- We're grateful to the library for the use of this lovely auditorium and to CATS for videoing our show.
- Thank you Jim Mannion and all the rest of the staff of CATS that have been here since one o'clock. The
- Free Verse Poets are delighted recipients of a BCAC grant and we also want to thank our generous sponsors,
- Blooming Foods, Body Poetry Soaps, Caviar Emptor, Grant Street, and Tesoro Mio.
- I want to acknowledge the help all my fellow poets have given me in putting this performance together,
- and in particular, Charles, John, Roger, Antonia, and of course, Carol Hovis, who has again designed
- our posters and invitations. In addition, I thank each of our entire cast for being so willing to put
- up posters and distribute flyers.
- We poets are also indebted to these musicians and windfall dancers who've so willingly offered us their
- creativity, special talents, and been so generous with their time. I'd like to mention that an arts
- community spotlight is on the Bloomington Free Verse Poets in the most recent edition of Wind Magazine,
- number 86, which features a number of poems by each of our members.
- And we're delighted that the editor of Wind, Chris Green, is up here from Lexington, Kentucky to see
- our show, Welcome, Chris. The magazine will be available at some of the local bookstores for anyone
- interested in reading more of our work. We'll have an intermission of 10 minutes and I ask you please
- to contain your delight and only applaud then and at the end.
- Origins. I am who I am, a coincidence no less unthinkable than any other. I didn't get a choice either,
- but I can't complain. Wislawa Jamborska.
- Our days are numbered. Imagine taking something so completely dark into dawn and then morning and long
- afternoon blended evening to midnight and dawn to sunrise and calling it the ninth or the 23rd.
- Imagine that. And how about taking minds away from sleep, stars, sleep, dream and awaken as birds sing
- in dear mood.
- Trees sway so worms crawl and deer move again with the whippoorwills crawling in sleep, stars, dream.
- Taking this away by making up little earth spin sections to call hours and designate six o'clock or
- 1159. Not mentioning the so many years we've invented and monikered things like 108 BC or 1984. Who
- could imagine this first?
- And after they did, what options did H. sapiens really have? Crowding into every decent cow pasture,
- swarming the river basins, thronging all the poor old globe, having to make things up like math itself,
- and like religion's a useful filament of our collective imagination. Since if most people were to think
- more about, or especially to feel more for themselves of what's going on,
- outside calendar and clock, we might not so blithely watch it be numbered away. Waiting and waiting
- for amen. I am not from a house. Where I am from there is not a house. Can't prove there's a house.
- If I blew peanut skins from roasting pans on the front porch or rested in the cool marble shade where
- the outdoor staircase turned, if I stared out the fly screens in diamond-shaped bars, does that make
- a house? I am from the names of places. I am from the words in translation. I am from the airplane and
- the U-Haul.
- I run up mountains and no one bars my way. I am out from my own smallness, out of my mother's eyes,
- never mine. I am from laundry and unopened mail, and I marry whomever I like. I am doomed to a world
- of women, one wife,
- one daughter, three sisters, and a mother. No brother shared the womb, and no son shared the seed. I
- was the last of us four, and my father said he did not look at my face for a week, to which my mother
- always replied with her, oh, John. Her hand brought up to catch a laugh. But her hand there, nevertheless,
- necessary to show that while her God permits a little fun, he prefers it doesn't run amok.
- I was the last of us four and did not suffer hand-me-downs or share boyfriends or giggly gossip in the
- North Room upstairs. I ran the creek with my dog, glad I wasn't a girl to sit in the North Room, though
- I did wish dogs could talk back with something other than their ears and tails and eternal sardonic
- smiles. Right now, it's just me, my wife and daughter, and the latter is the boss of the ranch, telling
- us when to get up, when to sleep, when to go to the kitchen,
- not that his son would be any different. I used to run our house, I'm sure, crowing in Hoosier what
- I wanted from my iron daybed off the kitchen, where we pumped water, made soap, canned the South 40
- or so it seemed, and baked enough bread so no miracles would be necessary if Jesus came to call, so
- long as he brought his own fish. Where we acted out our self-sufficient lives a generation later than
- the rest of the country,
- and did not know we had been passed by until we at last turned to plastic and found the others returning
- to wood. I am doomed to a world of women not complaining mind you, just relating that part of my history
- so that when you see the agency deliver a boy and see my mighty grin, you'll understand that my son
- will be my brother in a manner of being a companion against hair curlers and gossip.
- and all those north rooms up all those stairs, past and present. And if you want us, you'll do well
- to go downstairs and outside on the front, where we'll be sitting talking mint talk about such things
- as poetry and sunsets and running collies to the creek.
- Granny Leah's house, the upper edge of the cupboard door, slanted to match the camber of the stairs.
- A small closing, and behind it, from Russian days, some toys I carried into the garden while the grown-ups,
- voices rising at times, talked on the brick stoop, and Lizzie brought the tea.
- I liked the tin cups and plates for sips of pretend juice and double crumbs I fed an austere doll, her
- painted hair shiny above staring eyes, her limp dress frayed. One bodice button lost, but my favorite
- plaything was the set of six hollow lacquer dolls, one within the other, each with floral headscarf
- and folded hands.
- but my favorite thing. The largest's upper half, twisted from its lower, revealed a smaller doll, pregnant
- with her own smaller sister. Again, again, and again, the glassy toys squeaked open at the waist, littler
- and littler, until the tiniest, a solid thumb of a doll, stood mute. Careful to close each one when
- I'd freed the next. I always lined the siblings up,
- as if it were possible to have everyone together and in accord. This poem is set in England. Revisiting
- an old love. When we arrived, the sea was flatish, brown, but smelled right.
- and the bladder-racked seaweed still popped underfoot. The donkeys trotted along the sand. The pier
- still stretched on stilts into the tide. And the promenade wall where I had sat upright, smiling in
- my beret for a picture. Here, because I was a poorly child, needing sea air, still kept its curve around
- the bay. Later, on Breen Down,
- We walked through the ghosts of a Roman temple and ancient British forts to the point. I watched the
- opposing tides rush together and the small boats navigate the channel. Fingering the wild thyme, I sat
- by the cliff's edge and my heart floated, gull-like, over the waves, tasting the spray.
- Unpack. Don't you know I can stand in an empty refrigerator box in any secular city and be home? Constant
- five-note melody of fruit bat, low-grown twisted frangipangy, white sap washed off fingers, and fruit
- bats bing-bong, dee-dee-dee, out the supper window. Everybody 12 years old and twisting,
- everybody's fingers in my hair, night hot, day hot, everybody poor but us, everybody else rich but us,
- everybody in church cool, everybody in the sand stuck, broken bottle triangles on every compound wall,
- us in church, us always in church, us always swaying, giving, counting,
- us always missionaries, always upfront, always hot and cold in church. For my poem on origins, I'm going
- to go very far back and a long way out and try to fit my brief, short, and tiny life into what I call
- the wilderness of time.
- As a child, I wrapped myself in blankets on snowy nights, pushed aside the curtain and peered out at
- the delicate swirling flakes creating my personal playground. I asked for nothing more of snow. I did
- not have the patience to sit one winter's night by the edge of a pond to see the ice form. Now I see
- the graffiti of gods.
- Miles of lines and bedrock scrawled by boulders gripped in the arms of ice inscribing time across entire
- continents, the press of the hand unperceivable by the narrow senses of a life. I have read that there
- are more galaxies than grains of sand on the entire earth. I do not know if this is true. I know that
- stars and insects, ideas and fears
- are comprehended in numbers of wonder, for I have the mind and senses of a man adrift in a universe
- of dreams and illusions. The age of the sun exceeds four billion years, and I am as thankful for its
- warmth and light as if it were my private miracle. I cannot know the eons that created dew-covered webs
- in summer fields where the sweet, sharp cheering of crickets
- rises in urgency. Some say in deep space the music of the spheres is silence. Some say a cosmic whisper.
- I wonder if it is only the fluttering of our imagination. All civilizations fail and disappear. All
- mountains rot and decay with a slowness that mocks our histories. Spread by tangled rivers into oceans,
- the peaks settle into mud,
- and hardened to rock. The moving earth raises the depths into mountains again or drives them into the
- infernal undercontinents, splitting the earth, raising from fire new lands where the first unfolding
- flower is the genesis of all gods. In the wilderness of time, rocks are the only texts, the only prophets.
- An outcrop of weathered
- Rounded sandstone is an ancient altar where I sit to be calmed by their long endurance, the gathered
- days and nights of millions of years. Beyond that, I am lost. I live on the precipice of eternity moment
- by moment. The stars keep their own time, different from mine. I am not a mountain. I am not a river.
- I am the one who perceives their glory and stumbles mute as the stones into every morning. Sunday Drive.
- In the spring, when rivers rise, I return to where the river rose in southern Indiana as we drove the
- back roads after Sunday dinner.
- sightseeing in our blue Chevy. Among derelict houses, men and women sat in boats half sunk with the
- weight of their lives. Tables, chairs, machinery salvaged from barns and porches, quilts stacked or
- strewn, their frayed edges dragging in the muddy water, animals gathered oddly quiet. With trust, my
- father said,
- remembering the flood of 37. And when we stopped and pointed, awed by the power of rain become river,
- patiently lapping at the road's edge as I danced back, a child laughing, unable to imagine tractors
- plowing bottom land, dust rising sunshot with the planting of corn. At the end of the road, we found
- again the rundown filling station, only a hard rain from going under,
- where I drank my mother's promised treat, an orange crush, and nothing more, she said, recalling the
- shock of chocolate bars alive with worms the year before. And then, on higher ground, I slept the highway
- home. The second theme is hearth.
- And Mary Oliver has written, whatever a house is to the heart and body of man, refuge, comfort, luxury,
- surely it's as much or more to the spirit.
- Frost Warning. The weather report gives a frost warning, so I start my winter routine, squeezing into
- the coral space to seal the vents and turn off the outside water. In the utility room, I clean the furnace
- pilot light, re-tape the duct joints, then go from room to room, closing the storm windows. Finally,
- in the evening,
- I make myself go upstairs. The empty quiet, the clean paint shiny in the electric light, startle me.
- And the space below my ribs gives its familiar, unpredictable lurch. There are no radios tuned to different
- stations, no clatter along the hallway or feet loud on the stairs. I stand still for a moment, then
- open the whole closet.
- No babies swaddled like eisenglass eggs nap on the shelves. No toddlers scramble down, chortling like
- starlings. No adolescents blower like gargoyles from the corners. I see a jumble of stuffed toys, puzzles,
- old yearbooks. Behind the children's doors, there's more empty silence. I shut their bedroom vents.
- fasten the last storm window and ready myself to face this new winter. In the sleeping room, whales
- and storms rock the steam. Man and boys breathe tea kettles, car crashes, doorbells over the rough-layered
- in-out wheeze.
- hanging out the wash. High clouds to the west predict rain, but not soon. I lift the wet lumps from
- the basket, lay them across my arm, then toss each item along the line. Spread, pin, spread, pin. Piece
- to piece. Shorts, shirts, and socks. Billow and swing. Thoughts turn inward. My mind rests. The morning
- chorus of birds sings as it does every day of every spring.
- Blood circles endlessly, sown seed is harvested and sown again. Persistent prayer moves from mindless
- repetition to trance to healing. I wash the dishes, sweep the floor, weed the garden, satisfied with
- each small completion, beads along the ambiguous years. In the afternoon I loosen the pins, pile the
- dry sweetened clothes in baskets, fold,
- into drawers and return to writing this poem. February Promises. Each day now is an inkling longer.
- Each keeps the cold gray until one sudden full blue sky warms the air enough by noon that brushing shaggy
- horses lets float in the brightness of first flurry of hair.
- hint of the heavy shedding to come when more weeks of the harsh and drifting than of the sleeting days
- are done. And a flapping racket at the only liquid edge of the pond marks this first day of courtship
- for the geese, precursors their desperate social couplings before the weeks of privation, females starving
- and paling on nests, the belligerent gander's guard. With no promise that pert goslings will grow,
- voracious in a new green, to learn by mimicking the gaggle's choreography. No promise beyond this ending
- afternoon's quick drop back to sharp air, which holds the last sun as horses nose their hay and the
- flock settles into drab grass, clean eyes keeping each moment toward the night.
- Plus and minus. My father's rear was flat as pita bread, his imagination dull as beige. A domed brow
- encased such mathematical expertise that full-blown bewilderment with sums provoked impatience with
- his own daughter's ineptitude.
- I've no voluptuous hind curves, and true, I cannot add. But oh, come close. In summer's broil, I have
- pockets filled with snow. Haiti, Iraq, Bosnia.
- The backyard a church of sorts, maple leaves dying a brilliant death, sky the blue of my mother's Sunday
- dress. When she called last night, my wife and I had just sat down to watch the news after catching
- a tree frog crawling up the living room wall, no doubt from one of the plants brought in from the cold.
- My mother had news of her own about a deer that left the fence to eat pears.
- How raccoons raided the garden behind the garage and cleaned out the last of the corn. Just called to
- talk, she said, and we did until the news was over and rain began, pouring a lovely sound like a rush
- of wings or a timpani of brushed leaves.
- I am not from a house. Where I am from, there is not a house. Can't prove there's a house. If I blew
- peanut skins from roasting pans on the front porch or rested in the cool marble shade where the outdoor
- staircase turned, if I stared out the fly screens and diamond-shaped bars, does that make a house?
- I am from the names of places. I am from the words in translation. I am from the airplane and the U-Haul.
- I run up mountains and no one bars my way. I am out from my own smallness, out of my mother's eyes,
- never mind. I am from laundry and unopened mail, and I marry whomever I like.
- I have always been a little afraid of July. I suppose because of the electrical storms I endured as
- a child, sitting with siblings in the kitchen, puppy huddled around mother, shivering when the lightning
- flashed and cracked across the sky, counting the seconds between flashes and pops to determine how close
- they were, and finding ourselves out counted sometimes as the false daylight would hit our front porch
- and knock that electrical thing off the wall time and time again.
- When dad was there, we didn't huddle but only spoke more softly and carried lamps and flashlights around
- the farmhouse, giving Halloween scenery to non-October nights. But with him gone, it was necessary to
- group ourselves and shake, praying for the storm to go away and come again when we were not there. And
- it was not until I, as an adult, faced the storms that I realized that my mother was as frightened as
- we all were and must have drawn comfort from four warm bodies near her
- our need of her strength giving her hers. Heat lightning was bad enough. Flashing spastically in the
- western sky outlined against the trees on the hill, we could see through the small bathroom window with
- the real crackerjack electrical storms with the brilliant smashing light that let us see the barn in
- unreal detail. The loud horrible noise of the thunder coming at us again and again and again
- was something that still draws me away from windows and makes me sit in walled rooms, in the middle,
- on a dry wooden chair with rubber leg tips, as I count the seconds, knowing not how close it was, but
- only that once again I wasn't hit. I live in the tropics now. We have rain but a ton and other things
- to scare us. And thunder is a surprise said in sentences like,
- Was that thunder or an airplane? And it is with the greatest of relief that I face July, sitting proudly,
- defiantly, near windows with my feet wet, touching metal, my tongue aimed at the sky in a Bronx cheer,
- that I am not condemned to an Indiana farmhouse to wait out the month until sultry, languid August takes
- over, too lazy, I suppose, to conjure up the displays in the sky,
- that July had so rudely given us once again. In the living room after dinner. Sitting next to each other,
- my mother smiling and holding his hand. My dad tells about his four widow women in the neighborhood,
- their needs and worries, the funny sad stories they become.
- these women who call on him to fix things, replace a broken pane, mandatory screen, recalk the tub or
- sink. And even though a stroke has left him legally blind, my mother, his octogenarian chauffeur to
- his chagrin, he still can read up close and at a slant, see well enough to please these women in their
- widowhood.
- We are the anger family, looking for the last straw. I was taught and I'm teaching you fate. We are
- on the mad seesaw. We drop our things where we stand, let them fall, strike now, notice damage later.
- We are the anger family, here comes the last straw. Smart, so smart.
- Brilliant screaming raw. We understand all the wrong things. Who can wait? We are on the mad seesaw.
- With 20 minutes between now and your dark bed scared, you bait me. We shout in the anger family, choke
- on our last straw. I yank you to the anger playground. We claw and swarm the fury monkey bars.
- We are booby skaters on a collision course with the mad seesaw. Swift, we are kings of the castle indignant
- behind our safe draw. Who will depose us, hammer the alligators? We are the crowned anger family, ha,
- the final straw. We are the dynasty on the mad seesaw.
- How strange to awake in a city and hear grown men shouting in the night. Robert Bly.
- I'd really like to get a job so I can get out more and see people. You might like to pay me with one
- of those paychecks and I could come here into your office. I'd like a job very much. I will punch the
- clock hard. I will punch it flying and everyone will like me. I will put on clean clothes, throw away
- all my old smelly things and walk to work in the fresh air. Oh, I will be a civic leader.
- And with my crisp paycheck, I will build sidewalks and massage parlors. The people will throng to the
- gleaming M. Dear Plaza and shop and mingle, drink double lattes under Chairman Mao-sized portraits of
- me. They will clog the courtyard drains with cherry pits. I would so dearly like a job.
- This poem was inspired by a concert in Bryant Park, part of the Music in the Park series that occurs
- every summer in Bloomington. It's called Jazz in the Park. Syncopated people converge, sit down,
- tune up, lie flat, watching chimney swifts slide by, chattering to the bouncing beat of basketballs.
- People walk, people talk over the crescendo of cymbals and drums.
- Kids run, improvising, ignoring the runs on the keyboard. Unannounced, maroon shirt, long sleeved, over
- long arms, blue jeans woman. Black hair, pressed with a silver clip, falls to the hollow of her back.
- Graceful face, deep brown skin, resonating.
- A chin composed on thin arms resting on thin knees. She sits alone surrounded by dogs and dogs snarling
- and sniffing with no cats to vex. A little wine and cheese intervene. Tipsy glasses on uneven ground.
- Up on stage, strict interpretations of mutable sounds.
- She looks around, glances at her timing, rises, arranges the long strap of her purse over her narrow
- shoulder, walks emphatically to the playground swings.
- and swings and swings from the strings, long hair flying out, high and higher she swings, other swingers
- all around, a dizziness of ups and downs, accompanied by the tenor sax, threading the reds and greens
- and browns, white and black jam of people, old, young, older, young, in between the high and the low solos.
- I did not know her, probably never will. Her tall, long-legged stride as she glides from the park before
- it is all over. But the band plays on until, thanks for coming folks, the crowd thins and the beat slows
- to the last few people and their jazzed up lives, leaving me wondering if I understand jazz.
- a poem about Madrid before I ever went. Madrid, images of orange and brown and specks of black, dust
- over most things, old wood. Women standing in doorways one step up from the brick street, looking with
- wrinkles at you, the stranger. Greeting you with a frown more against the sun over your shoulder than
- against you. Then smiling as you smile. And saying you'll never before use tongue.
- Madrid, images of children kicking a small ball, hitting it with a stick, posters of Franco and the
- new king, churches and church music, widows praying with widows, young men in shirts and slacks too
- small, a bit brown, moorish blood, curly hair, teeth set off with a darker face, talking to women with
- long black hair, snappy eyes and white blouses,
- Sitting in the plaza as the sun makes everything about copy itself in long black duplicates across the
- square. Madrid, images of orange and brown and specks of black. I wonder when I get there if I shall
- have the same images for my return.
- Old, bold town square is the stone core of so many hard yards, straight streets, clerk's works, and
- now this chilly and overgrown with brown weeds vacant lot. Being rummaged by an offhand, don't push
- me now because it's winter, soft-eyed possum. My car is stuck deep in downtown snow.
- I borrow a shovel from a wrinkled woman with wig awry, selling guns. Amid all the rifles that could
- blast my life away, a shovel to dig myself out, not under. Elevators glide, all glass and shaftless,
- up a wide-walled atrium core of plush downtown hotel, where light cathedral-like begins a downward play
- to foliage, fountain, and humans thronged, jabbering, showing no alarm at such a lofty silence of no
- birds. Bradford Pears. Gloriously bridal, Bradford Pears are neatly queued along the streets,
- A hazard, I should think, for drivers and pedestrians alike, their eyes dangerously distracted. To make
- things delightfully worse, the wind, like a jealous sister come to town, is brewing trouble, as much
- as she can muster. Dresses whipping and rising like a kind of laughter, undoing hair and hats. In fact,
- forget the hats.
- They're often a hoot of their own, a few in the trees like, look at me, even though the brightest can't
- compete with Bradford pears in April bloom. Washington Square, San Francisco, 1995. Called here 30 years
- by a trout fishing in America book cover picture of this
- Stone Ben Franklin, and slim poplars towering south across Filbert from high pink church spires. Finally,
- I stand in the park, famous this morning with a loose phalanx of Chinese flowing with their live leaders
- slow motion boxing with eternity. While ponytail joggers and bright bandanaed moms strolling babies
- watch too.
- across the dewy and new green April sunrise. In feathered hats and goatskin lace nightgown, I plan to
- take an amble into town. I'll visit a store that's staffed by urban sheep whose job it is to count you
- off to sleep because they peddle a range of colored dreams they parcel and string
- in palest blues and creams. Our cafe, gaming snakes and ladders alone, with for dice a heart-shaped
- milk white stone. While I one by one some almonds, roasted light, and count the abacus hours left till
- night. Our granola old men hungry on a bench, then strut my stuff like any strumpet wench.
- The traffic will slow its onward-rhythmic stream in case I wish, although their light is green, to cross
- on my way home to where such blooms are sold for long-stemmed radiance and perfumes. Arms laden with
- stacked boxes on my head, the woodlands. And I'll mount the steps to bed, but first arrange the flowers
- in Lalique vase.
- And all my dreams I'll pour in antique jars at my bedside. So wide and full I'll breathe, floor to ceiling
- tapestries I'll weave, and one with metaphor, rhyme, and symbol leap among mythical beasts and sonnets
- in my sleep.
- We go beyond walls. A few lines from Adrian Rich. Nights like this. On the cold apple bough,
- a white star, then another, exploding out of the bark. On the ground, moonlight, picking at small stones.
- My son-in-law told me of this event from his school days. I knew there was a poem there. The Dauntless,
- Pennsylvania, 1960, for Jameis. It's been snowing steadily for days. Amid indistinct trees blurring
- the angles of classroom buildings, the severity of dormitories drifts back high as the second floor.
- When naked boys shift and shove at a window, faces bright with dares, dog dares, double and double dog
- dares. One flings the window wide. In quick succession, arms flailing, they leap, shrieking into the
- freezing white, sinking ice shafts the depth of body weight, then burrowing out, frantic, trembling.
- And there's the cellar door, and beyond it a wood stove,
- warmth. Circling. When I leave the trail and come through woods to the edge of a pond, a heron rises
- and flies away over the water on ancient wings.
- And when everything is still again, I look across the pond to the circling hills, tree covered and sloping
- to the water's edge. And although the leaves have fallen, there is still color. Narrow twigs make a
- net of gray. The bark on branches and trees is dappled with brown and orange. And leaves on the ground
- like ruffled water reflect the colors.
- Although I'm in southern Indiana, the grass at my feet still green, the pond high from last week's rain,
- ripples made as a fish jumps running down an otter's slide, keeping it slick and moist. I imagine those
- sleek creatures tumbling down into the small oxbow the nearby creek has abandoned. When I look at those
- trees and that color again,
- I am standing with you in desert country, mountains to the north and south, dry mesquite scattered land
- stretched around us, the hot wind in our ears, buzzards endlessly circling.
- Hands that pick cotton have held my body, touched it, made my soul tingle and my spirit rise. Brown
- hands surround me in patterns, reminding me of the familiarity of 20 years. She would lie down in fields
- when the smell of cotton in the heat of the sun overwhelmed, letting those hands rest, not knowing they
- would belong to me in a few short years. Soon, she would begin again to pluck the bulls in her practiced way,
- sweaters would start to live. She has not picked cotton since we met, nor have I handled plows, discs,
- or harrows in all those springs since we inevitably found one another. Only later did I dream of images
- of her, lying on a half-filled sack in an Arkansas cotton field, wondering whose body she would give
- those hands to once she had done with cotton in Arkansas.
- and the necessities of her childhood gave way to the luxuries of being an adult. Walking with Henry.
- Having turned 50, I consider going down on all fours to bark at the wind just for the feel of it.
- Instead, I walk a while with Henry, the springer spaniel who came scratching at our door last November,
- a good dog and forgiving of my initial doubt. I ask if he knows why we are taking this rare walk together.
- He stops to sniff and pee, then runs ahead, nose to the ground, tunneling fields until his neck and
- ears are burred green.
- no matter. It is enough to be alive with a dog on a country road, now and then a thrash of quail or
- a hawk's slow spiral. Turning back, I call Henry home where we sit as I ruffle then unravel his knotted
- fur and whisper in his ear, Henry, Henry, you dog, you, to which he whines and dances
- his bobbed tail signing the air. A garden plot. The garden was becoming overpopulated, what was panthers,
- parrots, frogs, raccoons, Adam, Eve, and now William Tell,
- Drawn by that apple, he spied in Eve's hand. Bo taught, squinting his arrow's length, Tell was planning
- to invite Adam to join him in a spot of fun. When he overheard Eve telling her rib man, Will could split
- my Granny Smith in two clean halves, and was charmed. Eve, bored with unrelenting bliss, begged Will
- to promise Adam there was small risk,
- and he, with apple steady, could stand against the tree of good and evil over there. Adam, miserable,
- but compliant by nature and irritated by the serpent hissing, sissy, sissy, balanced the granny Smith
- green upon his head and driven by nerves, mouthed the first prayer.
- This poem was inspired by a visit to Ocracoke Island off the North Carolina coast. Island shore. By
- day the surf line seems scarce of life, small nervous fish and trods between waves, coquinas burrowing
- quickly when the water withdraws. But there is more. From earliest light into darkness, sanderlings
- and willets pace the shore, driving their long bills into the sand.
- I walk the fringe where the birds feed, but find no trace of their prey. At night, things become clear.
- When the birds have gone, the prey rises. As each wave slides back to the sea, its place on the shore
- glows with luminescent splotches. I take a light into my hand, pale blue crustacean the size of a seed
- from a sunflower.
- A great calm envelops me, deep silence emanating from this small pulsing creature, food of the shore
- birds, a meagerness that pulls on me like a star, mysteries gravity. In my 55th year, I finally understand
- where I am in our galaxy. The Milky Way, scattered above in a broad fluorescent band,
- far away flecks of light breathing in a time and space I struggle to comprehend is also here, wriggling
- in the palm of my hand. Regeneration. My wife and I rose in a plane from Indiana fields.
- soared over Colorado peaks, remembering the quick decade when both children blossomed in hardwooded,
- wabash ribs of the continent, before each left to follow an earth-encircling dream. Now both were back
- from Pacific sojourns, Kenai, Shinjuku, Mooresby, Balboa, Wanaroo, and both newlywed. To make us a fresh
- six, first mixing at that strand,
- where sea lions lolled on coast rocks sprung up sheer from the frothing sea. Clear streams descended
- through redwoods to wind heathery bluffs and embrace the ebbing sea. As the young ones compared new
- plans for Sonoma and Seoul, I could hear my mother's old refrains. Four brothers came from Scotland
- to the hills of Tennessee. As a girl, great-grandmother sailed from Montrose
- to Grand Manin Island off the coast of Maine. Then twilight stilled the Mendocino shore, crimson sky
- patch and seabird calls all gone. And breathing eucalyptus, we walked together out the loop in dunes
- to open darkling beach, where land was one dim line, tied all the power. And stars came high and random,
- soft, quick, new.
- In Kenya, have you ever heard an elephant trumpet across the dark? That sound still haunts me.
- Kiliguni Lodge, bamboo easy chairs on an open fan veranda. We look across night felt toward a floodlit
- water hole. Not a twig snaps as elephants glide from darkness. Siphon water with frowning trunks, heads
- tilted to squirt a gush into deep,
- peony mouths. Some zebra glance up, continue drinking as if being behind bars protects them. Warthogs
- jostle for space well away from elephant legs. Those tree bowls, flat ends ringed by great pale half
- moon toenails. In a minor key, a lurching melancholy looms cadences against the night.
- Let's take a 10 minute intermission and come back after the second part of the program. Chris Green,
- the editor of Wind Magazine, has asked me to hold it up so that any of you interested in getting it
- can recognize it. It will be available at the book corner.
- In a space, I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone. That is why I often think up an imaginary
- companion to have breakfast with. Yesterday morning I ate my oatmeal, porridge as he called it, with
- John Keats, Galway Canal.
- Dreaming with my feet. My feet sleep, spiny lobsters trekking the ocean floor. I walk to make them wake,
- sand becoming the street in front of my house. My wife greets me, wondering where I've been. Dreaming
- with my feet, I say. She looks disappointed, knowing it's the truth again.
- Barstools, solid, black, and shiny, reflect the red sign floating in a cloud-mottled sky. The black-white
- checkered floor fades away, and the clouds, drifting like smoke, obscure the rest of the diner. A cat's
- huge transparent face, tabby gray, looms below the sign. Large aquamarine eyes,
- draw me in. Do you wonder what I have to say? My cloudy sky eyes unblinking, bewildering, promise you
- something beyond the checkered floor, shiny stools, neon diner light. Your eyes trace the pattern of
- my dappled fur, but you don't reach to stroke me. Me, the lost love,
- The love you never had. The love you don't understand. Walk beyond the stools. Risk the blue space.
- I sit on a stool, not knowing which way to face. No counter, only this cat mural. But there are stools
- and the neon sign. Excuse me, I say to no one in particular. Yes.
- I spin around, no one there. You want something? I spin around again. To what direction shall I speak?
- Well, yes, something to eat. Like what? The voice is wispy, neither old nor young, female nor male.
- Oh, some sort of sandwich, a veggie burger maybe, or tuna fish salad.
- I could have sworn something smacked its lips. That could be done. Oh good, something to drink too.
- Yes, the voice almost croons. I find myself saying milk in a saucer and then don't bother with the bread,
- just tuna on a plate. Come on in.
- Either, jumping down, I pad into the cloudy sky, licking my lips, or I think I want out, I say, as the
- clouds come closer.
- dog religion. I'm up on the roof trimming branches that whip our shingles in high wind when my dog comes
- trotting around the corner of the house and a heavy pine bough whooshes toward her on the path below.
- She swings easily out of the way and turns to sniff the bough
- then sniffs all the others landed nearby and without looking up trots on. Everything smells okay to
- her, so my dog doesn't care about what's overhead making branches fall from the sky. Whether more will
- fall tomorrow and surely not about who might have made the tree.
- I'm going to date myself with a reference to Frankie Avalon in this poem, which is titled The Pleasures
- of Bathing. In frequent tubs of deep, warm water, I trim my nails and raise white sails on the numinous
- Nile, or, like a rugged Frankie Avalon, camp at night on a bongo beach along the Amazon. Granted, my
- mind's not what it used to be, but given the cost of travel,
- It's still the cheaper agency. As we all know, unexpected things do happen. The bottom line. So you
- stir at 6 a.m. and all's humming along nicely. Boring even. So you doze away again.
- An hour later, you wake, and the large red job's gone berserk. No kidding. 140 beats a minute, and not
- a steady one, two, one, two. Uh-oh. A ruckus of stumblings and spikes. And when you stand up thinking,
- maybe this is for the last time, you really feel like the buffalo are running and you're the range.
- Of course, it's not an actual attack, you know that.
- but it's not hard to label anarchy when the hullabaloo's on the inside. Next thing, you're all hung
- up with a drip, and they've even x-rayed the bellows, and you've oxygen spurting up your breather through
- little green pipes. When the doctor, cool Charlie, blows in and says, don't you do something on the
- radio, I recognize your voice.
- In Memphis, Tennessee, Tuesdays at the zoo were reserved for blacks, which is another way of saying
- Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays were not. On Tuesdays only, the giraffes
- came onto the grass and let the boys and girls slide down their necks. On Tuesdays at the zoo in Memphis,
- Tennessee, peacocks brought forth six gorgeous feathers hidden in their tails for six days.
- On Tuesdays, flamingos lifted both feet in the air and remained aloft. On Tuesdays in Memphis, Tennessee,
- even the snakes behaved. My future wife chose a wildebeest to put golden flowers in her hair, then whispered
- to her of Serengeti. She placed her red shoes on his hind feet, and they danced, laughing, laughing.
- Finally, suddenly, at five o'clock,
- Little girls cried and hugged the bears goodbye. Cats licked boys' faces and rubbed their purring chins
- against nappy heads. The white guards awoke and cage doors rang shut.
- The energy eddies in so many flickering things. Like this splash of water, protein dash and pinch of
- salt, I am. Pink and white and hardening green against the spring sky, buds wave. And candles take night
- like horses throat the silence of a lake at dawn.
- Camellias in my ginger jar glow the moon's light day long above their tense leaves' darkness.
- The old horse, belly full and head drooped, eyes the slow staccato lifting line of turf a mole works
- in dusk outside the stall as black holes make eternity.
- and morning lights the bright scarves of lychee vendors in Bombay. Sealed, taut gold, blanketed in white
- rind, its seeds fanning out like dancers. How entire the inner rhythm, the solitude of the orange.
- This is a prose poem titled Grady's Choice. Under the influence of his own imagination, Grady rises
- from the comfort of a deck chair and walks to the center of his backyard where luminous ropes are being
- lowered from a fleet of cumulus clouds. All he has to do is grab one and hang on. No climbing, so it
- isn't a matter of being in shape, which he isn't.
- just hang on to the rope of his choice, and he will slowly ascend until he passes through the soft structure,
- becoming its pilot. As such, he will gently bump other clouds, merge and share their power before emerging
- reshaped and rerouted, though anywhere the sky is can serve as a port of call. A patient man,
- Grady sits, then lies down,
- his hands locked finger-woven under his head, a martini glowing in the grass beside him. As the clouds
- float overhead with a barely audible hum, Grady already knows which one he will choose. In the distance,
- a dark balloon appears on the horizon, grating the silence with its repeated blasts of hot air. A vulgar
- choice, Grady thinks.
- Some impatient fool has made a vulgar choice. Surely she was lovely before age and illness penned lines,
- hollows into their own gaunt tale. Supported by her husband at the doctor's office, she sinks stiffly
- into a chair.
- Whistling softly, lifting gloved fingers up before her face, she capers them back and forth,
- pauses to ask, aren't they pretty? You scare the people half to death, Mother, the old man smiles, one
- hand on her arm. Do you need anything, Papo? She answers. Are you all right? I'm just fine, he says.
- And again, for her dancing fingers, she's whistling. One chickadee perky in his skull cap,
- pops onto the feeder near the window. See the little bird, mother? Will you just look at that? Her tune
- fluting from purse flips. She glances outside, returns to frolicking her fingers, stops long enough
- to ask, aren't they pretty? Journeys. End of the line.
- I ride beyond the end of the line. Thomas Tranströmer.
- I brought you into a fruitful land to enjoy the fruits and the goodness of it. But when you entered
- upon it, you defiled it and made my heritage an abomination. Jeremiah 2-7. Pilgrimage. Blocked inside,
- dazed and sullen, I drive for hours. I despair of people. All the beauty blotted out.
- All the harshness draining from greed, all lies heavy in my gut, contorting me with confusion and ruinous
- anger. I arch my shoulders, breathe deeply, but the tightness remains. I drive on, do not speak, just
- drive to get there, to be there on that clear, wild lake. At dusk, standing beside the water, I choose
- a stone from the cobbled shore
- Hold it tightly in my hand, press its coolness to my belly. Take this constriction, these tentacles
- that grip me, pull them into the pores and cracks of this deep and aged vessel. I fling the stone far
- into the lake. Wash out this hardness, grind our arrogance to sand. Another rock, resplendent from eons
- of violence, I hold, implore,
- and pitch away, another and another, until I am finally easy, reassured. Slowly, the hardness will resolve
- to this mellic and graceful shore. I 70 West.
- But sore from driving all day in an 82 Civic, he tries to imagine a hundred years ago, Kansas cowboys
- riding these green and yellow hills, rousting strays out of dry riverbeds, as he tames his thirst with
- beer, his hunger with a bag of stale chips, thinking what this good old boy needs is an air-conditioned
- cable TV, motel, bar, and grill.
- beside the pool, a woman built like a Dallas cheerleader, though down on her luck, her body oiled like
- an Oklahoma gusher, primed for a chance encounter with a big buckle, good time son of the plane.
- I am not from a house. Where I am from, there is not a house. Can't prove there's a house. If I blew
- peanut skins from roasting pans on the front porch or rested in the cool marble shade where the outdoor
- staircase turned, if I stared out the fly screens in diamond-shaped bars, does that make a house?
- I am from the names of places. I am from the words in translation. I am from the airplane and the U-Haul.
- I run up mountains and no one bars my way. I am out from my own smallness, out of my mother's eyes,
- never mind. I am from laundry and unopened mail. And I marry whomever I like.
- winter visit at Great Tew, Oxfordshire, England. A brisk walk, the air's skin tingling, crows and church
- bells sound across frosted thatch and field. Darkening day leans against leaded panes, beach and the
- broad stone grate draws fire, flares, oak hunks
- Bark deep-scored burn with slow vehemence. Sudden crunch of tires on gravel. They're back. These have
- been quiet hours. A 200-year-old house silent behind replastered walls. The boisterous polarities of
- children for a while elsewhere.
- Left in the wake of grandchildren's zest, outside the circle of my children's sufficiency, thoughts
- mint a simple stepping into final shadows, but fail to conjure the swift fade. Late, an owl's ethereal
- hoo-hoo spans the negative of night.
- Ia Formosa, an island over the ocean west. And my teacher showed old ways, saying, eat nothing but fresh
- papaya fruit. And so I did, three times a day. All I wanted of the firm, sweet fruit meat, with only
- lime to boost the clean, wide taste. Papaya piled like fish at market stalls.
- translucent treat, though the best never left a tangled mountain's feet, kept there by a village man
- who offered them from his trees. Past the last bus stop, I'd walk to his hut and trade for fruit, then
- sit in the shade to eat. And this is what let me forget about food. Let me know new paths.
- Behind the village, hiking big noons, sheen white, over all a mountainside of breathing green.
- Quick snakes, striving full, so hot a heaven of leaves. So back here now, I know about walking away
- again. South this time, perhaps, where papaya began, when seasons were time and no trees sailed yet
- for Goa, Manila, Macau, or for that island,
- Where surely now a man will be at his hut with new fruit and the folds of a mountain opening down, profligate
- with green. Met an Englishman once, asked him what he did and he said, I drive a lorry.
- A simple statement, yet one remarked with eyes averted and head set rather at an angle between the ashamed
- and the defiant, somewhere near where all those of the spat upon class of English folk hold their heads
- when talking to their betters. And I said, interesting work that.
- And he, with relief, took up the task to explain the ins and outs of what I secretly felt to be a boring,
- tiring job, one that fitted in somewhere classes below my university parchment and work experience.
- Yet, with my background of mortgaged farms and ruined businessmen and wooden churches needing paint,
- what could I say but interesting work that?
- as if I really cared, and yet I found I did. But what I most remember is not what he told me when I
- urged him on with my slap on the back quote, but the pain he endured in that interminable silence between
- his reply and my response to it, when I could have cut him cold and no angry retort of his would have
- come near my sneer and slight sniff as I searched for something to say to that lesser sort. But instead
- I remembered in that same silence
- my own and myself. And I came across, I hope like kin, when I said as matter-of-factly as I
- could, interesting work that. Always with us, Frank Tennessee. In a field on the edge of the continent state,
- I find a Civil War graveyard. I climb a stone stile, stoop under the low maples, and come to the foot
- of a slope. Lines of square, small stones stretch almost to the top of the hill, like broken teeth sewn
- in the short, thick grass. The historical marker reports more than a thousand soldiers buried by landowners
- and his slaves.
- Out of the woods, gray line shining, a sudden evening rain advances across the meadow. My fathers, stenciled
- in uneven letters on the rough wood,
- 12091, Major A.C. Stedman.
- had not been long in this country when I wrote this poem. Night journeying across Nebraska, at a train
- window I watch evening descend upon the land. The Platte River, stubble fields, cottonwoods are a woman's
- body seen through her dark nightgown.
- As she withdraws, I linger, recalling a South African countryside of years ago. Rocked by the syncopation
- along narrow gauge tracks from Transvaal to Cape, with a varnish teak compartments behind me, I gaze
- through corridor windows, small head of a springbok etched on every pane, absorbing the deepening dusk
- of the Karoo. White thorns of a Durin boom snagging the last light,
- stony outcrops, scrubby tussets, tree aloes all streaking by. Gripping the corridor rail, swaying with
- a rhythmic ta-ta-ta-ta beneath my feet, I was a child present while her motherland, readying for sleep,
- dimmed the light. But a stranger here now, I turned my eyes away.
- A belated note to an old landlady of mine. Forgive me, Frau Erhard. You must have died, but I'm juicy
- and breathing in pink, and if you're still decked out in your teeth, sitting up nights with the TV lights,
- waiting for me to come door-slamming home, I'll eat your garden mud clogs. I never wrote you in 20 years,
- in Buschgewand, whatever that means in Buschgewand, but you can't have died, 100 years old, and still
- parading me to the neighbors, the butcher, hands off the prize, big American girl, the grin, your steering
- elbow. You must have died, your grandchildren, grandparents, but who then is chopping the wood for the bath?
- Who will you let touch your 50s kitchen? I'll eat your TV and your beer and your teeth and your short
- white fence and your apron flowers if you are not sitting there, watching my phantom fingers go like
- crazy, nights in your living room, letters out, typing save me, you praising my worklust. You just won't
- teach me what you know, hands off the axe, away from the stove,
- I'm sorry you're dead if you're dead, but if you're bright alive, I'll eat the underpants off the line.
- You're wool ones that keep you warm, and mine. And the final category of the evening is beyond. Mary
- Oliver said,
- At any cost, it is the dangerous and marvelous future I mean to find.
- I always seem to be turning on the shower or arriving at Kennedy Street on the bus or answering the
- phone at work, reaching over to push down the lighted button to get staccatos of words punctuated with
- questions. Some things we do that we seem always to do when we do them, forgetting completely about
- them the rest of the time until we do them once again and think to ourselves, I always seem to be doing
- this. Not a disturbing thought, but certainly a recurrent one.
- If it is a morning thing, we wonder where our days go, always seeming to be getting them started but
- never seeing them end, or if it is evening coming to the same kind of question from the other side.
- It always seems to be 11.25 a.m., or else it's a quarter to three. My biological clock says to me to
- look at my wrist twice a day, and it is at those two times that I promptly obey, and every so many times
- say to myself,
- It always seems to be 1125 or 245, even though it almost always never is. Life patterns, bits of our
- lives held up to us by ourselves to look at and wonder why, just that, just then. Since we do so many
- other things, arrive at so many other places every day of our lives. Don't I ever look up as I am arriving
- at Ingraham like I did tonight in the rain?
- or see what my watch has to say for itself at 422, or glance at my action of putting down my fork at
- the end of the meat. These patterns, these indicators tell me that once again, it is morning,
- it is evening. Once again, it is a quarter to three and another day has gone, leaving me wondering what
- I did between 1125 and 1125 besides turn on the shower and see Kennedy Street loom up before me once again.
- to go forward or beyond in this poem, we first have to go back. We have to imagine that we're in 1992
- and we're looking ahead to the results. Election year, 1992. I am voting and remembering the 50s. Just
- out of high school told rock and roll was savage, primitive, appeal to our baser instincts.
- In hidden basement coffee houses, we tentatively moved from the formal waltz embrace and began to shake
- it. A small rebellion, suppressed for me in teacher training college, where we were checked back in
- at the porter's gate by 11 p.m. And as befitted young ladies entering the field of education, we signed
- in at breakfast, washed, dressed, and in our right minds.
- I'm voting for the dangerous edge, the glint in the eye, the dreamer who still dreams that dreams can
- come true, and a remembered evening in Texas, driving with friends in a fast car across county lines
- to a beer joint in the desert, the night wind in my hair, watching the stars. Then, going home in the
- sunrise, the world unfolding ahead of us. So, I'm voting for hope
- and change and dreams and youth and for the time when there was still possibilities, I'm voting for
- Elvis A. Sheherazade in her bedroom. This is the story I finished before I died.
- This is the man who insisted at gunpoint, I finished the story before I died. This is the crazy inner
- voice that deranged the man who insisted at gunpoint, I finished the story before I died. This is the
- strange and moon-like landscape that echoed the crazy inner voice that deranged the man who insisted
- at gunpoint, I finished the story before I died.
- This is the rosy haze of morning that softened the strange and moon-like landscape and silenced the
- crazy inner voice and soothed the man who insisted at gunpoint, I finish the story before I died. This
- is the lull in a thrilling story that comes in the rosy haze of morning that softened the strange and
- moon-like landscape and silenced the crazy inner voice and soothed the man who insisted at
- at gunpoint I finished the story before I died. Here is my sister who brought us the tea that filled
- in the lull in a thrilling story and sweetened the rosy haze of morning that softened the strange and
- moon-like landscape and silenced the crazy inner voice and soothed the man who insisted at gunpoint
- I finished the story before I died. This is the man outside the window who eyed my sister
- who brought us the tea that filled in the lull in a thrilling story and sweetened the rosy haze of morning
- that softened the strange and moon-like landscape and silenced the crazy inner voice and soothed the
- man who insisted at gunpoint, I finish the story before I died. This is the sun that rose so swiftly
- and lit up
- the man outside the window which frightened my sister who spilled the tea that filled in the lull in
- a thrilling story. The sun that burnt off the haze of morning and flooded the strange and moon-like
- landscape, but shut out the crazy inner voice that deranged the man who insisted at gunpoint, I finish
- the story before I died. This is the evening that followed the day in which the sun rose up so swiftly.
- The evening that swallowed the man at the window and sent home my sister who'd brought the tea that
- filled in the lull in a thrilling story. The evening that echoed the haze of morning and deepened the
- strange and moon-like landscape and brought back the crazy inner voice that deranged the man who insisted,
- at gunpoint, I finish the story before I died. You go to sleep.
- I'll stay up every night recalling the evening that follows the day that is over so fast when the sun
- moves so swiftly, disclosing the man outside the window who frightens my sister, who brings the tea
- that fills in the lull in a thrilling story and sweetens the rosy haze of morning that softens the strange
- and moon-like landscape and silences crazy inner voices and soothes the man who murmurs in sleep
- But I finished the story. Tomorrow I'll die. When we are old. When we are old, let the wind reel us
- in from our field of play.
- like airy things relieved of suits and masks. In evening light, we shall write out a stride a dream
- of stars like a new constellation. And who will remember two who were suddenly gone in a rise of wind,
- seen last together at the edge of the field of play.
- fine line. In Zimbabwe, shaking in wind, high on the boulder-stroom metopus, desiccated clumps of stems
- are hardly worth a second glance. But submerged one in water, watch it soak up life. I saw what was
- drought-dead foliate, green as belief,
- the resurrection plant. For a child, a fine line was erased. What's deemed lifeless can revive. I sought
- my twin. In imagination, dug for her bones, laid those fragile remnants, the reassembled stems of Elizabeth.
- to steep until they too fleshed and she lived again to play with me. Up on the metopus all is quiet
- and dry, the way it is with graves.
- in the winter river. From the bridge, long shadows and clear water are schools of fish in murky symmetry,
- languidly swaying as one. Erratically, it seems, within the gray mass, one form turns, then another,
- each emitting a silvery flash. As a child, I dropped stones to scatter the fish, to break the order.
- I watched the slow flowing of a passing log spread to school like smoke in a breeze. Even the shadow
- of my waving hand unsettles them. In my youth, I gave too much credit to stones. To wary fish, graceful
- motion may shroud a stalking heron. Now I seek the stillness in all things.
- In the pale green filigree of flowering maples simple in their eloquence, I measure my own dignity.
- In the shining wetness of a stone wall after rain is the silent spirit of beings without life. When
- Sirius is on the heel of Orion sweeping across the Milky Way in late summer, I enter the nearness of
- those bright creatures
- whose escape from the distant roar of death and birth of stars whispers them into myths. Now I school
- with the fish, suspended through the night in our cold river as the snow deepens, clouding the water
- above us, and I am leery of graceful shadows. But within the anonymity of the river, far into the harsh
- distances of space,
- Lost in the swaying mass, in the dull brown camouflage of despair, I too turn in silvery signal. Fountain
- Void. This close vortex of the land
- Corrugated yet in deep treed hollows, steeping ridges, vines sanctified and fast against the spill of
- plains, holds a tight tap down through logic and illusion, through paleological prints of the gene,
- to the fountain void past all desire. I am the million bees that tangle dogwood lit in greeny filtered
- beams, the pillar oak,
- slayed like raw hay in summer-churning bolts of storm, and smothered rock, earth-memoried, eon-capillaried,
- mute, entropic ocean of our bones. O roiling woods, suspended sharp in the season's flashing eye, impart
- the vast centripetal calm. Impel the lilting juggernaut of butterfly, transcending warmness,
- its few days with no shackled dread, and loose the force that opens blossom, feather, leaf, and eye,
- without a feathering cell of hope, to thrive and burst and nourish more in the everlasting flux.
- Accepting snow. Perfection marred by erratic tracks suddenly overlapping, locked like magic rings. You
- lie back dreaming the bird you found the winter you were nine, wings outspread in a sky of ice. Slowly,
- the last breath like a sliver of glass drawn out the full length of your body.
- You rise neither warm nor cold and wait unseen beside yourself.