- Thank you for being here.
- so sad
- Thank you for coming, have a great day. It would be amazing if there was two here tonight. We got cakes
- for you out in the...
- It's a vice cold beer.
- to introduce a very special person. You all may know him. World renowned. You see him almost every day.
- If you're lucky, that's not true.
- working man in poetry. Let's welcome to the stage, give him a warm welcome, Mr. Ross Gage.
- This is right that when this book came out, we had a book release at the IFAO. It would have been like
- February of 2015. And I'm pretty sure we were saying, yeah, I think Bussman's playing for that, too.
- So it's just, you know, it's amazing. I thought it would be fun to do. So I want to remember, there's
- a couple things. One is that we have these broad sides of catalog of Anabash Gratitude, like a kind
- of a pamphlet that our friends Vaughn and Daniel made. They're beautiful.
- one-off, they're letterpress cover, they're out there, they're free. And there's also copies, like I
- think we have like 150 copies of catalog, and they're free. So take them, if you have a copy, you know,
- leave it. But if you have a copy and you've got someone to give it to, take it. So that's that.
- You know, and I wanted to do that because this is the first book I think that I wrote every poem here
- in Bloomington. And there's a lot of Bloomington in this poem.
- in this book, it's not all Bloomington, but there's a lot of Bloomington here. And a lot of the ways
- that these poems got made are with beloveds here, like, you know, Bryce, old dirty Bryce who's on the
- base, spicy Brycey. We were in a writing group together back in the day, and he saw some of these poems early.
- I also was remembering that as I was riding my bike when I first got here, I'm pretty sure it was Bryce
- that I saw like turning compost somewhere and he invited me to turn compost. Changed my life, you know.
- But anyway, this is so many people who have helped with these poems. So I'm just grateful. And,
- you know, Dave and Kay and Alex and Chris Mattingly
- and on and on and on. But, you know, my partner Stephanie, like, when these poems were first shaping
- up, I didn't know if they were poems. And she was like, no, I think they're poems. So, endlessly grateful
- to her. I'm going to read a handful of poems and then get you back to them. This first one is called
- Burial. Oh, and it's so fun.
- I get to ask this question, if it's legal to ask anymore. Has anyone done anything interesting with
- a placenta? There's one.
- Beautiful. That's awesome. That was like, you're like a plant. Like you're exactly answer. You know,
- there may have been a placenta in a freezer that I almost thought was bananas or a smoothie once. Maybe.
- Anyway, thank you. That's, you got it. Didn't happen. You know, I didn't, I... Burial. You're right.
- You're right.
- The fertilizer is good. It wasn't a gang of dullards came up with chucking a fish in the planting hole
- or some midwife just got lucky with the placenta. Oh, I'll plant a lilac bush here. And a sudden flush
- of flowers. Yes, the magic dust our bodies become cast spells on the roots about which someone else
- could tell you the chemical processes, but it's just magic to me.
- which is why a couple of springs ago when first putting in my two bare root plum trees out back, I took
- the jar which has become my father's house and lonely for him and hoping to coax him back from my mother
- as much as for me. I poured some of them into the planting holes and he dove in, glad for the robust
- air, saddling a slight
- gust into my nose and mouth, chuckling as I coughed, but mostly he disappeared into the minor yawns
- in the earth, into which I placed the trees, splaying wide their roots, casting the gray dust of my
- old man evenly throughout the hold and replacing then the clods of dense Indiana soil into the roots,
- and my father were buried.
- Watering it all in with one hand while holding the tree with the other straight as the flag to the nation
- of simple joy of which my father is now a naturalized citizen. Waving the flag from his subterranean
- lair. The roots curled around him like shawls or jungle gyms, like hookahs or the arms of ancestors
- before breast stroking into the xylem, riding the elevator up through the cambium and into the leaves
- where, when you put your ear close enough,
- You can hear him whisper, good morning, where if you close your eyes and push your face, you can feel
- his stubbly jowls. And good Lord, this year he was giddy at the first real fruit set and nestled into
- the 30 or 40 plums in the two trees, peering out from the sweet meat with his hands pressed against
- the purple skin like cathedral glass.
- And imagine his joy as the sun wizarded forth those abundant sugars and I plotted barefoot and prayerful
- at the first ripe plum swell and blush almost weepy conjuring some surely ponderous verse to convey
- this bottomless grace. You know, oh father, oh father kind of stuff. Hundreds of hot air balloons filling
- the sky in my chest, replacing his intubated body listing like a boat keel side up.
- replacing the steady stream of water from the one eye, which his brother wiped before removing the tube,
- keeping his hand on the forehead until the last wind in his body wandered off while my brother wailed
- like an animal. And my mother said, weeping, it's OK. It's OK. You can go now, honey. At all of which
- my father guffawed by kicking from the first bite of plum buckets of juice down my chin.
- staining one of my two button-down shirts, the salmon-colored silk one, hollering, there's more of that,
- almost dancing now in the plum, in the tree, the way he did as a person, bent over and biting his lip
- and chucking the one hip out and then the other, with his fists loosely made and his elbows cocked and
- his eyes closed and his mouth made trumpet when he knew you could make you happy just by being a little silly,
- and sweet. Thank you. This is called To the Mistake. And this is like a, it's a school poem. Anyway,
- but it's an LSD poem more.
- When I was, it was just like a weird, I don't want you to miss it, because it's kind of crucial to the
- poem that kind of slipped by, but I, weirdly, I was in, you know, like the, what do they call it, gifted
- classes. I mean, they kicked me out in eighth grade, but, you know, when I was really little. But they
- had a reunion my senior year of that crew at like the teacher's house, and for some reason,
- Three of my friends took a bunch of acid shortly before the, I'd never done acid, so I didn't know how
- long it lasted. So I guess we ate the inebriant around 10 in the morning and the reunion was at three.
- To the mistake.
- It is good to know a thing or two about that of which you speak, or even to be expert, which is not
- requisite, though a thing or two is good. Like the prop plane I know is going to land on the canvas
- roof of my friend's rickety Jeep, while the salutatorian to be sits in the backseat giddy with her new
- graphing calculator. And the driver says something I think about Arsenio Hall, but he sounds like a
- bunny in an echo chamber.
- And it's hard to hear with those propellers roaring above. And today in class, I am lecturing on the
- miracle of the mistake in a poem. That hiccup or weird gift that spirals or jettisons what's dull and
- landlocked into as yet untraversed, i.e. cosmic, I overuse this metaphor with my students, grounds.
- I tell this to 105 give or take undergrads who mostly don't care.
- and wrestle second to second the by now blood-borne drive to check their beckoning phones, which mostly,
- bless them, they don't. The mistake, I say, is a gift. Don't be afraid. See what it teaches you about
- what the poem can be. I know of what I speak.
- Like the two tabs of very potent, evidently acid, I dropped four hours before this reunion and graduation
- party of sorts for we the gifted and talented. Corn chips and Mr. Pibb and store bought cookies, the
- texture of which sunk me knee deep in a desert. I imagine I looked something like an opaque cloud.
- that day when Mr. and Mrs. Szymanowski, our brainy hosts and teachers, guffawed in claymation, the tremendous
- bead of spit balancing on Mr. Szymanowski's lip before Gustav Ehr lifted it and it drifted slowly to
- the coarse fabric of his beard, all the spiny hairs of which seemed to screech like crickets.
- And no wonder I declined the invitation from the volleyball court, although I was a phys ed major. And
- beneath the white arcs, the ball painted in the sky, my classmates Lisa and Eugene and Ick and Becky
- all looked a bit alien with craniums engorged slightly and spines compressed, if not even serpentine,
- their limbs flailing about wildly like cuttlefish speaking only in polysyllabics, which must have made
- my breathy grunts
- all the more apish. Who knows where the poem will lead you? I tell my students to let go their reins
- and listen to the tongue's half-wit brilliance, the corner of the mind made light by some accidental
- yoking of two impossibly joined things. One or two in the rear of the classroom, I notice their eyes
- roll into the backs of their heads. And my plastic cup of root beer by now is spilling a bit while Mr.
- Szymanowski laughs
- like a hyena plunging its face in a ruptured gut and nothing has ever been as clear to me as the bell
- that rang in my head that day. We were a 12-year experiment. The garden variety brainiacs from a suburban
- school, passable genetic mixture, forgettable location. Mr. Sim's oddly large eyes and his long reptilian
- tail now making sense.
- And the way someone with an electric can opener voice seemed always to be inside him speaking when he
- spoke, now making sense as the night winds down and the last of the cake is served writhing with some
- fluorescent scrawl only I seem able to read.
- While all the good-natured kids whose fingernails are chewed raw and jaws pulsed who are so good, they
- are so very good, and soon will be hauled into the bottomless sky under which I stumble to see what
- direction they're coming from. And can I run?
- Thank you. The poem gets truer every day I read it. This is a poem called To the Fig Tree on Ninth and
- Christian. Bless you. And one thing, you know, there's someone who shows up in this poem named Mr. Liao.
- He's my best friend Jay's dad. And he died in April. I think it was in April. And he gave me fig trees
- that I brought here and then shared with
- Bloomington Community Orchard. So there's fig trees at the orchard that were Mr. Louse trees. They're
- cuttings from his trees. And I had a hunch that they might make a lot of fruit this year. They haven't
- made much fruit, but this year there's a lot of fruit on them. And, you know, God willing, they'll ripen
- all the way up. Anyway, I just wanted to say that this is, he was like one of my first garden teachers.
- He didn't really tell me much, but he showed me something.
- And he gave me and us figs. Some of you might have cuttings from those fig trees. To the fig tree on
- 9th and Christian. Tumbling through the city in my mind without once looking up the racket in the lug
- work, probably rehearsing some stupid thing I said or did, some crime or other. The city, they say,
- is a lonely place until, yes, the sound of sweeping.
- And a woman, yes, with a broom, beneath which you are now, too, the canopy of a fig, its arms pulling
- the September sun to it. And she has a hose, too, and so works hard, rinsing and scrubbing the sidewalk,
- lest some poor sod slip on the silk of a fig and break his hip and not probably reach over to gobble
- up the perpetrator.
- The light catches the veins in her hands when I ask about the tree. They flutter in the air,
- and she says, take as much as you can, please help me. So I load my pockets and mouth, and she points
- to the stepladder against the wall to me, and please take more. But I was without a sack, so my meager
- plunder would have to suffice.
- And an old woman whom gravity was pulling into the earth loosed one from a low slung branch and its
- eye wept like hers, which she dabbed with a kerchief as she cleaved the fig with what remained of her
- teeth. And soon there were eight or nine people gathered beneath the tree looking into it like
- a constellation pointing, do you see it? And I am tall and so good for these things. And a bald man
- even told me so.
- When I grabbed three or four for him reaching into the giddy throngs of yellow jackets, sugar stone,
- which he only pointed to smiling and rubbing his stomach. I mean, he was really rubbing his stomach.
- Like there was a baby in there. It was hot. His head shone while he offered recipes to the group using
- words which I couldn't understand. And besides, I was a little tipsy on the dance of the velvety heart
- rolling in my mouth.
- pulling me down and down into the oldest, oldest countries of my body, where I ate my first fig from
- the hand of a man who escaped his country by swimming through the night. And maybe never said more than
- five words to me at once, but he gave me figs.
- And a man on his way to work hops twice to reach at last his fig, which he smiles at and calls, baby,
- come here, baby, he says, and blows a kiss to the tree, which everyone knows can't grow this far north,
- being Mediterranean and favoring the rocky sun-baked soils of Jordan and Sicily. But no one told the
- fig tree or the immigrants.
- There was a way the fig tree grows in groves. It wants, it seems to hold us. Yes, I am anthropomorphizing.
- God damn it. I have twice in the last 30 seconds rubbed my sweaty forearm into someone else's sweaty
- shoulder, gleeful, eating out of each other's hands on Christian street in Philadelphia, a city like
- most, which has murdered its own people. This is true.
- We are feeding each other from a tree at the corner of Christian and 9th. Strangers may be never again.
- This is called Two More Cents on Gratitude. Just in case. Seems like we need reminders.
- If gratitude is, at root, the acknowledgement and celebration of our needs, our fundamental and undeniable
- and common neediness, and if the practice of gratitude illuminates not only our needs, but the needs
- of others, if it illuminates the web or net of need we are in and of, though it be devastating sometimes,
- though it be terrifying to be mostly to be only need. A web or net of thicket or tangle of relationships
- known and not from which we will never on this side of things escape or be free of. And if that web
- or net of need might also be called simply life. And if therefore gratitude is the acknowledgement,
- the practice of being life.
- The practice of acknowledging ourselves as tiny knots in the net of need. The practice too of celebrating
- the net of need, which let's remember is another word for life and being it. If we in here talking about
- the practice of being life, and if we are living or trying to in a murderous,
- genocidal lunatic system whose objective is to corral and dominate and destroy life to phase us and
- usness out to put a highway between or through us or over. And in so doing to also corral and dominate
- and destroy gratitude and joy and love along the way.
- Destroy our understanding of and belief in the sanctity of our connection, our relationships,
- our beholdenness to one another. Destroy our belief in the necessity of our relationships to one another,
- the necessity that is of our need for one another, and all the loving practices born of that need.
- such that we come to believe the murderous genocidal lunatic system that is actively phasing us out,
- the murderous genocidal lunatic system for which phasing us out constitutes a market, a boon, that that
- system might tend to our needs, in large part by destroying our need for one another, though their phrase
- would be freeing us of our need for each other, freeing us
- from each other. And if gratitude, in so being a celebration of our need for one another, a celebration
- of our being life, of our being mutually, commonly, needfully, beautifully, inescapably life,
- then it is also, in addition to a defense of life, true gratitude is a defense of life. It is perhaps
- A way by which we come to understand the murderous genocidal lunatic system for what it is. And also,
- maybe and crucially, a way by which is said or sung or meant or practiced or might be to the murderous
- genocidal lunatic system itself. Yo, fuck that shit motherfucker. Or you can get out of my face with
- that fucking bullshit.
- Which is to say, gratitude might also be a way of being, as Cornelius Eaddy writes, a brick in a house
- being built around their house. A way of remembering, of practicing, as Fred Moten and Stefan Oharney
- write, that we owe each other everything. A way of practicing or remembering, as Thomas Lux puts it,
- that we love the thing because someone else loved it enough to make us love it.
- a way, as June Jordan puts it, of fathoming mercy. And as Adeselis Girmai writes, that you and you and
- you are who I love. Of remembering and practicing that, as Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, the more something
- is shared, the greater its value become. That we might be and are, as Janann Alexander writes,
- caring for what lives, living for what cares and moves in us, oh, each brief company. That, as Gwendolyn
- Brooks writes, we are each other's harvest, we are each other's business, we are each other's magnitude
- and bond. All of which is to say, gratitude might be, no, no, it is. Gratitude is, as Patrick Rosale writes,
- and altar for listening to the beginning of the world. This is a poem by Rafat Alarir, who was assassinated
- by the IDF in December of 2023.
- called If I Must Die, Let it Be a Tale. If I must die, you must live to tell my story, to sell my things,
- to buy a piece of cloth and some strings, make it white with a long tail, so that a child somewhere
- in Gaza, while looking heaven in the eye, awaiting his dad who left in a blaze, and bid no one farewell,
- not even to his flesh,
- not even to himself. See the kite, my kite you made, flying up above and thinks for a moment an angel
- is there, bringing back love. If I must die, let it bring hope. Let it be a tale. It's Rafat Al-Arir.
- This is a short little poem called Catalogue Unabashed Gratitude. The orchard features prominently in
- this poem. The Bloomington Community Orchard, if you don't know, go. There's so many things about it.
- I mean, working on that project with so many beloveds, I could go on and on. I've written about it elsewhere.
- You can read that. It totally changed my life.
- like gave me my life in a lot of ways. Catalog of unabashed gratitude. Friends, and also thanks for
- coming out, I'm glad, investment. Thanks for having me, boys. Friends,
- Will you bear with me today, for I have awakened from a dream in which a robin made with its shabby
- wings a kind of veil behind which it shimmied and stomped something from the south of Spain, its breast
- a flare, looking me dead in the eye from the branch that grew into my window, coochie cooing my chin.
- The bird shuffling its little talons left and then right while the leaves bristled against the plaster
- wall, two of them drifting onto my blanket while the bird
- opened and closed its wings like a matador giving up on murder, jutting its beak, turning a circle and
- flashing again the ruddy bombast of its breast by which I knew upon waking it was telling me in no uncertain
- terms to bellow forth the tubas and sousaphones, the whole rusty brass band of gratitude not quite dormant
- in my belly. The bird said so in a human voice.
- bellow forth, and who among us could ignore such odd and precise counsel? Hear ye, hear ye, I am here
- to holler that I have hauled tons, by which I don't mean lots, I mean tons of cow shit, and stood ankle
- deep in swales of maggots swirling the spent beer grains the brewery man was good enough to dump off
- holding his nose where they smell very bad.
- but make the compost writhe giddy and lick its lips twirling dung with my pitchfork again and again
- with hundreds and hundreds of other people we dreamt and orchard this way.
- throwing our brows and hauling our wheelbarrows and sweating through our shirts. And less than a year
- later, there was a party at which trees were sunk into the well-fed earth, one of which a Liberty Apple,
- after being watered in, was tamped by a baby barefoot with a bow hanging in her hair, biting her lip
- in her joyous work. And friends, this is the realest place I know.
- It makes me squirm like a worm. I'm so grateful. You could ride your bike there, or roller skate. You
- could catch the bus. There's a fence and a gate twisted by hand. There is a fig tree taller than you
- in Indiana. It will make you gasp. It might make you want to stay alive even. Thank you. And thank you
- for not taking my power when the engine of his mind dragged him to swig fistfuls of Xanax and a bottle
- or two of Booth.
- And thank you for taking my father a few years after his own father went down. Thank you, Mercy. Mercy,
- thank you for not smoking meth with your mother. Oh, thank you. Thank you for leaving and for coming
- back, and thank you for what inside my friend's love bursts like a throng of roadside goldenrod gleaming
- into the world, likely hauling a shovel with her like one named Aralee Ott.
- with hands big as a horse's and who, like one named Erra Lee Ott, will laugh time to time till the juice
- runs from her nose. Oh, thank you for the way a small thing's whale makes the milk or what once was
- milk in us gather into horses hucklebuckling across a field. And thank you, friends. When last spring
- the hyacinth bells rang,
- And the crocuses flaunted their upturned skirts, and a quiet roved the beehive, which when I entered
- were snugged, two or three dead fist-sized clutches of bees between the frames, almost clinging to one
- another. This one's tiny head pushed into another's tiny wing, one's four legs resting on another's
- face, the translucent paper of their wings fluttering beneath my breath. And when a few dropped to the
- frames beneath,
- And after falling down to cry, everything's glacial shine. And thank you, too, and thanks for the corduroy
- couch I have put you all on. Put your feet up, here's a light blanket, a pillow, dear ones, for I think
- this is gonna be long. I can't stop my gratitude, which includes, dear reader, you, for staying here
- with me, for moving your lips as I speak.
- Here's a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it. And thank you, the tiny bee's shadow perusing these
- words as I write them. And the way my love talks quietly when in the hives, so quietly, in fact, you
- cannot hear her but only notice barely her lips moving in conversation. Thank you, what does not scare
- her in me but makes her reach my way. Thank you, the love she is which hurts sometimes.
- In the time, she misremembered elephants in one of my poems, which, oh, here they come. Garlanded with
- mourning, Gloria and Wisteria blooms trombones all the way down to the river. Thank you, the quiet in
- which the river bends around the elephant's solemn trunk, polishing stones floating on its gentle back,
- the flock of geese flying overhead.
- And to the quick and gentle flocking of men to the old lady falling down on the corner of Fairmount
- and 18th, holding patiently with the softest parts of their hands her cane and purple hat, gathering
- for her the contents of her purse and touching her shoulder gently in her elbow. And thank you to the
- cockeyed basketball court on which in a half court, three on three, we old heads made of some runny
- nose kids a shambles.
- And the 61-year-old, after flipping a reverse layup off a backdoor cut from my know the past to seal
- the game, he ripped off his shirt and threw punches at the gods and hollered at the kids to admire the
- pacemaker's grin across his chest. Thank you, the glad accordions wheeze in the chest. Thank you, the
- bagpipes. Thank you to the woman barefoot in a gaudy dress for stopping her car in the middle of the road
- and the tractor trailer behind her and the van behind it, whisking a turtle off the road. Thank you,
- God of Gaudi. Thank you, Paisley Panties. Thank you, the organ up my dress. Thank you, the sheer dress
- you wore kneeling in my dream at the creek's edge and the light swimming through it, the coy
- kissing halos into the glassy air, the room in my mind with the blinds drawn where we nearly injure
- each other, crawling into the shawl of the other's body. Thank you when I just say it plain, we fuck
- each other dumb. And you, again you, for the true kindness it has been for you to remain awake with
- me like this, nodding time to time or making that noise which I take to mean yes,
- Or, I understand. Or, please go on, but not too long. Or, why are you spinning so much? Or, easy, tiger,
- hands to yourself. I am excitable. I'm sorry. I'm grateful. I just want us to be friends now. Forever.
- Take this bowl of blackberries from the garden. The sun has made them warm. I picked them just for you.
- I promise I will stay on my side of the couch.
- And thank you the baggy of dreadlocks I found in a drawer while washing and folding the clothes of our
- murdered friend. The photo in which his arm slung around the sign to the trail of silences. Thank you
- the way before he died he held his hands open to us. For coming back in a waft of incense or in the
- shape of a boy in another city looking from between his mother's legs or disappearing into the stacks
- after brushing by.
- For moseying back in dreams where, seeing us lost and scared, he put his hand on our shoulders and pointed
- us to the temple across town. And thank you to the man all night long hosing a mist on his early bloomed
- peach tree so that the hard frost not waste the crop. The ice in his beard and the ghosts lifting from
- him when the warming sun told him sleep now.
- thank you the ancestor who loved you before she knew you by smuggling seeds into her braid for the long
- journey. Who loved you before he knew you by putting a walnut tree in the ground. Who loved you before
- she knew you by not slaughtering the land. Thank you who did not bulldoze the ancient grove of
- dates and olives, who sailed his keys into the ocean and walked softly home, who did not fire, who did
- not plunge the head into the toilet, who said, stop, don't do that, who lifted some broken someone up,
- who volunteered. The way a plant birthed of the reseeding plant is called a volunteer.
- Like the plum tree that marched beside the raised bed in my garden. Like the arugula that marched itself
- between the blueberries. Nary a bayonet. Nary an army. Nary a nation.
- Which usage of the word volunteer, familiar to gardeners the wide world, made my pal shout, oh, and
- dance and plunge his knuckles into the lush soil before gobbling two strawberries and digging a song
- from a guitar made of wood from a tree someone may be planted. Thank you. And thank you, Zinnia and
- Gooseberry, Rebekia and Pawpaw, Ashmeads, Colonel, Coxcomb, Scarlet Runner, Feverfew, Lemon Balm.
- Thank you, Knitbone and Sweetgrass and Sunchoke and False Indigo whose petals
- it apart by bumblebees. Good Lord, give me that. And Moonglow and Katkin and Krupnack and Painted Tongue
- and Seed Pod and Johnny Jump up. Thank you, what in us rackets glad, what glad rackets us. And thank
- you to this knuckleheaded heart.
- This pelican heart, this gap-toothed heart flinging open its gaudy maw to the sky. Oh, clumsy,
- oh, bumblefucked, oh, giddy, oh, dumbstruck, oh, rickshaw, oh, goat twisting its head at me from my
- peach tree's highest branch, balance impossibly gobbling the last fruit, its tongue working like an
- engine, a lone sweet drop tumbling by some miracle into my mouth.
- like the smell of someone I have loved. Heart like an elephant screaming at the bones of her dead. Heart
- like the lady on the bus dressed head to toe in gold, the sun shivering, her shiny boots singing Erykah
- Badu to herself, leaning her head against the window. And thank you to the way my father one time came
- back in a dream by plucking the two cables beneath my chin like a bass fiddle strings that played me
- until I woke singing. No kidding, I was singing and smiling. Thank you.
- where the Juneberry's flowers had burst open like the bells of French horns. The lily my mom and I planted
- oozed into the air. The bazillion ants labored in their earthen workshops below. The collard greens
- were waving in the wind like the sails of ships, and the wasps swam in the mint bloom's viscous swill.
- And you, again you, friend, were hanging tight.
- I know I can be long-winded sometimes. I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude over every last
- thing, including you, which, yes, it's awkward. The suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling
- gem slipping into your eye, soon it'll be over.
- Which is precisely what the child in my dream said, holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and
- the sky, hurtling our way like so many buffalo who said, it's much worse than we think. And sooner.
- To whom I said, no duh, child in my dreams. What do you think this singing and shuddering is? What this
- screaming and reaching
- and dancing and crying is other than loving what every second goes away. Goodbye, I mean to say. And
- thank you, every day. Thank you.
- Thank you, thank you, thank you. Okay. That was nice. Thank you to Ross. Yeah.
- That was beautiful. It's a rare treat to see that poem read again. Can we get a spotlight up here? Make
- it low for us. It's cool too.
- the pawn shop in town, and it gets a little out of tune. It was $100, and I was trying to get a deal
- on it, so I was like... And I was like, what are you gonna do about that? And the guy was like, you
- don't play up there anyways. You gotta buy that. And he was right. I did buy it. I'm a sucker.
- Brand new song. So the band hasn't learned it yet.
- Asia Essex here on the soprano saxophone. Matt Narrowland on the trumpet back there. And Dylan Maloney
- here on the alto saxophone.
- One second before I said it, because we've gotten his name wrong a bunch of times. Not the Dylan part,
- but the second part. I'm pretty sure I said Dylan Maloney. But we've, that's the one. Yeah, that's it.
- Okay. Good. Yeah. Yeah. When you're with Dylan Maloney. Yeah, we know
- Thank you all so much for being here. Thank you so kindly. Took a lot of great support to get to this
- moment, so really appreciate it. It's been a really crazy year for us, so we really appreciate everybody
- being here. Yeah. Thanks so much. This is our last song. Thank you all for being here.
- Come on, we'll do it again. What's the point of being hard though, you know? That's right. Thank you
- all for being here. We really appreciate everybody being here. It really means a lot. Yeah,
- we love you all. Yeah, let's make this one last. We really appreciate it. Thank you to Ross. Let's give
- him a round of applause again. Ross Gay, everybody. Ross, National Treasure.
- He's a national treasure. We really appreciate him being around and inspired around us. Okay,
- let's rock this.