 I am thrilled to have you all here. And Mary Rose and I have been collaborating for a while. And Mary Rose, would you mind just shutting that door? And people, if they come, they can just open it. Thank you so much. And Mary Rose has been a frequent contributor to our library programs. We did an embodied poetry workshop. Was that a year or more ago? I think it's more. It's been a while. Yeah, it's been a while. So anyway, she's been great. I see her on the path a lot. And she's the editor of this beautiful magazine, The Mountain Troubadour. And she's been published in Calix, Poem, City, Shoreline, Poetry and Prose, Explorations of Mental Illness, Calliope, Yankee, and V.T. Digger. And her awards include the Artistic Award from the Writers Circle in Warwick, Rhode Island, judged by New Hampshire poet laureate Patricia Farknoli. She has an MFA in writing from Vermont College and has completed residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Frost Place Poetry Seminar in Franconia, New Hampshire. And Mary Rose is going to, hi, Garrett. I was hoping you'd come. Now you're on camera because I just ignored you. So Mary Rose is going to kick off our morning of poetry readings. And she will do the introduction to Sam. So thank you both for coming and welcome. We have a cozy group today. This is going to be sort of like an autobiographical reading, so starting with childhood stuff. My mother is a prayer. She sits in her chair fingering her rosary beads, or sometimes with prayer book in hand. Praying is her habit. So much so that she's become the thing itself, verbing towards God, whose name is I am. I know this because the Easter I was 11, it snowed. And because of her devotion, I wore a pale yellow cape, the color of Coriolopsis. She sewed for me as though I were her only child, not the fourth in line of nine, not surrogate parent, not one of a brood, though I wasn't. Perhaps time stood still just for a moment that Sunday morning on our way to St. Mark's for Easter mass because she guided the fabric with care through the presser foot, letting the feed dogs move the cloth along, using threads of quiet adoration. I was made of one piece. I was Mary Rose. I bloomed. Her work was her blessing. Should the filament tangle in the needle, then she would simply shift, soften into contrition, reset the bobbin, adjust the tension, for a mother of nine must have known what it was to be stretched tight. In the backyard, Facithia was yearning to open its yellow blossoms, singing its welcome, hallelujahs to the new season. But I was adorned in a cape of gentler yellow, Asia's choralopsis, rendered with grace in grace, the third thread of prayer. In this garment, cape and skirt of soft yellow and gray brown plaid, like the bark of the shrub, bespoke, my mother gave herself over to being petitioned, beseeching all goodwill, as she has always done. If a stitch is a loop, then my mother is prayer. Blessing, forgiveness, thanksgiving, petition, embodied in her every action. It snowed that Easter, and my choralopsis ensemble awakened in me in early spring. And I should have told you what feed dogs are on a sewing machine. So she was moving the fabric through the presser foot, which you probably know, but the feed dogs are, it's actual term from what moves cloth through on the machine, sadness like rain. Now the sound of my own voice is enough, and choosing to be loved, the sadness like rain falls in on me until I remember the forsythia. It's impatient green buds bursting from brown stick bumps, transfiguring the backyard, yellow, yellow, yellow. Mother hands me the scissors and trumbling, I cut the fullness dripping with morning's dew and wrap it in the post-tribune. The gravity of giving away what is beautiful, pressing down on me. As the early morning sun filters through new leaves of oak and maple, lining Monroe and Jackson streets, I cradle the swaddled en font, the bundle brightening me on the long walk to school, carrying it to my teacher. Even then it was important to give something beautiful away. Tobacco and old spice. Mornings you'd turned to me, gently pat aftershave on my cheeks. Forever lured by your scent, the nutmeg, cinnamon cloves, I couldn't stop searching, followed its bouquet into the pockets of your suit coats, scavenging loose change and half sticks of Wrigley's spearmint, minty toothpicks, butterscotch, artifacts of you who'd quit smoking but still brought the musky sweetness home to me, my hunger, the weight of your lawyer gray, navy brown bearing down on me. I grew up in Gary, Indiana and you can imagine with nine kids, my mother needed help. And there was a machine called a mangle. Anybody know what that is? Some people know what it is. But if you don't know what it is, the mangle is, it looks like a box when it's closed and then you open it up and it's got this like a drum, which is covered in cloth and it's really good for flat fabrics, for ironing them and moving them through so they're pressed. And this is for Bula. Bula, I'd like to stand by you and feel the heat rise from your skin as you threaded cotton pillows through the mangle smoothing every wrinkle to a crisp and flat conclusion. You worked hard for my mother, pushing back against the ceaseless mound of laundry, a family of 11 generated, creating order in carefully folded piles of clean linens. More than a domestic, you were of home Bula. Something drew me to you. So that day when you called to me from the basement, asking where my mother was, could I get her? Though geared up to return your kindness, I was startled to find my ear untooled for the marvelous, strange vibrations in the husky grain of your voice. And the words twisted in the mysterious machinery, I felt small and stupid as a stain. So I have a couple of sisters who suffer mental illness. Postmark, you of sea. Hospital lobby, but I don't sit. They've gone to find you to see if you'll see me. When word comes, no, you won't. I pack your refusal and carry it to O'Hare. My bags colossal. Honey, you who entered all bright light, I never asked to be more than I am. Last night I wished you dead, not this other I can't reach. Yet I call out, sister. Honey, shadow dancer, listen, are you there? Now in today's mail, you've broken silence. Birthday card fashioned on a patient record form, crayon red heart, yellow spikes bleeding the pulsing. Inside image of a telephone receiver, circa 1940, and a brown rectangle, a letter you've written. Scrawled in thick black wax, drugs weary. Hello, H-E-L-L-O. Letters strung like crows on a telephone line. The wind takes things and whips them around inside of us howling. It takes our windsock and many colors washed up from the sea. Sister, it takes the laughter you breathed into the dark hours of the kitchen where your husband and our father fight over you, stripping you to nothing but a name on an admission form. A lottery ticket where the prize is a state hospital or a private ward. It is as if you slipped back into the sea where men make women empty so they float like driftwood. They try to silence a still, but it is their voices moving like seaweed in the charged night air. Sister, more shadow than light, I am calling you from the evening fog that wraps the water, calling your name and an uncle as well. Lullaby against a cold rain. Dear uncle, with knife and fork crossed over a huge slab, pink tinged at the center, who attempted at the stake joint near the mall to assuage a deep, persistent hunger. Dear uncle, who considered a new wool hat on a day almost Thanksgiving, strolling the mall's main boulevard among Christmas shoppers, thinking better of stopping for an orange Julius and the carcings you tried on cardigans. And the yellow one with a white shirt, navy pants, red and blue tie, flucked with sparkling gold pinstripes. You looked every bit the school teacher, the real estate agent you once were. On your way out, you quipped with a saleswoman about turkeys and eating too much, but refused her your porky pig imitation. The next fall, a mushroom hunter found the body and a driver's license, a walk's distance from the mall. And these, a checkbook register with its scribbled withdrawals and a photograph of you and Terry, your only child, about seven at grandma and grandpa's 50th, both modeled with decay. No sign of the splintered marriages, the lost job as bank examiner. A good job, the one you said showed you'd made it after everything else had gone bad. No sign of chronic depression or the unreliable thyroid. They use these scraps, the currency of the living and your clothes, your teeth to be sure. Dear, dear uncle, I shopped for a birthday card and a pair of jeans before dropping in at the Six Flux while a cold rain took over and composed a lullaby for you on the brittle leaves. Dog boom, this is my second dog, Maura. She was an Irish setter like my first dog. She's kind of a brat. How many to grace? Has no one told them you've gone? Has no one said, dear crows, your searching is fruitless? Have I ever told you how much I love the crows? It wasn't always this way. They used to taunt you so. All your weight straining at the leash or loose, you would chase like my first setter trailed thunder, red blur, frenzy, a red fever. What else could I do in your absence but love the crows? In my longing for you, I am empty. I wait to their question hanging in the air. They are your legacy. They are, to me, an example of anger turned to love. A fall down on your knees, love, the sort of adoration born out of respect. Here they are again outside my window crying in the early morning, searching for you. I think they are lost, lost souls without you. I think they loved you too. For now, their circling cry is no taunt. Now, their call is gratitude. I'm sorry, my mouth gets dry. So for many years, I taught for a really long time, almost 20 years as an adjunct, and then I got divorced. And I calculated that, and I had a young son. So I calculated that the money I earned as an adjunct, I could have another job and have more access to my son and not be grading papers constantly like I always was. And in some ways it was a really good decision and in some ways it wasn't because I would just die to be teaching again and I can't get back in because of the way things are with the colleges. There's been a lot of change. So I became a professional caregiver with home health and hospice. And this is a poem that came out of that experience. Clue, tonight, after a full day of earning $2 more than the minimum wage, I'm not going to think about old Mrs. White who shaws me at her weekly home visit as I'm getting her grocery lists together. Oh, I don't really need anything, do I, she says, bearing down on anything like the 36 cans of sliced cat food and more, which soon I'll be hauling in her door. You just need to check that off your list, don't you? That you did something. I listen while inwardly rolling my eyes and slipping through the passage to Mrs. Peacock, 90-something artist popping out into her kitchen where neither of us can answer why or how she lives on but she's up dressed, strutting it. Soon I'll trace my home, my way home to the elegance of tomato soup and toasted cheese sandwiches to play clue with my son. Not the piles of laundry, the sinks full of dishes, the floors, the money I've been in too many homes, too many other people's homes, too many other people's rooms today, parlor, bath, kitchen, laundry, all that's left to discover is who did it, in what room, with what weapon and to choose a new identity. So my son turned 25 yesterday and since I was doing the reading today, he's in New York City now. And I couldn't, so I couldn't be with him this weekend. So I went down last weekend and he's got this little studio and it was a real mom visit because I had a lot of sort of anxiety, mom anxiety, because I didn't really know where he was. I mean, I saw his space because, you know, with technology now, you can take pictures and you can video the whole place and everything, but it was so nice to be there. It was really settling. And I think that that poem just took me back to that place, which was really hard for me, but fun, it was the best fun. So it surprised me. And here's another poem that comes out of that experience. Fine. I will keep you in my thoughts, I said, looking softly into her eyes. All those Mondays I'd girded my spirit against your willfulness just to show up to do laundry, dust. Wipe out the bathroom sink and scrub the toilet if you'd let me. You were the crabby woman on the third floor. None of us could stand. Who'd call, yoo-hoo, not my name when you wanted to tell me something. I arrived to find you in bed that last Monday on your way out of your prison of physical pain, refusing food and drink. Still you had instructions for me. Do the laundry, press the linen vowses. A woman so intentional, she focuses her attention on the mundane details of laundry as a task reserved toward dying. Then come back up here and sit after you put the laundry in. And I did, silently praying the new prayer I'd learned from Pema Children. May Annie know true happiness. May Annie know the root of true happiness. Practicing burrful gratitude, embracing each person who came to mind, always spiraling back to you. Later the laundry, the ironing complete, you hand motioned, bring them here. I brought the pressed vowses smelling of steam heat for your inspection. And you gently fingered each saying, yes, this is fine. And then standing aside your bed, I enclosed your hand in mine and held it. And it was, it was fine. So a little bit of a tone change. The man with an ear in his thigh has been working on the channel all day. An otherwise ordinary guy with his nose to the grindstone. Imagine as he puts his ear to the ground, the acrobatics he must do, a freak at the county fair, the barker calling, come one, come all. As he overcomes odds to dress in layers on the coldest winter's day, sliding his leg into long johns and jeans, pushing back against the muffled sound of the tunnel's, tunnel borers grind and whirr, which seems to call from underwater. But the advantages, when hungry, does he sooner hear his stomach rumble? Is he better attuned to know where he is going and sprint when called? Here things the rest of us can't. The outbreath of a whispers sliding in one ear and out the other landing in his lap. So when making love, being better positioned, perhaps his come cry comes more tenderly. Or perhaps he is more willing to lay with her in the afterglow, being closer to hearing a woman's pain and the sound of the memory of his birth. Love bones. Garam Masala is a spice you may be familiar with. It's really popular in Asian cooking. Garam Masala, one day I wake and I know I want you. I was empty except for the certainty. I searched you out. When I removed the cap of the bottle, your spore curls to me, the earthy sweetness stroking my olfactory neurons. But there's no easy translation for so many conversations happening at once. Your lemon, your sweet heat, your cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, coriander, cumin, aromas, melding, bending to one another. An ancient dance this. Your color is dirt, but you golden my life. Your citrusy veil wraps around me and I'm beside it, falling into the fur forest. I let you lead me through the piney woods. Where a woman is grating tangerine. And then under the trees there, the ghost of that boy. The one I lusted after at 18. I wore a black camisole under the sheer teal blouse, floral skirt, and walked the block to his house. I knew his mother wouldn't be home. Crater, when I was a girl, I'd rise at night and gaze, sleep drunk at the man in the moon, standing at the bathroom window, waiting for him to blink first. What's he absorbed with me too, the way I, a proximal body, like to study you when I wake first, your jaws slackened as though you're trying to remember something. Your shadow beard come back overnight, your peppered hair, which mesmerize. Vigilant night watch, a search for an opening, a crater that might rise between us, one lip bending back from the other, with names like try again pit, river of receptivity, valley of resting in each other's arms. On the lip, I want to look a little longer before drawing closer and letting myself fall in. This has a word that you might not know. Hypantheum, it describes like a cup-like receptacle that surrounds the part of the flower that is the female part of the flower. Apple blossoms. Walking towards them, like moving toward you husband, is a series of cutaways in which coming closer means sometimes a slipping backward. I fix my vision on the petals, which up close are not the white perfection distance promises. Instead, they're like a self driven to honesty, modeled into a deep completion. In my hands, they smell light and thick at once. I become Hypantheum cup, drink, if you will. So in my autobiography, this is a love poem of a sort about, maybe what causes difficulty sometimes for some of us in relationships. It can't rain forever. Think of it this way. Right now we are flying below the clouds. The next clear day, I'll take my watercolors and go off somewhere to paint 50 minutes from home to here, 50 minutes from here to the vets. Where my dear dead dog was cremated six years ago, closer and more certain I want and earn for his ashes. April was the wettest month on record here, ever so far. It can't rain forever, bet me. The sound of steady rain on a tin roof all afternoon and summer. The women here are all hungry for sex, but each once, even the celibate, is to lift the dull ache of loneliness. On a tin roof, pebbles wrapped in cotton. What does it matter if you have a man? Have a man do you if you can't talk to one another? If you listen, Ava will tell you the various ways he hurts her, his hand, his sex, his words. Wave one against the other and strike her again. The insistence of a steady rain on a tin roof all afternoon. The smell of the deep pink of crab apple blossoms fills me after the rain stops. After the rain, the smell of the deep pink of the crab apple blossoms filling me again. I have to retrieve one of the ancient poems. This is, some of these are really ancient poems, but so it's been a long time since I've been to the Tundra Fair, but it was probably the last time I went, and there was this act, and they were called Fool's Proof, and that's the name of the poem. So that's where this took place. Fool's Proof, partners in a troop, these two juggling balls at the town fair suddenly crossing their arms, one over one another's, sharing the juggling. Now spray from a fountain, so pleasing to watch the spitting that at first you might miss what comes next. She slipping into his vest, floating and circumnavigating until he's wearing the vest. No, she is. The balls rising and falling as though not several, but one, so unpracticed it all seems. That's my definition for a good marriage. Okay, divorce cup. Language is a tool to build something out of the pain. Quote from Roca. And two words in here that you might not know. Houser is a kind of rope and it's particular to like see-going things. And manubrium is this little space right here where you can put your thumb. That afternoon my hands salvaged from clay. The fraught rope of language which choked us both, braiding it into a wide arch, a handle, houser. A mooring line to set me to rights through which my hand might slip, hold the mug securely. Halfway around there at the cup's manubrium, pressed a hold for my left thumb. They use the blunt end of a pottery tool to brand it with moons of every phase, the full and half and quarter, pounded into clay flesh to remind me. But who but these hands could fathom I was now able to live uncoiled. And so they didn't bother much with the slip, leaving the seam visible, curled the lip back as though crimping a pie crust, then spiking it a bit. No smooth rim to meet my lips tenderness because after all, this wasn't a cup I wanted to drink from. Finally they dressed the artifact in whitish gray glaze as though someone kicked up dirty sand to meet the tiny bubbles of air dancing on deep sea green waves. Calla Lily, it's your beauty that calls me. Pulls me down your depth past spatex, sliding down the shaft of space into the shadows where I may be illuminated. You live in the light and are of the darkness. And so caressing myself toward the woman I want to be, what else can I do but feel my way through darkness? Each passageway is a tunnel that both holds and channels me, throaty mystery, tunnel of monacious strength, male and twined in female that resolved to which softness bends by which I will myself to find my way back up from the depths, from this dark place that is like a rainbow turned inside out. With every wrong turn I unearthed my way from this black place and quiet, too quiet. Finally a light but not glory, not saved but changed on my way to that inner communion where even as I triumph my return, faithful to myself and with tender mercies for grief, I turn and embrace what brings me to these depths. For these walls are both vessel and bridge. I have two more. And this is for my dog Hudson who died two months ago yesterday. Harvesting, we used to go down to the river and which we didn't do this past year much because the weather was so awful and it flooded and everything. And so I've been here five years and sometime in those five years he was quite a bit younger than he was before he died. And he used to be able to take these stones and put them in his mouth which he couldn't do really at all the last couple of years. But I just loved watching him do this because he was so intense. Harvesting stones, the dog lifts the stones from the shallows, fiercely faithful, fervid in his attentiveness to the task, removing them one by one, brain, nerves, muscles, clamping the boulder in his mouth. The river responds by quickening the flow of its current. The heart learns removing each nugget one at a time in its own time, bolsters its rivers, surrendering to and carving out channels in the dark unknown. And this is my last poem. Like a lotus, we open ourselves to ourselves slowly as the world closes each day. Each blade of grass begins bending toward the diamond ship of dawn light. The birds quavering their opening song, awake, awake. Sun punctuates the rising sound of day. A kind black shadow careens across the field. You are tilting into a new day, neither hurried toward destination nor wait for the journey to begin. Throaty richness of dung fragrances the air. Pick a leaf of mint, crush it in your palm and place the rough green on your tongue. Thank you. Brief pause if anybody has any comments or questions. Before I end. Thank you so much. Thank you. What's said to not just your way with words, how do you read what you've written? Oh, I love your delivery is that fun. I take issue a lot with my parents for raising me Roman Catholic, but I appreciate their devotion, which I have in my own way. And, but they were both left doors at church. And I was also brought into reading at a really young age. And so I think that all kind of like comes together. Plus when I was a little girl, I wanted to be an actress. Now we say actor, but, and then I remember we had this time where we went around the table and everybody was supposed to say what they wanted to be when they grew up. And I said an actress. And then I kind of got, the equivalent of booze and hisses. And so then I said, I want to be a lady lawyer, just like daddy. But I'd really rather be an actor. Anything else? Yeah. You described my mother at her singer sewing machine. It was perfect. And I'm like, oh, I haven't thought about that in such a long, long time. She made all my clothes. Yeah. But we only had my brother and myself, not nine children. Oh my goodness. She made a lot of, she made a quilt for each one of us. I have a wedding quilt from her. And I had another quilt that we made together in when I was in college, but it fell apart. So I don't have that one anymore. But actually one of the things that I really felt in Sam's book was the fact that she made, we moved from Gary to a town called Valparaiso about 40 minutes to the East when I was going into the seventh grade. And so in seventh, I went seventh and eighth grade there. And we had the money. I don't know really why she did this, except we wore uniforms when we were at St. Mark's and Gary. She made a jumper for each of the girls. There were six girls and three boys. And so the girls had jumpers and every day we would wear a different blouse. And it was, I'm in seventh grade. That's the bullying age. And the kids were horrible. And this is like, there's a place in Sam's poems where I completely identified with what she's talking about. But I got rescued by someone who is still a really good friend of mine because she was a popular girl. So the sewing had good and bad to it, but she was really good at it. Yeah, for a long time. And that poem actually, it sounds like I'm really praising her but I'm really fighting back against a lot of things that make me really angry about who she is. So, okay. I have to break this out of your poems. That's such a wonderful play of smell, more than I've seen used. And I wrote, I just appreciate that you, the way you write kind of helps the body relate to the world. I think a lot of these images really came through. And especially your poem about your uncle had such a surprising change of tone. I didn't see it coming up. It's more in the middle of the poem. A lot of that is imagined. I didn't really even know that he had like disappeared until one day I got a call from my oldest sister. And she said, they found Andy. And I said, this is like first thing in the morning, say like on a Saturday. And I was still married at the time. And I'm like, you know, a real phone. And which yesterday I was at, I volunteer at the food shelf. And yesterday the phone was ringing. And Sarah, the director says, could you answer the phone? And I couldn't because I hadn't answered a landline in like five years. I couldn't figure out where the button was. But anyway, so I get this call. They found Andy. And I was like, I didn't even know Andy was missing. Cause my dad, he was, there were three boys in my dad's family. There were seven kids and he was the youngest boy. And my dad, I think was just, he just kept it quiet. And just, you know, my dad was a lawyer. So he probably had connections with the police in certain ways. And so they found him. And so I didn't really know. But I just, I imagine, there's a lot of, there are details in there that are true and real. But the part about going to the Six Plex and all that is somewhat imagined. Cause I didn't know at the time, I think I did go to that mall and visit, but I didn't know at the time that he was going to be a little while away. So I, it came in later. Anyway, thank you. And there's a really good book out there by Liz Powell. It's called Atomizer. If you're really interested in what people do with scent, it's her new book. And she just does all of these wonderful things with smell. It's an amazing book. Okay. Now to the main course. I need my book. I'm gonna, I'm gonna read a couple of this. This again is the troubadour and there's a couple of Sam's poems in here. So I'm going to read a couple from there. Sam Stockwell earned her MFA from Warren Wilson Program for Riders, which is the sister program of the program that I graduated from. And interestingly, I went on to their website last night and it says they have their oldest, oldest writing program in the country. And I don't think that's exactly true because from Hunt College and Warren Wilson came about at the same time. But anyway, one of those sibling fights. Musical figures is their third book of poems. Louise Glick chose Sam's book, Theater of Animals for the National Poetry Series, which has also been awarded to many poets whose names you may recognize as did I. Stephen Dobbins, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Stephen Dunn, Lynn Emanuel, Marilyn Hacker, Marie Howe, Dennis Johnson, Jane Miller, Jack Meyers, who I worked with, Naomi Shehab Nye, Donald Ravel, who I also worked with, Patricia Smith, Lee Upton, and many more. This is like constellations in the sky of poetry. Her second book, Recital, won the Editors Award from Elixir. Sam's work has been published in The New Yorker, Agni, The Mountain Troubadour, Powshares, Salamander, Three Penny Review, and others. More close to home, Sam has served on the Troubadour editorial board, which reads and helps select poems for the forthcoming issue. She teaches at CCV and serves on the Berry City Council, and she was Children's Integrated Services Coordinator at Family Center of Washington County, which I think is marvelous way of addressing life after going through and surviving things that you survive as a kid. Her new book, I have a couple of poems I wanna read. Her new book, Musical Figures, relates a family history of relative poverty, alcoholism, sexual trauma, physical abuse, and mental illnesses, and the chaos, shame, and emotional and physical scars that grow from and survive such experience. They document the sad but real humanness of people who are supposed to love and support us, parents and teachers. Sam draws on her upbringing among small farmers, auto mechanics, and factory workers, a family, and I'm quoting from your essay, hungry at the edges to tell her story, one in which she was tormented by other children and tried to torment back wearing their hand-me-downs. It is essential that she has documented her history. In doing so, she brings reader in so they may recognize stories not far from their own. I know I did. Beyond content, the poems in this collection are brilliantly crafted. If a musical figure is the shortest idea in music or a short succession of notes, often recurring, then Sam has honed these poems well, honoring the craft by turning out poems that reflect the best the art has to offer in high coup-like phrases employing the volta of a sonnet. These are sparse, clean, and powerful poems, and I wish I could write like her, but I don't. So here's a couple that I wanted to share that this one is called Given the Inherent Desire, but you cannot ginger every hurt as though preserving plums. The tide rocks the sea buttons, rattling the coastline, singing in its ablutions of turquoise backwash, rocking until matter defaults. Sea glass, a sculpture of softening brick, a half-burnt timber soaking on this beach, an assertitude of snails quashed by mussel shells, the blue black, the sea beards trimming in a thinning stream, that's all I'm saying. And I just, I appreciated this poem so much after reading musical figures, much better. And this one, which also I just really loved, and I rallied for it so it would get in the journal, The Standards. June, have you ever been to the Whammy Bar in Calis? Well, this is it, so now you're gonna be there. And more, The Standards. June plays piano at the Whammy Bar as the audience is threaded into brook and flowering crab tree and rippled sidewalk, teetered under an aging dog as zeff music disrobes space until we lie against each other, bone and cavity inebriates. Sam Stockwell, welcome. Thank you for that generous introduction and thanks for doing this. May we stand up? May we stand up? Stand up? May we stand up? Oh, yes, I was gonna say, this is me standing up. This is as high as a ghost. Yeah, I was gonna say, this is a little funny. That's true. Just have a little break. Sure. Thank you. Yes, there are some unhappy poems in here, but there are also some very funny poems in here. Granite Sill, fourth floor. So I had a number of terrible jobs as I got out of my teens and this is one of many horrible jobs. In an attic workshop, I assembled Tiffany lamps badly, holding my uneven seams up to the window, then staring at the street below, a man spilling mustard on his dress pants, a bus wheezing in front of Caldor's and pigeons carted by air. Lead trickled over my knuckles as I soldered plaques of colored glass. I thought I would never be alive. The most I could hope for would be the walk into the morning glaze building, following the trail of someone's perfume in the stairwell. Sunday, Devon. As my family walked to church, my younger sister jumped into the road and a ford leapt into her side. When the driver emerged, my father unfurled his arms, leaping to the man's lapels and toss him to the ground. My father was softly pinched into a police car as my sister waved from the ambulance. The sale. My father bought a hearse for the family car and severed his tendons putting in windows, blood flooding the towel on the drive to the hospital. When he sold it, he patched the gas tank to get the new owner home. My father laughed folding the check in his wallet. My mother objected and they divorced between children, a semi-colon between clauses. Out on the playground, we milled in the cold, currents of girls and a classmate said, we couldn't be your, we couldn't be friends, your parents, and she grimaced. 43 Howlin Street. When my father waved goodbye, Sobs bent him bowed over his cane while the car of his children disappeared. Terrible fear is love with its constant emptying of assurances. Long ago, walking in the early morning in Belgium, his pack chafing his shoulders, his rifle jostling, he couldn't see the neck stretched, neck stretch, quiet except for the feet of his platoon, pattering and the sleepiest river gliding over its worn, worn bed. He thought he had lost the weight of himself. Tick, my mother shuttered a two-step in a shimmy, a bug's crawling down my back. Before I was born, my mother was wrapped in a covered tub in an asylum. The women on the ward steamed and rose my aunt among them. I imagined my brother and sister hauling my mother from the housing project in their toy wagon, palm sweaty with the smell of the metal handle, dragging the cart to the steep steps. Four lost ticket. I watched the moon flick over orchard and fields as I sifted myself to sleep, landing in a doorway of snow, the sharp breath of another century. My parents are playing cards there, homeless in the suburbs, waiting for the conductor to tell them to begin their lives. And I chased them from station to station, shaking their past before them. My mother lived in a nursing home for about 15 years. It was a long result of a very severe stroke. And my parents were difficult but extremely durable. So what would have killed normal people was just like, okay, still going on. So they said that she would die after this stroke and that didn't happen. Eulogy, I take the corpse of my mother out. The ground is dry enough for her to shuffle safely across the parking lot. She squints and admires the gulls if they are gulls. I'll cry when she finishes slurping out her rare words. And some other her can be summoned. As partial, as extinguished, my mother lived so long McDonald's died. The five and dime migrated to the dollar store and the drugstore lunch counter forever closed. It's great for Micah's stall. Laces, my teacher said I'd better shape up or I'd be left behind. But it was not until second grade I was told to gather my pencil box and move back. As the teacher pointed out, only one child couldn't tie her shoes. It was years before my teachers wrote, she could do better. First confession, Stephen ground my face in the snowbank and ran to his mother's house. Martin smelled like cow shit and held my hand in third grade. My best friend held a velvet postcard of the Virgin Mary glowing in the dark. I loved her and wanted to marry her, though she committed mortal sins. We wanted God to keep us forever, riding our bikes over the iron bridge, waving to our distant parents. My mother made me take a pill before they carried me to the dentist. It's to calm you, she said, and I ran. His hand on the tree trunk, I could see my father through the leaves as I swung up another level. I was shamefully old, 11, crouching in the branches, each foot besieged. First period, this is a bit of a shift and it's really about my observations of teaching and being in schools rather than the torment children experience of being in schools. First period, brave Mrs. Kenley turns her back on the first grade and like a grass fire from raw blade to raw blade, enmity spreads. Mr. Hawkins twists paperclips around his knuckles. Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Hall sit at their stern desks, squinting at long absent children, shuddering at the mirage of Theodore, his head clean and empty as a silver pond. No cultivated seed grew in his acre, no stray fact lodged between his teeth. The void must be extracted, that was the clock for Theodore. Mrs. Thompson remembers him without even the fondness one feels for a good meal. Dream. We wandered through my grandfather's house, sorting plates and twigs and throwing pebbles out the window. In the yard, swifts tangled in our hair and we couldn't find our way back. We met two women coming back from a wedding, one in a beaded vest. They gave us a glass of wine and for years we quarreled about recipes. We followed the wide path out of town and found our own house blackened. In the clearing between two birches were our broken pots and mildewed clothes and I wept for the things grown old without me. Road trip. We slept by the highway in West Virginia. I don't remember how we made it that far. By morning, the gullies of the sleeping bag were filled with snow and the few houses strewn beneath the overpass, we could smell cornbread frying and hear dogs. Because his parents were wealthy, he was supposed to bring money. He unrolled a candy bar and a quarter. His broad shoulders shaking as he wept. We turned back a long way from New Jersey. I knew someone in the splatter of houses would take us in and I would have my hand on him to show he was meek and slowly nod to show I was wise. The fifth winter of my grandmother, sometimes when you're a kid, you're like listening to these people tell the stories about their youth and you're just sitting there under the table being quiet and you just think, wow, what a lot of suffering. The fifth winter of my grandmother, her father drunk tied her to a sled and walked quietly through the snow to leave her with a distant relative. The sawing of the runners, the creak of the crossbar as he pulled, an owl above the now clear, now distant figure of her father as snow shifted around them. Her father didn't die, not then, but disappeared in the same woods. It was her mother she searched for, her mother who had plucked the oldest and the youngest to leave and reset the table for four, a blue water pitcher, roast potatoes, salt pork. No matter how many times my grandmother cooks the same meal, they never take her back. Thank you for your patience. Preciant, my mother murmured into the phone. She knew everything, but couldn't go to the pharmacy because the pharmacist could read her mind. Her doctor sent her to the hospital. We visited her in the atrium and ate on linen tablecloths. Reason took center stage for a moment. She saw us as though standing on us, eyes stuffed with glass. Space program. Marilyn Monroe dies the year we shuffle into the gym to watch John Glenn in his slow orbit across the monumental sky. Mrs. Tufani, the fourth grade teacher, exhorts us to remember this day and I remember Martin threw a rock ushering a geyser of blood from Danny's head and Mrs. Tufani pressing paper towels on him as though she was forcing him into the ground. At night I thought of Mrs. Tufani helping me into my spaceship or suit as I lie sweating in my bed. A couple poems from my first book, which I now look at as the book of my childhood. I think this was one of the first poems I completed when I was about 19. Harvest. The cat sings by the cornice, the puddles fuse, grass leans into cowlicks and feels spotted with children. Their mothers wait like obelisks above the hill, the long years waiting them. The wind rushes in the gables to cover the tenant's sigh. The postman grates his hand against his beard. Field empty, their eyes squeezed tight against sunlight. The women turn, they dream of the moon lifting them out of their bedrooms, leaving them thin as ribbons. North Avenue. I hear the door of the oven creaking and a pan shifting. And imagine the window broken as though to let someone lean into the street for repair from the taunts of domesticity. The rustle between summer dress and satin shirt rises through the deserted hall. The sound that lifts above the larval tenement and laboratory after laboratory of its inhabitants. And here's my middle book. By the time I was putting this book together I was spending a lot of time teaching. And dragging people through English composition is probably one of the most painful things you can be paid to do. Sermon on composition. A sentence, Michelle, is an equation. It needs two balanced parts. Tired sentences and fresh sentences both. It won't make you old to know this. You've learned harder things. If it is Emerson you have to blame for the state of modern poetry then surely it is Thomas Aquinas you must blame for your essays. All human passion undulates in a form like geese tethered in an arrow. You keep your eye on the horizon whatever has fallen will rise up. Whatever has risen will have its low moment. Fame and grief follow the same path even in the complex fortunes of a young woman. A lot of my work is really not linear at all which I don't read as often in public because I think it's easier to read on the page. I guess that's a pretty good reason. I'm having an indecisive moment, I'm sorry. Read a book. Traveling salesman. Coins are wearing through my pockets as I walk around collecting from the encased merchants. A docile clerk bends and hisses gently over the counter at the woman doved with makeup. The band on the gazebo starts a march. The audience on the lawn taps its feet arrhythmically. Each town has a booming clock counting my years of sleep under quilts of amputated roses. All professions track their labors. Scientists mediate time through sound filling out their diaries with measured echoes. The tests of men are not men in substance nor their forms laid out to step into. Life inhabits its specificity. The coins are worth very little. Snails, snails, we can't shrug them off. And to end, I'll read a funny poem from musical figures. I will find the funny poem in musical figures. Well, a tragedy in three acts. Okay, a tragedy in three acts. And it actually does have three parts. I was driving past Walmart when the transmission fell out of my car, too. It reminded me of bumping my suitcase up the steps of the greyhound when the cover sprang open festooning the passengers with my underwear. Three, at school, we played polio victim. The smallest, I was daily lugged by grieving classmates from tarmac to apple tree where a miracle occurred because I didn't want to be the main corpse. Thank you.