splendor, no place for longing there. It's we who want her wanting. Thank you. Here's a broader piece of biography. It's called Chronoscape. Driven through the snow-slopped city streets of Brooklyn and admitted to Bethel Hospital in the tropical warmth of mommy's womb, you came out and back home with her to that steam-heated January walk-up, made something squeezed into smiles, a sourcing of small round joy to burble and be bragged about, to her lip-sticked sisters and smoky brothers-in-law, summoned from weekends of saders and socialism to view the bay born in this wintry burrow. Far north of the east river on the coast of eastern Maine, colored leaves crackled the quiet of a small town avenue while you and your friends giggled your ways through kindergarten. You shared sneezes and scratches and messy sandwiches among pungent allicens and butchers and janeys and bobbies running on through arithmetic to recess on the knee-skinning stony fields of Maine, walking slower on longer legs to old spicy patterned waltz lessons at the Y, thinking, how do we hold? How do we listen? And after later last dances and extracurricular lessons from D.H. Lawrence, sweaty held hands swinging out along the shore path, lulled by the near eternal water, looking for new and dark and dusky private places to squeeze and be squeezed. There were many stacked dormitory rooms, uncrowded and scheduled campuses, many rented apartments with strewn underwear, some of it hers or his, floating on flows of fortune through seasons of past due notices, here and there with him and her catching the bus, making the plane, grasping greetings, stroking surrenders, guessing what good should be and how to keep it coming, dancing till death do you part. But now, in a far time and place on a well-respected boulevard, you turn on a private light and pack your ample wardrobe and sleep through frequent flyer rewards towards reunions with Allison and Bobby to share selfies of you and the grandkids while memories of Bommie chaperone your seniority. Thank you. This one is another flashback, I guess, it's called Summer for Sophomores. This is a pretty new poem, but it's an old poem. What do these memories look like? How do they sound? All those that made my dreams come true or tried to, on their clangoring way through the true mud of which we're made, spattered on the soft scrub cheeks of that girlish grin out in the yard, not among whatever flies flew for whatever while in that summer time. Look, it looks like Mary Ellen when I picked her up, early enough on that evening that the Lewis family home stood still welcoming against the sinking sun. Early enough that later I could still dance into the sparkle of her pretty blue pools and hold us to early love. Thank you. This is still ocean related, it's called Surge. I've migrated my tears to somewhere else's season, displaced and rather wrinkled, they tasted still the same, tasted as I always thought they did back there then. Do you remember? Young and fresh among the pines, those tears, siblings of the sea. With her I waited into it, it surging in between our legs and splashing up around our chests. It left us after, landed on the lawn, where I could shell her two-toned body from her lycra layer and lick the saline basting from her untanned breasts. I had to leave that ocean and that island as she must have. We left the gold cries in that dusky day, the murmurs of that musky time to do it somewhere where we do it with whom I do it now and wherever she may be thinking of it may be. It's some time again, my time again, the season to cry for all seasons, to kiss the streams of salt and go back down to the timeless taste of the ocean. Thank you. This one is a little lighter, it's called My Dorm Mate's Cousin. I remember April. Showers were expected, pleasure protected by what water could do, fallen from far above, falling on her long blonde hair over embraceable shoulders, rivulating down the pushing curbs to splash on sweet small shoes, standing as it seeped to rest in the dark old soil of rural Massachusetts. Thank you. All right. This one, it's about three minutes, is that okay? All right. This one is called Overture, it's anybody's memory and it's based on, I hope some of you have seen this, Ingmar Bergman's film of Mozart's The Magic Flute, Kim has seen it I think, which is absolutely marvelous and this is from the filming of The Overture which even before you get into the opera is so damn far out. So it's called Overture, which is Overture in Swedish. My Sunday hands besmirched in a dining room with a jam of wild strawberries. On a screen, my Sunday eyes and ears, young again, gather in golden light, rippling under bird song outside the Drottingham Palace Theater. Orchestral strings tune up to join the birds, then join the horns in three Masonic chords, as under twilight, a naked statue stands in black silhouette. Inside under bright important house lights, a plump cheeked berry-haired girl grins close up, looking down at Wolfgang's Overture, blessing it, blessing Wolfgang, blessing Ingmar's blessing, Bergman's own young daughter, Lynn, about to enter her father's dream and I with her. Lynn is comfy in the company of the living, blinking art of that audience. Introduced to us by Bergman and Sven Nickwist, the strings frisky children pull us along in our sleigh, in buffo-fugal allegro through all the ages and races in rows. Fresh-faced sky-eyed Scandinavians and an olive-yewed subcontinental seer is nod conducting the rhythm. Europeans wisened way beyond Mozart's lifespan. A chocolate girl, in joyous innocence, what should she do in an opera house? What should the opera house do for her? For this seated journey, some have come seeking stories, some carrying their own, three fortissimi come back to command them all, then they're hastened ahead, Lynn at their lead, through the gusts of another allegro, this one tinged with sad mystery. Love is tried for a time before it triumphs in the tonic climax. There's a pretty portrait of a courtly young Mozart, serious in the 1760s, when he was Lynn's age. He hears the applause. The boy had written his first symphony by then. There'll be 40 more and can charity and operas and whatever else can blossom across 35 autumns. Lynn will grow to be an actress and novelist. For now, her lovely mouth is smiling, her excited eyes shining. Had they spanned the 200 years and the 800 miles from Vienna to Stockholm, these kids would have liked each other. She can like him now. Thank you.