WEBVTT 00:00:36.450 --> 00:00:43.452 - and welcome to the Free Verse annual program. This is our 10th annual poetry reading. Checking 00:00:43.452 --> 00:00:51.487 - our references, we found out that the 10th is the aluminum anniversary. Trying to read a little significance 00:00:51.487 --> 00:00:59.152 - into that, we decided even if we're lightweight, we're tough. So this is our 10th annual program. We're 00:00:59.152 --> 00:01:06.302 - glad that you all came and joined us on a beautiful early spring afternoon. We want to thank our 00:01:06.946 --> 00:01:13.112 - The program sponsors this year, which are the Runciful Spoon and Matrix, a space for literary and visual 00:01:13.112 --> 00:01:19.102 - arts. Thanks to the library for use of the auditorium and to CATS for filming the program, as well as 00:01:19.102 --> 00:01:25.034 - playing the program throughout the year. Mark Minster has joined the group this year and is on stage 00:01:25.034 --> 00:01:31.024 - with us for the first time. Our long-standing valued member, Tonya Matthew, is on sabbatical. We look 00:01:31.024 --> 00:01:34.782 - forward to her coming back, being in the program in the future. 00:01:35.362 --> 00:01:41.675 - Tony Brewer is our special guest poet joining us this year, and you've already enjoyed the Swingin' 00:01:41.675 --> 00:01:48.177 - Beats, our musical group guest this year. That's Mitch Rice on guitar, Wade Van Orman on clarinet, Joe 00:01:48.177 --> 00:01:54.742 - Hickman on bass. As for the program this year, Thomas and Roger took on much of the work of organizing. 00:01:54.742 --> 00:02:01.055 - Carol designed the program and organized the food, as usual. Speaking of which, everybody's welcome 00:02:01.055 --> 00:02:03.454 - to join us for the cookies and punch. 00:02:03.810 --> 00:02:10.159 - back around the hall in room 1B after the program. We'll have the usual 10-minute intermission halfway 00:02:10.159 --> 00:02:16.385 - through. We hope that you will help us keep the flow of the program going by holding applause and or 00:02:16.385 --> 00:02:22.549 - other reaction until either the intermission or the end of the program. And our theme you will have 00:02:22.549 --> 00:02:28.960 - noticed is News of the World. Incidentally, if you don't have a program over here with titles and poets 00:02:28.960 --> 00:02:32.350 - listed, there are some by the door. News of the World. 00:02:32.866 --> 00:02:40.224 - William Carlos Williams has penned these lines. It's difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die 00:02:40.224 --> 00:02:46.654 - miserably every day for lack of what is found therein. So that's our theme for this year. 00:03:39.522 --> 00:03:48.715 - Outriding horses on a morning of every mildness march could make, between its ides and equinox. No breath 00:03:48.715 --> 00:03:57.387 - of frost staying, or first zephyrs luring up new buds. We found a long ridge of hardwood sovereigns 00:03:57.387 --> 00:04:05.886 - hushed, empty-limbed, and pure of tangle, vine, or underbrush. How could we ride then but silent? 00:04:06.626 --> 00:04:14.683 - kept in thin sun and the breathless stir until my wife said from behind me on the trail. I never remember 00:04:14.683 --> 00:04:22.588 - these names, but your mother would if she were here. She'd know beech or oak or hickory from the shape, 00:04:22.588 --> 00:04:30.265 - the texture of bark, and say something she first learned about each when she was a girl in Iowa. And 00:04:30.265 --> 00:04:36.574 - how then but remembering her love of travel, her favorite poems, until the horses, 00:04:36.706 --> 00:04:47.731 - winded, brought us to a glade of silent pines. Joe Pie is a native wildflower that is named after a 00:04:47.731 --> 00:04:59.198 - Native American healer who used the plant as one of his medicines. Within the teeming fields of August, 00:04:59.362 --> 00:05:06.894 - The myriad greens, yellows, purples, white lace, and browning grasses rise the dusty mauve clouds of 00:05:06.894 --> 00:05:14.799 - Jopi. These perennial herbs seem ancient to me, like the lives of native peoples. Their spirits abandoned 00:05:14.799 --> 00:05:22.779 - here, intermingled now with the same loud churning of insects they knew so well. Tall Jopi, the allurement 00:05:22.779 --> 00:05:28.670 - of butterflies on vivid wings that flicker like flames on the blaze of summer. 00:05:29.602 --> 00:05:37.646 - The mists that lie upon the fields on some cool mornings mute the colors of day and magnify the memories 00:05:37.646 --> 00:05:45.306 - of our losses. Beyond that scrim, I imagine the people moving, quietly trailing ghosts circling the 00:05:45.306 --> 00:05:53.120 - fields of abundance, reminding me with their faded eyes of the decaying of history, a story retold in 00:05:53.120 --> 00:05:56.414 - the persistence of that old healer, Jopai. 00:06:07.554 --> 00:06:15.297 - The Dalai Lama turns 70, and Bloomington is teeming with monks. They have come in from our cornfields, 00:06:15.297 --> 00:06:23.491 - across oceans and mountains, the biggest of all, exile. Their scarlet robes signify a charity and compassion 00:06:23.491 --> 00:06:31.083 - only their perfect minds can fully address. And then you arrive at their shoes, brown leather, black 00:06:31.083 --> 00:06:37.022 - socks elevated to mid-calf by samsara. Even this shiny creaking newness chants 00:06:37.122 --> 00:06:44.742 - in low tritones, I am ignorant of your feudal materialistic ways, merciless American imperial dead soul 00:06:44.742 --> 00:06:52.216 - man-child. And yet they, too, pour over the birthday card section at Target, searching and selecting, 00:06:52.216 --> 00:06:59.836 - sometimes frowning, furrowing their shaved golden heads, sometimes erupting with a belly laugh reserved 00:06:59.836 --> 00:07:06.430 - for such profane aisles as this. But mostly they simply open a card, read the punch line, 00:07:06.658 --> 00:07:16.570 - laughed at themselves, and spited themselves, consider this moment for a moment, and move on to another, 00:07:16.570 --> 00:07:26.294 - perhaps more perfect, birthday blessing. Emma, I wrote a big poem about you, but it wasn't big enough. 00:07:26.294 --> 00:07:35.262 - And the words gone over a second time fell flat and colorless and lay embarrassed on my table. 00:07:36.258 --> 00:07:42.245 - I have thrown them away as you have too much respect for me to have something less than grand written 00:07:42.245 --> 00:07:48.290 - about you. In the writing of that poem, I came to realize you were winning the contest, for I finished 00:07:48.290 --> 00:07:54.395 - it thus. Am I find you a challenge? You have escaped me mostly this time, but I shall take you up again 00:07:54.395 --> 00:08:00.440 - when you aren't looking. I'm coming back without warning. I'll grab you some night when you're cooking 00:08:00.440 --> 00:08:01.790 - greens in the kitchen. 00:08:02.242 --> 00:08:08.888 - or yelling at your son sitting on the bed with his shoes on. And I shall have you run you down the page 00:08:08.888 --> 00:08:15.278 - with this keyboard, my eyes in hot pursuit, getting you on paper before you realize you've been had 00:08:15.278 --> 00:08:21.093 - one more time by a white man. But now there's a difference. This is free. This time, Emma, 00:08:21.093 --> 00:08:25.758 - no money down, no money to pay. Or said better yet, you've already paid. 00:08:36.226 --> 00:08:45.520 - hiding in plain sight. It's not likely in 2006 that the muse is a long-tressed maiden trailing diaphanous 00:08:45.520 --> 00:08:54.288 - veils, scattering flower petals, at best elusive, at worst prone to tease. What if she or he is the 00:08:54.288 --> 00:09:03.582 - uniformed mail carrier and we are too offhand to note the stanzas tucked among each day's glossy clutter? 00:09:04.674 --> 00:09:13.246 - Maybe the muse arrives electronically, disguised as spam. I know I have from time to time felt challenged 00:09:13.246 --> 00:09:21.413 - to compose a Viagra Villanelle. Or could it be that listed in the lost and found columns, the sought 00:09:21.413 --> 00:09:29.823 - after waits for us to claim what is lyrically ours? If visiting garage sales amid the chipped mugs with 00:09:29.823 --> 00:09:34.270 - mother in gold and roses, the pilled acrylic sweaters, 00:09:34.530 --> 00:09:49.239 - Within that carton of empty frames may be, but herein lies the magic we are not to know, just to become 00:09:49.239 --> 00:10:03.806 - alert, tingling for gifts. The Widower. Only after her mirror betrays him, pearls in a cream camisole, 00:10:04.546 --> 00:10:12.456 - His ivory chest hairs foresting through a lacy rose garden like snowy pines or closet-grown sprouts. 00:10:12.456 --> 00:10:20.600 - Only after his thumbs have rummaged her satin nightclothes fraught open the clumsy garters for the last 00:10:20.600 --> 00:10:28.902 - time this time, touching his old limbs with each slip's shoulder straps. Only after he has doused himself 00:10:28.902 --> 00:10:34.462 - with every fragrance she used to use, jellied his hair with her mousse 00:10:34.850 --> 00:10:46.622 - cue chalked up his eyelids like a pool player or real whore. Only after all of this will he acknowledge 00:10:46.622 --> 00:10:58.394 - his harsh last words to her, mouthing them now to the mirror, now to the air. The old woman Jane found. 00:10:58.394 --> 00:11:01.790 - We didn't even know her name. 00:11:02.146 --> 00:11:09.781 - A widow newly moved to the only rental on the block, one side of a peeling duplex, her porch light burning 00:11:09.781 --> 00:11:17.059 - on a bright autumn day. Jane, a good neighbor, had gone to tell her so. That's when the sheriff came, 00:11:17.059 --> 00:11:24.408 - no sirens, stopped with a squeal, blue light flashing, luring neighbors, kids on bikes, even Nikki Ray 00:11:24.408 --> 00:11:28.190 - from down the street who cheers for the high school. 00:11:29.442 --> 00:11:36.905 - Having called our paper boy back to deliver no doubt the hottest news of his 10 years, we asked what 00:11:36.905 --> 00:11:44.516 - was going on. He was quick to tell how the rug was twisted under her legs, how the face was all scary, 00:11:44.516 --> 00:11:52.128 - and how the cat might have done it, still eating from a spilt box of nine lives when the sheriff broke 00:11:52.128 --> 00:11:57.374 - the glass, reached in, and opened the door. 88 and dead, the boy said. 00:11:57.858 --> 00:12:07.813 - The old woman Jane found. Roost, in the morning I find you lulling in a field of flowers, sun's wild 00:12:07.813 --> 00:12:17.867 - eye blossom, lemmoning your skin. But when I think of you, as rain recalls mist, as dewdrops bring to 00:12:17.867 --> 00:12:25.950 - mind falling stars, I see you flapping through my dreams, a large dove-like bird, 00:12:26.242 --> 00:12:37.246 - with a heart beating intemperately fast, a bird which has come to roost on the firm, stretched skin 00:12:37.246 --> 00:12:48.911 - of my breast, the same skin which covers my ribcage, the same ribcage which nestles and anchors my heart. 00:12:48.911 --> 00:12:50.782 - To Viola Lucero. 00:12:52.866 --> 00:12:59.585 - Saying goodbye is saying I must accept the silences where your laughter is now, where now is found your 00:12:59.585 --> 00:13:06.174 - smile, your expletives undeleted, your swift hands raised in mock shock to your raucous face, at some 00:13:06.174 --> 00:13:12.893 - retort you'd loved and then surpassed, making us both get tears at our eyes' edges. But once in a while 00:13:12.893 --> 00:13:19.806 - I spy you on the phone running your show or being the center of a willing circle, and I am calm and quiet. 00:13:20.546 --> 00:13:26.665 - is I think of your story of the Texas bus station civil rights as ago, when the whites wouldn't let 00:13:26.665 --> 00:13:33.030 - you pee, when the blacks wouldn't let you pee, and you sat on the bus in agony, too dark and too light. 00:13:33.030 --> 00:13:39.210 - Not negroid, not carcassoid, but an almond-eyed, oval-faced, beautiful little girl who had committed 00:13:39.210 --> 00:13:45.758 - the crime of being born an American. A fact all those immigrants, forced and non-forced, could not handle. 00:13:47.042 --> 00:13:53.000 - And in the midst of our wonderful silliness, in the middle of a joke, a bitchy, gossipy tale about a 00:13:53.000 --> 00:13:59.194 - dummy mutually thought, or when you are so competently carrying on, well-dressed, a good-looker, poised, 00:13:59.194 --> 00:14:05.211 - and positive, I think about you sitting on that bus in the heat of Texas and remember with such shame 00:14:05.211 --> 00:14:11.170 - our history of little brown violas waiting on buses to be carried uncomforted across their own taken 00:14:11.170 --> 00:14:15.358 - land, or little black ones blown up in churches exploding the country. 00:14:16.514 --> 00:14:23.115 - And I look at my own brown daughter and am relieved she will not suffer indignities of older generations 00:14:23.115 --> 00:14:29.465 - and intend to tell her your story so she will know where some people's souls come from and why it is 00:14:29.465 --> 00:14:36.004 - important to be able to laugh not just to keep from crying, but to laugh with relief that one need only 00:14:36.004 --> 00:14:41.662 - laugh for the cringing joy of laughing at life no longer having to be taken so seriously. 00:14:51.234 --> 00:14:58.760 - The Colonists. I have seen the Amish driving front inloaders down at the local wood yard, scooping up 00:14:58.760 --> 00:15:06.138 - bucketfuls of log tops and gnarled, unsplittable rounds, dumping them into the cavernous bed of two 00:15:06.138 --> 00:15:13.516 - new Fords. Papa stands atop the free Yupik wood pile, tall and proud beneath a black hat, as though 00:15:13.516 --> 00:15:20.894 - God himself selected this age, this place, this one patient pilgrim for to impart his vast message. 00:15:21.026 --> 00:15:27.571 - Papa is working and waiting for the word, waiting and working for it. Sitting in the front seat of one 00:15:27.571 --> 00:15:34.052 - truck, neatly obscured by her bonnet, the daughter discovers us, slowly loading our truck by hand. My 00:15:34.052 --> 00:15:40.470 - mate and I are wearing flannel shirts. I'm under a long shoreman's cap, she in muddy gloves, both of 00:15:40.470 --> 00:15:47.078 - us wrapped in denim and with long decadent ponytails down our backs. The daughter whispers, Papa, she's 00:15:47.078 --> 00:15:48.222 - wearing overalls. 00:15:49.634 --> 00:15:56.039 - I have seen the Amish restore a sundered barn with only mallets and glue and whip the horse for failing 00:15:56.039 --> 00:16:02.382 - to lift a beam. I have felt the roar of their heavy machinery resonating up from wood yard mud through 00:16:02.382 --> 00:16:08.787 - scrap logs and work boots and gloves as the bucket slams into the pile then raises under heaven another 00:16:08.787 --> 00:16:15.315 - load. Some Amish families allow convenience for the betterment of the community. Electricity, telephones, 00:16:15.315 --> 00:16:16.670 - chainsaws, bush hogs, 00:16:17.666 --> 00:16:24.359 - I have seen Amish bush hogs pulled by Amish tractors refueled by Amish pickups rolling across wide, 00:16:24.359 --> 00:16:31.186 - quiet Amish fields. Oh, the furniture they must make to atone for the foregone scythe. The tremendous 00:16:31.186 --> 00:16:38.281 - thread count of their quilts is a sermon. The smoothness of their sanctified butter and cheese, a prayer. 00:16:38.281 --> 00:16:45.175 - I have seen the Amish shopping at Walmart where the little girls eye more than jeans and bras. One day 00:16:45.175 --> 00:16:47.518 - that daughter will have the choice 00:16:48.162 --> 00:16:55.151 - As a teenager let loose upon the world, she may stay among the English if she can't go home again. But 00:16:55.151 --> 00:17:01.461 - she will come home, this one, and many after her to colonies at the end of dark gravel lanes 00:17:01.461 --> 00:17:08.246 - after provocative ideas planted by temptation by this modern ashtray earth have been expressed away 00:17:08.246 --> 00:17:15.099 - come Rumspringa, the wild time when the bonnet is lifted from her eyes and she will find no peace at 00:17:15.099 --> 00:17:17.406 - all nor fully know it ever again. 00:18:29.282 --> 00:18:38.939 - weak at a glance after a quote from an episode of Monk on TV. He may kill you just because it's Wednesday. 00:18:38.939 --> 00:18:48.506 - Tuesdays he castrates if irritated and Mondays frequently dismembers. What about Thursdays and no mention 00:18:48.506 --> 00:18:53.470 - of Fridays? Thursdays he calls his mother, then fasts. 00:18:54.178 --> 00:19:10.003 - Fridays, he hones his knives, strips birch rods for weekends of self-flagellation and satanic intercourse. 00:19:10.003 --> 00:19:23.166 - Why do you ask? I'm here to cut his hair. Lush or Dry, Indiana, 1998. Such a warm winter 00:19:23.682 --> 00:19:32.424 - El Nino's doing. They said it would lessen spring, kill off unsuspecting buds, the early ones like lovers 00:19:32.424 --> 00:19:40.672 - who can't help themselves, the wet opening suddenly shot with late frost. And yet the world is lush 00:19:40.672 --> 00:19:49.002 - again, more so perhaps. At the end of the driveway, one tulip, cups so ablaze with red and yellow, a 00:19:49.002 --> 00:19:51.806 - drink from it would risk rapture. 00:19:52.834 --> 00:20:03.268 - And this morning, along the highway, flaming out of a rock wall, a bright loner of a red bud below the 00:20:03.268 --> 00:20:13.398 - steep ground above, rich with sheep and trees and tall mottled grasses measured by a line of barbed 00:20:13.398 --> 00:20:22.718 - wire, one man's rusty grip on the world as he sees it, no matter lush or dry. November sky. 00:20:23.714 --> 00:20:32.537 - string of cloud days, oyster shell gray, wake to darkness, breakfast through half light, season of deer 00:20:32.537 --> 00:20:41.360 - rot, of crimson seeping under autumn leaves, season of loss, of no certain tomorrow. Far across night's 00:20:41.360 --> 00:20:50.014 - borders, geese honk. How can they fly with such end of day energy? Wings negotiate such late arrival. 00:20:50.014 --> 00:20:53.662 - Yellow disc will arrive again, so radiant, 00:20:53.762 --> 00:21:05.091 - and ordinary. Sky will turn 911 blue and we will give thanks for one more perfect day, no matter how 00:21:05.091 --> 00:21:16.307 - insect wing fragile. Incidental music. More to this drifting shore. We watch the flaring sun recede 00:21:16.307 --> 00:21:23.486 - into quenching cold beyond the prostrate arms of the wide lake. 00:21:24.354 --> 00:21:32.676 - Church bells ring the hour, eight peals for a day fully passed. At nine o'clock, carillon chimes glitter 00:21:32.676 --> 00:21:40.840 - over the settling dunes, their notes disappearing into the water like cantable snow. Earth shadow blue 00:21:40.840 --> 00:21:49.004 - grounds the eastern sky as we walk together in hand with the chorus of crickets beyond the orange moon 00:21:49.004 --> 00:21:52.254 - rising. Besides the stillness inside me, 00:21:52.610 --> 00:22:04.388 - What else hears the music? Moving. When it came time to leave Texas, we got a rental truck and parked 00:22:04.388 --> 00:22:16.397 - at the curb in front of our house. Then we spent two days filling the truck in the cadence of the quiet 00:22:16.397 --> 00:22:18.014 - neighborhood. 00:22:19.234 --> 00:22:26.084 - Summer afternoon sun soon is gone from live oaks over city streets. When the house was empty, we stood 00:22:26.084 --> 00:22:33.000 - in front and looked at what had been our home. The green prickly pear in our front yard is dappled pink 00:22:33.000 --> 00:22:40.116 - with summer fruit. We drove away through the park along the river and up to the highway on pillars heading 00:22:40.116 --> 00:22:47.166 - north. The sky was banded caramel and coffee and rose. In leaving, we finally could see the city's heart. 00:22:48.994 --> 00:22:56.182 - First summer stars blink faint above a quick sunset in deep city streets. After just a few miles it 00:22:56.182 --> 00:23:03.442 - suddenly was too dark and we were too tired from the work of moving. We slept hard through an opaque 00:23:03.442 --> 00:23:10.845 - night beside the road and the next day drove east out of Texas and on across Arkansas. We lunch in big 00:23:10.845 --> 00:23:15.230 - sun and dust where heavy trucks swing down by summer fields. 00:23:24.162 --> 00:23:32.131 - Song for early in springtime. Under the glare of such stares as ours, what lovers could long survive. 00:23:32.131 --> 00:23:40.022 - We cannot always lie with each other as yesterday we lay, in a bright fallow field, our noses close, 00:23:40.022 --> 00:23:47.834 - steeped in the fragrance of cold dirt and young clover. Near seeds spat from unripe rose hips, side 00:23:47.834 --> 00:23:53.694 - by side we lay, lost for hours in a daydreamy gaze, long after the ground, 00:23:53.890 --> 00:24:01.782 - dulled our arms' nerves asleep. So close, the human eye cannot well adjust. The nearer I come to you, 00:24:01.782 --> 00:24:09.674 - the less light gets in. Your face deserts me. Pupils swell with a sick gravity of black bruises until 00:24:09.674 --> 00:24:17.953 - everything seems a cave. I need you just this much farther away if I'm to keep sight of your shape against 00:24:17.953 --> 00:24:23.678 - the shapes of town and hill. Distance will win back what proximity loses. 00:24:24.642 --> 00:24:32.405 - For if sad scrutiny has got it all wrong, scaring away what it's squints to describe, the galactic dilation 00:24:32.405 --> 00:24:39.593 - of lovers' round eyes has it worse, glazing our vision with a glassy sheen. Yesterday, darling, was 00:24:39.593 --> 00:24:46.782 - lovely but long. Today my neck is sore. Tomorrow we could try perhaps looking for the whole half of 00:24:46.782 --> 00:24:51.454 - things that lies behind us, letting more than ourselves be seen. 00:24:58.882 --> 00:25:06.444 - September leaving. Six o'clock and the cicadas continue their percussive music. While far away in San 00:25:06.444 --> 00:25:13.413 - Francisco, my daughter begins her grown-up life. Today, I found three hair bands on the lawn, 00:25:13.413 --> 00:25:20.901 - red and black, purple, and kelly green, more vivid than the grass itself, entwined on one several of 00:25:20.901 --> 00:25:27.870 - her golden hairs. Evidence tells man proof that she once lived with us, made our hearts sing, 00:25:28.162 --> 00:25:37.715 - as the cicadas do now, however mournfully. The Bowl of Possible Peas. It took me a long time to learn 00:25:37.715 --> 00:25:47.456 - to call them peas. Today I slipped up, surprised after years of using the right word, saying, I'm going 00:25:47.456 --> 00:25:57.758 - to have more beans. Do you want any? And my wife, either not hearing or finally resigned to my word, said no. 00:25:59.170 --> 00:26:05.955 - peas to me are pods filled with round balls of bright green that we grow in our truck patch, not the 00:26:05.955 --> 00:26:12.808 - black-eyed sort that I now eat every first day of January. For good luck, she said with determination 00:26:12.808 --> 00:26:19.593 - and certainty as she stirred the pot of beans, now peas, on our first New Year's in 1971. We have to 00:26:19.593 --> 00:26:26.110 - eat black-eyed peas on New Year's Day. My childhood was green, rows of corn, fields of soybeans. 00:26:26.498 --> 00:26:33.360 - a garden of carrot tops, sweet potato vines, tomato plants, and pea pods getting ready for snapping. 00:26:33.360 --> 00:26:40.221 - Her growing up was brown, the color of skin segregated to city playgrounds worn too thin. I ran free 00:26:40.221 --> 00:26:47.015 - in a green world, dashing barefoot between rows of field corn, the sharp-edged leaves slicing in my 00:26:47.015 --> 00:26:54.012 - shins, knowing nothing of black eyes by any name, or how one must never forget to seek the luck needed 00:26:54.012 --> 00:26:56.254 - to get through yet another year. 00:27:05.826 --> 00:27:13.782 - Cody, Wyoming, 4th of July, 1976. John Wayne weighs from open top tail fins, Americana on a roll, and 00:27:13.782 --> 00:27:21.738 - everyone's a cowpoke. Me, leaning against the wall, looking mean like James Dean, slick down hair and 00:27:21.738 --> 00:27:29.772 - wrapped in blue denim jeans and jacket, well-worn boots kicked out in front of me. The red skin stands 00:27:29.772 --> 00:27:33.438 - stiff and dumb, feathers and paint too bright. 00:27:33.730 --> 00:27:40.976 - plastic nose bones, impotent spears, maybe just little boys posing as enemies, filling a roll. I sang 00:27:40.976 --> 00:27:48.152 - amber waves of grain till blue in the face and rode silent across plain states. Every tree concealed 00:27:48.152 --> 00:27:55.469 - a bobcat or bear, every license plate a game. Dad smiled on that bicentennial, watching me in buckskin 00:27:55.469 --> 00:28:02.715 - vest, watching geysers at Yellowstone, throwing snowballs at the mountain. Cannon, fires from within, 00:28:02.715 --> 00:28:03.710 - shotgun float 00:28:03.842 --> 00:28:10.376 - Rolling down Main Street, Cody, Wyoming. Boom, we laugh at how loud. I stand awkward next to players 00:28:10.376 --> 00:28:16.910 - in the historic drama of USA, hand jammed in pocket, already looking too bored for all this, and dad 00:28:16.910 --> 00:28:23.379 - shifts for best instamatic light. We are glaring at him, my red-skinned brothers and I, waiting for 00:28:23.379 --> 00:28:24.414 - him to take it. 00:28:34.050 --> 00:28:43.832 - Mute is as mute does. It said life span comprises birth, sex, and death. So I've been thinking about 00:28:43.832 --> 00:28:53.710 - TV. We have control. On, mute, and off. Plus the range of varied channels. But then life offers those 00:28:53.710 --> 00:29:02.814 - as well. Doctor, sportsman, cowboy, pimp. The mute option intrigues. Right now, for instance, 00:29:03.042 --> 00:29:11.377 - A face is mouthing silent but carefully articulated words before a shelf of shelved shoes, and the little 00:29:11.377 --> 00:29:19.476 - button's gift is freedom to fantasize. This is his collection of footwear, filched from numerous crime 00:29:19.476 --> 00:29:27.496 - scenes before police arrived. He's not admitting that. Or, Let's Get Noir, garnered from relatives of 00:29:27.496 --> 00:29:31.742 - homicide victims. Maybe he owns a lonely hearts club, 00:29:32.034 --> 00:29:40.454 - And to match singles, he's inviting the desperate, the forlorn, to come pair if the shoe fits. Perhaps 00:29:40.454 --> 00:29:49.119 - their designer rejects, he bargained for. A Diamante buckle was slightly off center. Sequins were missing 00:29:49.119 --> 00:29:57.702 - on one instep. Or a job lot he bought at an estate sale. The deceased had a shoe fetish. They'd replaced 00:29:57.702 --> 00:29:59.582 - men who'd spurned her. 00:30:00.258 --> 00:30:14.235 - There was a phallus she held in every heel. If I grant the mouth voice, I know I'll be disenchanted. 00:30:14.235 --> 00:30:28.350 - It's a humdrum ad. Kurt's shoes for all your sporting needs. More remote from sex than fantasy. Wind. 00:30:29.250 --> 00:30:38.344 - New Hampshire, 1978, September 9. A deep rush of swallowing as if the continent were taking great gulps, 00:30:38.344 --> 00:30:47.439 - tidal waves of wind. Wind of erratic thrust and speed that scours the clouded sun, startles the delicate 00:30:47.439 --> 00:30:54.974 - ferns waving their green selves like tattered distress flags. Wind that suddenly stops 00:30:55.362 --> 00:31:04.890 - as if some huge myth of a bird had landed on Mount Monadnock to preen itself, still salt wet. September 00:31:04.890 --> 00:31:14.236 - 10. This day is a mute stare of absolute stillness. Where yesterday the trees creaked with the weight 00:31:14.236 --> 00:31:24.222 - of wind, today there is the close, pervading silence of loss. Even the ferns, always nodding and whispering, 00:31:24.642 --> 00:31:38.066 - have ceased bending each other's green ears. The sun moves through dark rooms, mourning no one. Under 00:31:38.066 --> 00:31:52.542 - White Pine Mountain. Back at the cabin, I cleaned up from the day's work and cooked supper on the wood stove. 00:31:53.378 --> 00:32:00.022 - Then I went outside under the last shoaling of light behind mountain silhouettes, rimming the field 00:32:00.022 --> 00:32:06.932 - of stars. Night breeze and breath of young pines where I sit opposite the cabindor's wedge of lamplight 00:32:06.932 --> 00:32:13.576 - on the ground. An owl's urgent baritone pulls me to enter the whispering night. The only human sign 00:32:13.576 --> 00:32:20.286 - in all that expanse was a light from the fire lookout on White Pine Mountain across the empty miles. 00:32:21.506 --> 00:32:28.537 - As young children, my brother and sister and I had believed the sporadic blinking of the light was a 00:32:28.537 --> 00:32:35.568 - signal to us from the people who lived May to September in that glass walled cabin high on stilts at 00:32:35.568 --> 00:32:42.668 - the mountain peak. But that summer at 16, I realized the blinking was only one of the rangers passing 00:32:42.668 --> 00:32:48.446 - on the close side of their gas lamp. Oblivious to the droplet, my camp represented 00:32:48.706 --> 00:32:51.774 - in all the ocean of darkness their tower rode above. 00:34:17.762 --> 00:34:27.334 - Late Sunday evening, reaching into the cupboard for chocolate, I brush a jar of mustard and suddenly 00:34:27.334 --> 00:34:37.380 - remember my sister telling me what my father said the day he died. Photogenic, I am torn down the middle. 00:34:37.380 --> 00:34:47.710 - There I stand with a faded old grin, my arm around nothing, air, the rip, the tear. I'm embracing her still. 00:34:51.458 --> 00:35:00.450 - When the phone rang, it was the phone wanting to talk to someone. Here with my begging bowl, wondering 00:35:00.450 --> 00:35:09.705 - what to write, I listen for a clink of pebble, a button perhaps, some small present dropped in its curve. 00:35:09.705 --> 00:35:18.959 - Exploring, I find no pebble but a green glass eye with a minute pupil, as if blown in too bright a light, 00:35:18.959 --> 00:35:20.094 - with no lid, 00:35:20.386 --> 00:35:33.425 - No socket, it stares, naked in my palm. A voyeur, I look away. Jealousy. My eyes are troubled by your 00:35:33.425 --> 00:35:46.337 - foot, nearly lost under a mist of white gown, your hand a dark lover, embracing your ankle. The girl 00:35:46.337 --> 00:35:48.382 - with blue hair. 00:35:48.578 --> 00:35:58.960 - The girl with blue hair and sequined eyes. The one with the dragonflies darting from her mouth. Each 00:35:58.960 --> 00:36:09.240 - a wish she will grant you. Do not dismiss her. She may not come again. Myopia, an impromptu survey. 00:36:09.240 --> 00:36:17.566 - Eight of eight poets wear glasses. Two of three musicians. First poem in a year. 00:36:18.786 --> 00:36:29.226 - Next door, my neighbor exclaims with hammer and saw, while I sit idle as a sunlit firefly, pen and paper 00:36:29.226 --> 00:36:39.567 - that any moment now, my hands will try like strange tools. Art. Surprisingly orange, the buggerfly weed 00:36:39.567 --> 00:36:47.422 - is blooming. Clashing symbols, childlike glee among the staid grasses of July. 00:36:48.130 --> 00:36:57.332 - An artist might be called clownish for painting such a scene. Too gaudy, incongruous to be real, but 00:36:57.332 --> 00:37:06.990 - see how the swallowtails gather and feed. See how I likewise stare at Water Lily's starry night Guernica. 00:37:06.990 --> 00:37:15.646 - She can make an afghan in four days, said so matter-of-factly yet so all-encompassingly proud. 00:37:16.162 --> 00:37:22.114 - of another old woman, a feat she had expected us to admire and understand the portent of. But since 00:37:22.114 --> 00:37:28.066 - we did not know how long it took to make an Afghan, the exact meaning of her words went by us, that 00:37:28.066 --> 00:37:34.138 - we did understand in the general sense her source of felt pride in her companion who did a good thing 00:37:34.138 --> 00:37:40.269 - thought good. She could make an Afghan in four days, said so calmly, so proudly, that we shared in her 00:37:40.269 --> 00:37:45.566 - calm pride and enjoined her to stop trying to explain. We understood even if we did not. 00:37:49.314 --> 00:37:58.809 - Every December I think of death, the way we leave the party one by one, sometimes shepherding our chairs 00:37:58.809 --> 00:38:08.484 - against the wall, sometimes leaving hat or gloves, pink or plaid reminders, hat bow, percoli tied, leather 00:38:08.484 --> 00:38:17.527 - glove forever imprinted by a slender hand. In the fridge, I found a four leaf clover propped in the 00:38:17.527 --> 00:38:18.974 - glass of water. 00:38:19.234 --> 00:38:27.425 - next to the milk and lettuce. How nice. She wishes me well. It remained for days, pert and green. Then 00:38:27.425 --> 00:38:35.774 - she gave it away. It wasn't ever mine. Luck comes and goes like a breeze. A touch on the face, a fragile 00:38:35.774 --> 00:38:43.726 - thought replaced by the mayo and beer. They tried to make things easy because they'd been trying to 00:38:43.726 --> 00:38:49.054 - make things work so long they forgot how to make things beautiful. 00:40:24.898 --> 00:40:31.955 - Track two for Bucharest. If I were to be a spy, I'd call myself Gomez, a delicious name sounding so 00:40:31.955 --> 00:40:39.436 - spies to me, innocuous to those after my secrets. Cohorts would slip into my pew in the back of churches, 00:40:39.436 --> 00:40:46.705 - place a thick envelope in an uncommon book of prayer. Gomez, they'd whisper, pretending to be reciting 00:40:46.705 --> 00:40:54.398 - responses to the priest. As we knelt, crossed ourselves, stood and knelt again. Go to Bucharest, they'd say. 00:40:54.658 --> 00:41:05.492 - Give this money to Smith. Smith, I'd almost smile. What a name for a spy. I am Gomez rushing to the 00:41:05.492 --> 00:41:16.542 - train, patting my pocket of pounds, smiling in my nomenclature, nodding to Dowagers boarding ahead of 00:41:16.542 --> 00:41:24.126 - me, all of us spies heading for a plain named man in Bucharest. Crux. 00:41:25.666 --> 00:41:33.028 - I'd like to invite Jesus to take a drive downtown with me to view the Christmas lights. Not on a Friday 00:41:33.028 --> 00:41:40.674 - evening, of course. I wouldn't ask him to travel on the Sabbath. But he might get a kick out of Bloomington 00:41:40.674 --> 00:41:48.390 - festooned for his birthday. Or would humility get in the way and ruin it for him? How do I explain reindeers 00:41:48.390 --> 00:41:54.974 - and sleighs on roofs, inflated Santas in gardens, the whole saint business so alien to Jews? 00:41:55.522 --> 00:42:04.082 - Oh, those are the homes of heathens and those sacks of toys. He'd recall having said, suffer the little 00:42:04.082 --> 00:42:12.312 - children to come unto me. Pretty rough then to discover he has serious competition from toys or us. 00:42:12.312 --> 00:42:17.086 - I'd better forget it. This joyride is across a minefield. 00:42:26.626 --> 00:42:35.014 - Luck. Driving home, 37 bypass, thinking he could do it blind, he wonders if it's always the same crows 00:42:35.014 --> 00:42:43.564 - bickering, lifting in half flight above and around each other on the high limbs, waiting for that edible 00:42:43.564 --> 00:42:52.033 - luck sometimes marked with a flare of blood that quickly pales as they float in and out of the rhythmic 00:42:52.033 --> 00:42:53.662 - lull of stoplights. 00:42:54.178 --> 00:43:03.792 - feeding on meat smoked in carbon monoxide, or, as he saw one do only yesterday, rise and veer off, a 00:43:03.792 --> 00:43:13.310 - slow motion train of crows in loud pursuit of the white sack, the golden arch crumpled in its bill. 00:43:23.458 --> 00:43:31.431 - murder at the big pond. There is something falling to the ground in the woods. The earth beneath it 00:43:31.431 --> 00:43:39.643 - is a crime scene. The screaming witness of cicadas points to the frogs who croak, two killed. Then the 00:43:39.643 --> 00:43:48.015 - cricket, first the cricket, then the fish, a flash of steel, a hook torn out with pliers, then the knife 00:43:48.015 --> 00:43:52.958 - and the remains thrown into a ravine. It was good, they said. 00:43:53.346 --> 00:44:03.554 - The fishing was good. Stand point. To ease the pain in my back, I lean on the hoe while the yellow and 00:44:03.554 --> 00:44:13.861 - black spider works its web at the edge of the garden. How careful, how poised as it fashions the limpid 00:44:13.861 --> 00:44:20.798 - net to tangle its tiny prey. I bend and continue to order the ground. 00:44:22.050 --> 00:44:30.429 - A pilot's eyes sweep the forest and fields lush green to the horizon. He can just make out a form, leaning 00:44:30.429 --> 00:44:38.574 - on a stick beside a tiny patch of rose. How simple and haunting the work of a gardener, so spare within 00:44:38.574 --> 00:44:40.062 - the sea of summer. 00:44:41.314 --> 00:44:51.450 - In the silence of its orbit, the blue-green sphere of Earth, its tan-smeared deserts, scattered puzzle 00:44:51.450 --> 00:45:01.389 - of clouds, conceits of life unresolved, floats within the twilight of knowing everywhere beyond. For 00:45:01.389 --> 00:45:07.294 - want of a better heaven, God invented a Bloomington spring. 00:45:07.522 --> 00:45:15.274 - She dresses the flowering pear trees on Atwater until they wave in unison their ivory petticoats. Meanwhile, 00:45:15.274 --> 00:45:22.457 - the pyromanical redwoods ignite pink and lavender branch fires up and down Maxwell. And those lilacs 00:45:22.457 --> 00:45:29.640 - on Morningside pressed into bloom early offer the grape-shaped clusters of praise. Finally, the lone 00:45:29.640 --> 00:45:36.254 - tulip in our front yard, apricot brushed with rose, rushes to open her topsy-turvy umbrella. 00:45:36.482 --> 00:45:49.368 - to welcome the rain. Enphaloskepsis means the contemplation of one's belly button. I've shown you mine, 00:45:49.368 --> 00:46:02.750 - this sinkhole in my belly, my little storehouse of cake, crumbs, and fuzz, my salt cellar, my berry basket, 00:46:03.394 --> 00:46:10.591 - My, how slowly and well we watched your fingers trace from periphery to center. Now you show me your 00:46:10.591 --> 00:46:17.717 - goblet, your puckered grail, thimble from which I'd sip water as well as wine. Lift just the hem of 00:46:17.717 --> 00:46:24.914 - your shirt. Let one thumb barely pass across it. Let me use my smallest finger, my wrist, the top of 00:46:24.914 --> 00:46:29.118 - my tongue. This is where you came from. This is the place. 00:46:29.282 --> 00:46:43.291 - some responsible person drew a blade and made you lonely, you as yet too young to feel any different 00:46:43.291 --> 00:46:57.022 - then as well as now. Vanished land. Gradually now I can see that ranch for its place in the world. 00:46:57.858 --> 00:47:06.437 - At the far edge of land we make were made spirits that hold in pastures, barns, and corrals, reach to 00:47:06.437 --> 00:47:15.016 - the edge of older spirits flowing in the woods as they flowed so long before we came. The horses look 00:47:15.016 --> 00:47:23.427 - up at shadows where a coyote trots through April woods. Three deer wait and watch an edge of summer 00:47:23.427 --> 00:47:25.950 - evening pasture losing light. 00:47:27.586 --> 00:47:34.749 - It is not a sharp line there, but a margin of mixing on the land. The cattle grazing deep August have 00:47:34.749 --> 00:47:41.771 - disappeared in pine shadowed woods. That was my father's world at the verge of what is wild. He was 00:47:41.771 --> 00:47:48.863 - a keeper of what makes so much difference across that blurry line. Looking for a calf lost in spring 00:47:48.863 --> 00:47:51.742 - snow, the neighbor finds a new bear cub. 00:48:40.322 --> 00:48:49.599 - Snow. Snow. A pollster of fence rows, painter of red oak, limbs both upright and fallen. How do you 00:48:49.599 --> 00:48:59.526 - taste? What makes you float? How can you hold so much tiny cold in your arms? Who made you rain's miracle, 00:48:59.526 --> 00:49:05.278 - child's wonder, mouth upturned to receive like a baby bird's? 00:49:05.570 --> 00:49:17.249 - I think you are stars transform, souls hurrying back to earth, light now, bodyless, so many crystals 00:49:17.249 --> 00:49:29.854 - of quiet wonder to slide into nothingness. The given. What news, dark trout? What news of the world to come? 00:49:31.170 --> 00:49:38.122 - Surely you've seen so surely you know the strange currents and deeps the rivers come from. You swim 00:49:38.122 --> 00:49:45.075 - in water like time. You gleam in the hand like change. You prophesied to poets long centuries past, 00:49:45.075 --> 00:49:52.236 - gave counsels and lore and the knife gift of speech to those swift enough of hand and eye to hold fast 00:49:52.236 --> 00:49:58.910 - your shattered scale mirrors. Beseeching each to return you to your stream, your stream to you. 00:50:00.130 --> 00:50:09.469 - Give to me now what you've been given to give, and I will tell others what you tell me to, of the dark 00:50:09.469 --> 00:50:18.627 - mouths of rivers, and I will let you live. I like words for their sounds that slosh and spew out the 00:50:18.627 --> 00:50:26.878 - mouth running along the tongue, jumping the fillings, leaping unreturnable into the world. 00:50:28.034 --> 00:50:34.999 - I like them to make my jaws earn their keep, my saliva to spit about my tongue to conquer new sounds. 00:50:34.999 --> 00:50:41.965 - Words like ubiquitous, egregious, and cognizant. Bring joy to the nooks of my cranium responsible for 00:50:41.965 --> 00:50:48.793 - joy. Force my facial muscles into smiles, my eyes to twinkle. What pride is apparent to what I have 00:50:48.793 --> 00:50:55.963 - had my child invented such words. What delight on my face as unaware speakers spread those multisyllabic 00:50:55.963 --> 00:50:57.534 - germs about the globe. 00:50:58.818 --> 00:51:04.946 - Over hearing a conversation, I'd say, that's my boy's word, or my girl came up with that one. 00:51:04.946 --> 00:51:11.530 - And disbelievers would shy away from an overeager man spitting with excitement, all of us continuing 00:51:11.530 --> 00:51:18.309 - to use the words trapped and attributed in Webster's. Only the child and I aware of the beautiful taste 00:51:18.309 --> 00:51:19.678 - of their inventions. 00:51:28.354 --> 00:51:38.058 - Take the day," the back of his designer tee said as he passed me at the Y, leaving me wondering if across 00:51:38.058 --> 00:51:47.397 - the front was scrawled, it's all yours. Or perhaps I've had it in caps. Maybe it's still free, a sure 00:51:47.397 --> 00:51:56.094 - grab in this consumer world. Or he wants to say, I'd rather it blew up in your face than mine. 00:51:57.410 --> 00:52:09.146 - Maybe I've too little faith. Take the day off was the intent, but the armpit was too close. He just 00:52:09.146 --> 00:52:21.000 - got it off a seconds rack to sweat in. He hunches forward as he runs, so frets and puzzles chase him 00:52:21.000 --> 00:52:25.694 - six times round the track. The opening. 00:52:27.554 --> 00:52:35.793 - What if every painting, 17 in all, suddenly fell from the wall and everyone stopped mid everything, 00:52:35.793 --> 00:52:44.443 - bite, word, gesture, drink, and looked at the broken pile of art, really looked for the first time since 00:52:44.443 --> 00:52:50.622 - arriving by foot, car, bus, bike, and then at that very moment of looking, 00:52:51.170 --> 00:52:58.395 - let's say 1.60th of a second, as if flash and film had fixed it true as the last supper, the lights 00:52:58.395 --> 00:53:05.910 - dimmed. And the owner said, thanks for coming, meaning everything that had transpired up to that moment 00:53:05.910 --> 00:53:13.135 - was the exhibit. And everyone slowly left, some lingering in the doorway, others grabbing a handful 00:53:13.135 --> 00:53:19.710 - of crackers and cheese, a dash of Chardonnay in the plastic cup for the walk or ride home, 00:53:20.194 --> 00:53:32.758 - while a hardy few hurried around the corner for a late dinner at the beef and cabbage. Women on Currency. 00:53:32.758 --> 00:53:45.440 - Sacajawea looks like an Eskimo. And how nice. Her papoose shares the spotlight. Mothering a child deserves 00:53:45.440 --> 00:53:49.470 - gold medal the size of a quarter. 00:53:50.210 --> 00:53:56.809 - But don't dare show her leading Lewis and Clark. No one would ever believe it. I must take her in my 00:53:56.809 --> 00:54:03.408 - pocket for Susan B. Anthony. I've lost enough of those in Coke machines that I stopped carrying them 00:54:03.408 --> 00:54:09.942 - in the 80s. So egalitarian, they slide into slots made for George Washington so easily, so readily. 00:54:09.942 --> 00:54:13.470 - You don't get change. The machine just asks for more. 00:54:21.282 --> 00:54:31.278 - Clichés I have known. Mounted on a paperweight, the small jade editor bites the end of a marker and 00:54:31.278 --> 00:54:41.275 - grumbles from her position on my desk. I'm sick of blooms full blown, buds unfurling, longing looks, 00:54:41.275 --> 00:54:50.974 - and trees losing their leaves in the autumn of someone's days. Bored by princesses kissing frogs, 00:54:51.138 --> 00:54:59.356 - nights in shining armor and the sanctity of peace. Waken my interest. Write about a hunk with psoriasis 00:54:59.356 --> 00:55:06.546 - and a limp and keep it short. Find me a grandmother who pickles squirrels' brains and sold 00:55:06.546 --> 00:55:14.763 - them to unsuspecting laboratories. Please me with dogs that behave like dogs and don't speak with their 00:55:14.763 --> 00:55:18.398 - eyes. Write me a puma with a Mona Lisa smirk. 00:55:19.714 --> 00:55:31.952 - You keep away from cliches when images, rather than leap off the page, swing your eyeballs from their 00:55:31.952 --> 00:55:44.670 - sockets. Walls, a prose poem. Walls tell the truth no matter what. Like a scar, they are their own proof. 00:55:44.670 --> 00:55:48.030 - No pictures on these walls. 00:55:48.290 --> 00:55:56.353 - But insects crawl freely, a kind of moving picture. And there are stains, scratches, holes. These walls 00:55:56.353 --> 00:56:04.648 - are white. In sunlight, they are the brightest walls I have ever seen. I, too, bear marks of imperfection, 00:56:04.648 --> 00:56:12.478 - though I do not reflect the light like these walls. It is commonly known that the muse comes in many 00:56:12.478 --> 00:56:17.982 - guises. Thus, I am grateful to these walls for their collective effort 00:56:18.946 --> 00:56:30.086 - How they feel about this tribute I will never know. The best I can do is leave the walls no less than 00:56:30.086 --> 00:56:41.335 - they are, resplendently flawed. Feeding horses. We have chosen our days among creatures of bone memory 00:56:41.335 --> 00:56:46.686 - from eons of the herd, keeping strength and fear 00:56:46.946 --> 00:56:59.388 - and trust in hard limb and large eye. With no famous place, no city, only such fortune has brought us 00:56:59.388 --> 00:57:12.196 - to move with them through each arriving, each leaving of light from the earth. Nautilus, the world grows 00:57:12.196 --> 00:57:14.270 - young around me. 00:57:14.402 --> 00:57:21.173 - in its constant renewal and my own eager forgetfulness. This is how I am able to share the nightmares 00:57:21.173 --> 00:57:27.943 - of my forefathers and still enjoy indoor plumbing. Advancement is illusory when the planet won't stop 00:57:27.943 --> 00:57:34.780 - spinning, each step forward another fraction of earth turning backward beneath my feet. This no longer 00:57:34.780 --> 00:57:41.086 - depresses me, though I think that, too, is part of the preparation, the welcoming of darkness. 00:57:41.954 --> 00:57:51.138 - the bow that sways and the sun backlighting it, I could never hold them still and same anymore, even 00:57:51.138 --> 00:58:00.504 - if I tried. Some days they are the only way I know my eyes still tell the truth, that the world is not 00:58:00.504 --> 00:58:10.142 - completely unhinged, that no matter what, some things persist. Fault line. My mother isn't made of stone. 00:58:11.138 --> 00:58:18.659 - She has no seething molten core. She is a human woman who bore four children, made us not alone, but 00:58:18.659 --> 00:58:26.553 - with my father, who is himself just human, not some planet eroding to dust. This Earth would never regret 00:58:26.553 --> 00:58:34.224 - losing some children more than others. You can't, as you can with mothers, use jokes to make the Earth 00:58:34.224 --> 00:58:40.926 - forget it was angry. It doesn't get angry, and it doesn't get the jokes. It just abrades. 00:58:41.346 --> 00:58:52.084 - and slips away. The tethered windmill. Blades locked, turrets swinging a few degrees one way, 00:58:52.084 --> 00:59:04.078 - then the other, screech, screech, grading its insides. I'm reminded of a caged bear swinging its lowered 00:59:04.078 --> 00:59:08.190 - head side to side, hour after hour. 00:59:08.770 --> 00:59:17.055 - as the wind passes around and away over the lake. Not like a tree, a kite, or even a sail, set high 00:59:17.055 --> 00:59:25.506 - on its tower, cemented in place, swiveling to confront its power, geared to spin and spin, working to 00:59:25.506 --> 00:59:33.791 - lift water from a well, mill our bread, unused now, left to wrench against the shackles of age. The 00:59:33.791 --> 00:59:37.022 - wind is in my face, ruffling my shirt, 00:59:37.314 --> 00:59:46.232 - mind rocking, rocking, pulling against ideas, but the words do not come. I stare out and the wind passes 00:59:46.232 --> 00:59:49.374 - around and away over that vast lake. 01:01:19.842 --> 01:01:27.831 - Gossip. You wouldn't believe the lies about me, people spread behind closed doors. The lack of love, 01:01:27.831 --> 01:01:35.820 - the sin and debauchery, you wouldn't believe those lies about me. So if you're all hot to hear more, 01:01:35.820 --> 01:01:43.888 - you'll have to do it without me. I won't repeat the lies about me, people spread behind closed doors. 01:01:43.888 --> 01:01:48.318 - Refuge. Speaking to the powerful, I hear hollow echoes. 01:01:48.770 --> 01:01:58.662 - Looking for answers, I find mysteries. Pursuing faith, I walk. The sun rises, the day evolves, an old 01:01:58.662 --> 01:02:08.651 - field overflows with summer's wild zeal wherein I search for spirits that never lie. Among the people, 01:02:08.651 --> 01:02:16.798 - I find the angel of tears. In boulders these names, in these names moss and lichen, 01:02:17.890 --> 01:02:27.450 - in this moss-cold dew. It was as if a cloth embroidered with a thousand starlings had been shaken out 01:02:27.450 --> 01:02:37.010 - of a high window and the birds had winged free to crowd winter trees in unstitched confusion, the air 01:02:37.010 --> 01:02:45.726 - a while chittering, flock swooping this way and there against a pale backdrop of frayed sky. 01:02:49.954 --> 01:02:57.806 - six inches of fresh snow this morning, except where grackles flock, feeding in a circle of grass over 01:02:57.806 --> 01:03:05.811 - the septic tank. Oh, Lord, give me a watch that counts only crow calls, measures each day in wren song, 01:03:05.811 --> 01:03:13.971 - its second-hand pausing only as long as the young doe hesitates before the black band of road, its steady 01:03:13.971 --> 01:03:16.126 - heartbeat fueled by cricket 01:03:16.290 --> 01:03:24.051 - Cricket rasp, toad trowels, it's tomorrow one looms longing on wind. We live far enough from the hustle 01:03:24.051 --> 01:03:31.887 - of town, out where pastures feather into the hardwood forest coming back. Fields abandoned for a hundred 01:03:31.887 --> 01:03:39.425 - years are heavy stands now of maple and beech, hickory and oak, except where we keep a long strip in 01:03:39.425 --> 01:03:45.022 - grass so the horses can run, throwing their heads like banners in the sun. 01:03:50.562 --> 01:04:00.060 - Have you never felt the mad beauty of the weeds? O Heraclitus, Nebuchadnezzar, oh me, crazed and face 01:04:00.060 --> 01:04:09.371 - down in clover. Espial, if you come to that place on the shore on a clear day at a certain hour and 01:04:09.371 --> 01:04:19.614 - stand in one specific spot when the light's angle is just right, you will see waves swelling into a rock cove 01:04:19.714 --> 01:04:30.286 - thrust back in white sprays, disappearing in slips of rainbows. As black as my umbrella, his blackness 01:04:30.286 --> 01:04:40.858 - spattered with mud. The pony sports thin whiskers just below the jaw, appearing wise beyond his years, 01:04:40.858 --> 01:04:47.838 - his tail switching flies as we eye each other, sharing summer rain. 01:04:51.458 --> 01:05:00.243 - like a bat with fine ribbed wings in obscene disarray upon the blacktop, a crushed umbrella, spines 01:05:00.243 --> 01:05:09.204 - splayed by tires, the rain, that bad joke driving down. The chickadees have arrived this morning, all 01:05:09.204 --> 01:05:17.726 - eager and flighty as usual. No prayers to share, no gossip skeins to weave between branch sighs. 01:05:18.050 --> 01:05:27.517 - What sharpings, whose announcements, I'll never know. Still I recognize news from their thrumming hearts 01:05:27.517 --> 01:05:33.918 - to mine. In the serrated shadows of Ailanthus, a listless rattlesnake. 01:06:52.482 --> 01:07:01.793 - stealing from birds. Their quick alarms jangle the sun's rays. I am among them, balding, gentle, though 01:07:01.793 --> 01:07:10.835 - a predator of sorts. I eat their songs with a forked tongue and leave them flopping and dazed, still 01:07:10.835 --> 01:07:20.862 - whole of feather and bone. At night as they stir, solemn in their sleep, I sing their songs like a mockingbird. 01:07:21.314 --> 01:07:31.891 - as they dream uncontrollably of berries that ring. Our killing styles are so very different. When the 01:07:31.891 --> 01:07:42.468 - cats have cornered a mouse behind the bathroom door and I discovered in the morning the body limp and 01:07:42.468 --> 01:07:47.134 - wet and scratched up from hours of playtime, 01:07:47.938 --> 01:07:54.048 - I grab the twitching not yet corpse by the tail and fling it out into the snow. Later, there are tiny 01:07:54.048 --> 01:08:00.338 - footprints away from the crater he created, to the fire pit, to the birch tree, and back under the deck, 01:08:00.338 --> 01:08:06.388 - probably back to his warm little den, the wife waiting with a thimble full of brandy in his pipe and 01:08:06.388 --> 01:08:12.438 - slippers. Boy, have I got a story for you, he squeaks. I hear him now between the walls regaling and 01:08:12.438 --> 01:08:14.654 - embellishing, still very much alive. 01:08:15.682 --> 01:08:24.883 - You, on the other hand, upon discovering the vermin, grab a shoe and whack it over the head. Whack! 01:08:24.883 --> 01:08:34.269 - Whack! Is it still alive? Whack! Then toss it outside. I appreciate your thorough efforts, but I hope 01:08:34.269 --> 01:08:42.366 - you never find me that small or annoying. Parabolic. When Romans wanted to kill a bear, 01:08:43.074 --> 01:08:49.950 - They put a pot of honey on the ground under a tree and hung a log lengthwise over the honey pot. For 01:08:49.950 --> 01:08:56.963 - love of honey, the bear would shove the lumber which swung away and back, thumping the eyes and hungry 01:08:56.963 --> 01:09:03.771 - mouth before the bear could take a taste. To get closer to the pot, the bear struck ever harder and 01:09:03.771 --> 01:09:10.920 - the log kept striking ever harder back. And yet bears don't give up and yet neither do logs as the honey 01:09:10.920 --> 01:09:12.894 - sweetens in its perfect pot. 01:09:13.986 --> 01:09:24.869 - So my heart is the honey, and yet my heart is the bear, and yet my heart is the log gradually swaying 01:09:24.869 --> 01:09:35.751 - still. The perfect poem has a full moon float over it and two stars, one cascading. A stray mutt runs 01:09:35.751 --> 01:09:43.006 - through it, it's barking his spots into oblivion, past the prairie, 01:09:43.170 --> 01:09:50.587 - repubescent mice sing. In the perfect poem, a rosy at cloud cartwheels over a fence. It offers the sounds 01:09:50.587 --> 01:09:57.725 - of a lone stallion, neighing for his errant, donkey lover. In the perfect poem, a Havana cigar flames 01:09:57.725 --> 01:10:05.072 - into life, but the stogie remains hidden under dense smoke. While we readers must creep through, praying 01:10:05.072 --> 01:10:11.230 - will recognize the poem's beginning before its singes are vulnerable yet eager fingers. 01:10:18.498 --> 01:10:26.979 - Frog came in through the open doorway. Humming to himself, he tossed his boater onto the hat rack, hung 01:10:26.979 --> 01:10:35.298 - up his navy jacket, and stepped a little self-importantly into the drawing room. Imagine his surprise 01:10:35.298 --> 01:10:43.534 - on opening the liquor cabinet to find his secretary, who tendered to tipple, had definitely overdone 01:10:43.534 --> 01:10:46.878 - it this time. Supine amid the decanters, 01:10:47.074 --> 01:10:58.292 - Four paws awry, rat snored. Tonight at church I polished candlesticks and vases for Advent, glopping 01:10:58.292 --> 01:11:09.733 - pink goo all over the brass and rubbing for all I was worth. The harder I rubbed, the more I blackened 01:11:09.733 --> 01:11:14.398 - the rag, the more I thought I had to rub. 01:11:15.362 --> 01:11:24.743 - so much rank filthiness I didn't want to be seen. Till the priest said it wasn't dirt, it was just a 01:11:24.743 --> 01:11:34.495 - chemical reaction. I could scrub and scrub, and eventually I'd scour it to nothing. Tipple, an apparatus 01:11:34.495 --> 01:11:43.968 - for emptying freight cars by tipping them, Webster's New World Dictionary. Seek no door to this poem, 01:11:43.968 --> 01:11:44.990 - no window, 01:11:45.346 --> 01:11:53.793 - For argument's sake, call it a teepee on the moon. Listen as spacewalks hurdle paths into nothingness. 01:11:53.793 --> 01:12:02.322 - Bury this poem in the garden with a ripped fin of a garfish and a silken giraffe's ear. Notice the girl 01:12:02.322 --> 01:12:11.015 - with alabaster skin balance herself over the thrumming tracks, her silver cross a magnet for dragonflies. 01:12:11.015 --> 01:12:15.198 - Warn her that her umbrellas too small a reservoir. 01:12:15.362 --> 01:12:26.849 - for rain. April night. Slender candles of new growth on pine boughs out my window hold the urgent shine 01:12:26.849 --> 01:12:38.115 - of spring's half moon, like the dogwood flowers lilting there two weeks ago. Camellias in Seattle the 01:12:38.115 --> 01:12:40.766 - night our sun was born. 01:12:42.114 --> 01:12:55.210 - hollyhocks of a childhood evening with its breeze to tug high yearning after clouds that rode the brilliant 01:12:55.210 --> 01:13:08.670 - air. Cat. More lice and mercury rising. She streams up to the hatch, molds into symmetry, golden eyes staring. 01:13:09.314 --> 01:13:19.275 - Her stillness as absolute as Bast's breath held. When back arched, she later end stretches every muscle. 01:13:19.275 --> 01:13:28.382 - It is yet languorous, unhurried, an action so complete as to be obeisance to some perfect rule. 01:13:38.338 --> 01:13:45.394 - searching for a gene, images of immortality. I expected something small, a will of the wisp, 01:13:45.394 --> 01:13:53.058 - a weak voice, but she was the looming clouds, the waves, dunes, birds, the lake itself glistening to 01:13:53.058 --> 01:14:01.176 - the horizon. I imagined the merganser sitting alone on a rock was more than just a bird, rather a familiar 01:14:01.176 --> 01:14:04.894 - face, the way it cocked its head to look my way. 01:14:05.570 --> 01:14:13.694 - If I spoke to the bird, would she answer? I could not risk it. I wanted to believe that if I were still 01:14:13.694 --> 01:14:21.896 - enough in this, our refuge, she would be there to see and hear me, our murmured conversation just beyond 01:14:21.896 --> 01:14:29.942 - the sound of voices. The air seemed eddied with images like looking through old glass. Was this merely 01:14:29.942 --> 01:14:31.582 - the art of memories? 01:14:32.546 --> 01:14:40.475 - When massive old trees die, they slowly lose their limbs and bark, but stand for years an imperative 01:14:40.475 --> 01:14:48.876 - part of the living forest. Old battle sites, long abandoned homesteads, the places where love was learned, 01:14:48.876 --> 01:14:57.041 - the places loved, remain when the people are gone. Even those who were not there sometimes feel distant 01:14:57.041 --> 01:15:00.574 - incidents fading in that never quite appear. 01:15:01.506 --> 01:15:09.725 - The language of the dead may be different. In a quiet dune meadow, I thought I heard people talking 01:15:09.725 --> 01:15:18.273 - far away through the utter silence. I am sure it was not the wind. Death may be real, but not absolute. 01:15:18.273 --> 01:15:26.820 - If bodies merge with minds, what are the limits? Where are the boundaries? Alone on a high dune, I felt 01:15:26.820 --> 01:15:28.382 - my mind slip away. 01:15:28.898 --> 01:15:37.149 - I could see all the generations, each individual being out there together, each staring out with longing 01:15:37.149 --> 01:15:38.878 - under the cold stars. 01:16:46.114 --> 01:16:53.728 - Please keep your mind turned from madness and your face turned upward toward the sky where the pale 01:16:53.728 --> 01:17:01.417 - light of divinity drags a sparking chain across a blacktop night. Do not succumb to infinity and the 01:17:01.417 --> 01:17:09.259 - pressure of the untold depths of time crushing to a pulp even sadness and snuffing out all comers, all 01:17:09.259 --> 01:17:10.782 - sources, all light. 01:17:12.610 --> 01:17:20.778 - I do not pretend to know the reasons why all sorrow and all hatred finally turn to gladness or why the 01:17:20.778 --> 01:17:28.787 - weak ultimately flex their might or why, good and bad, all things come in trinities. So cherish with 01:17:28.787 --> 01:17:36.716 - blunt instruments all indignities. Champion the weak and try to love the hapless who cower inwardly 01:17:36.716 --> 01:17:41.950 - beneath the light and in their disappointment fade and dissipate. 01:17:42.498 --> 01:17:55.514 - like a sigh. Rebel without a cause. Obstinate as stale fruitcake, she would not join the rest of America 01:17:55.514 --> 01:18:07.911 - in sports shoes, stride out in step with what she termed the herd instinct. No, she was on track at 01:18:07.911 --> 01:18:11.134 - the Y in slip-ons, mules, 01:18:11.618 --> 01:18:20.115 - They did have arch support, she told the M.D. when knee pain drove her to the clinic. On doctor's orders 01:18:20.115 --> 01:18:28.450 - she conformed, laced up in white rubber sole uglies, breezed a mile, outpaced herself in comfort she'd 01:18:28.450 --> 01:18:37.028 - not known, as if her feet were laced in foam. She has a logo now, humble for health. Figures that fitness 01:18:37.028 --> 01:18:40.670 - hinges on her keeping to a diet of the same. 01:18:40.962 --> 01:18:51.835 - in pie. Pins. It used to be that when a seamstress made a wedding dress, she saved the silk pins for 01:18:51.835 --> 01:19:02.923 - her husband to pick a lucky horse to play at the track. After the wedding, single women rummaged after 01:19:02.923 --> 01:19:10.782 - every hidden pin they could find in the gown of the bride. Corsage pins. 01:19:11.138 --> 01:19:18.216 - safety pins in the hem, so that when a year had passed, they could be the ones to wed. It used to be, 01:19:18.216 --> 01:19:25.363 - too, that an undertaker placed a small bowl on the chest of the departed for each mourner to fill with 01:19:25.363 --> 01:19:32.302 - a pin painted black. Then they stuck them in the cemetery gate posts. I think this was done so that 01:19:32.302 --> 01:19:38.270 - the veils of the dead would catch and tear, catch and tear every time they came back. 01:19:47.874 --> 01:19:53.334 - Good fences make good neighbors, Frost said. And I borrowed his remembered line as I pulled the weeds 01:19:53.334 --> 01:19:58.847 - from under the fence, separating our yard from our neighbor's yard. Those weeds that began on our side 01:19:58.847 --> 01:20:04.414 - and ended on their side, and they being too polite to say anything or not brave enough to reach through 01:20:04.414 --> 01:20:09.981 - and take care of the problem themselves, had put up with the stalk shooting up the side of their fence. 01:20:09.981 --> 01:20:16.190 - For surely they speak of it as theirs when standing in their yard, as we speak of it as ours when standing in ours. 01:20:17.282 --> 01:20:26.275 - Getting rid of the weeds was not a chore merely to see them gone. It was as well to preserve the fence 01:20:26.275 --> 01:20:35.354 - that was being choked in places by them and preserving it to demonstrate in plain view of all concerned 01:20:35.354 --> 01:20:44.958 - frost lines. Be they New England stone or Washington DC metal, good fences make good neighbors. Coyote bitch. 01:20:46.434 --> 01:20:54.156 - Flappy-titted she came, sneaking around our place, taking a chicken every day to feed her den of pups. 01:20:54.156 --> 01:21:01.803 - We had come as refugees from suburbs smothering the land for the old balance of keeping birds so they 01:21:01.803 --> 01:21:09.600 - could help keep us. But she had the immigrants' urgency too, opportunist, destroyer of well-laid plans, 01:21:09.600 --> 01:21:14.398 - keeper of wits for the next generations vying on the continent. 01:21:21.986 --> 01:21:30.482 - pheasant. As if he'd swallowed his pride at the last second, bright cock strutting across the road in 01:21:30.482 --> 01:21:38.896 - autumn evening, he rose suddenly seen in the neutral dusk and met the grill with a spray of feathers 01:21:38.896 --> 01:21:47.642 - as I braked and swerved, thinking to stop, my skin chilling as I pumped the pedal like a getaway. Later, 01:21:47.642 --> 01:21:50.974 - I found a small dent, twist of plumage, 01:21:51.266 --> 01:22:03.093 - there hadn't been time for blood, and tried to forget what it was that sent me driving a country road 01:22:03.093 --> 01:22:15.151 - only to return a foolish man home again, unlike that broken iridescence lying at the edge of the field. 01:22:15.151 --> 01:22:18.398 - Tree, this is a prose poem. 01:22:19.682 --> 01:22:27.579 - That old sugar maple must be 100 years old. The morning sun catches it stretching out for the day, golden 01:22:27.579 --> 01:22:35.028 - and eager, limbs spread out like welcoming arms next to the country road. On my way to work, I stop 01:22:35.028 --> 01:22:42.701 - sometimes to see early spring, softly green, slowly entering among its branches. In the fall, it glows 01:22:42.701 --> 01:22:49.406 - like a lantern against the gray sky. Winter contrasts its sinuous form in waves of white. 01:22:50.498 --> 01:22:57.839 - More houses going up around here now. That old field marked with flags and stakes will be built up soon. 01:22:57.839 --> 01:23:04.830 - I see it shifting in other ways. More people on the roads moving a little faster. At work sometimes 01:23:04.830 --> 01:23:12.241 - I daydream of that wide statue of a tree. Think of leaving a little early and stopping in its cool shade. 01:23:12.241 --> 01:23:19.582 - I could lean back against the rough bark and rest for a while. Stare up into that eternal green mystery. 01:23:20.930 --> 01:23:28.580 - I have to leave earlier to get to work on time, past the trees standing there like the sentinel of another 01:23:28.580 --> 01:23:35.944 - world, strong, secure, calm, an island in the tide of traffic. But I don't slow down anymore. Cars are 01:23:35.944 --> 01:23:43.165 - pressing behind. Then one morning on my way in, I came up the road and saw immediately something was 01:23:43.165 --> 01:23:45.310 - wrong. The old tree was gone. 01:23:45.794 --> 01:23:53.746 - Pushed down by a dozer and dragged off, it lay in a broken heap in the field, limbs torn and stripped. 01:23:53.746 --> 01:24:01.698 - A new road begins where the tree used to stand. Just a raw dirt wound now. Soon it will be paved sleek 01:24:01.698 --> 01:24:09.573 - and smooth, a faster way in and out of the burgeoning town. I still leave early for work to avoid the 01:24:09.573 --> 01:24:11.966 - hairy traffic on the new road. 01:24:12.322 --> 01:24:22.238 - sometimes glancing up where the tree used to be as I accelerate into the city as fast as I can go. My 01:24:22.238 --> 01:24:32.446 - father fixed the farm with twine that pulled and rotted black and died its annual death. And so to bring 01:24:32.446 --> 01:24:40.126 - renewal, the two of us would walk holding new string together around the farm. 01:24:41.090 --> 01:24:47.736 - as I bit my lip then let go against the fury of it all and cried aloud that fences fixed with twine 01:24:47.736 --> 01:24:54.516 - did not last and looked homemade at that. But my father smiled and continued to macrame his life into 01:24:54.516 --> 01:25:01.428 - the rusty breaking fences of the 80-acre farm. I was never more ashamed than when he fixed those fences 01:25:01.428 --> 01:25:08.074 - with baler twine. I wanted bright red metal fences around the fields to tell everyone that the barn 01:25:08.074 --> 01:25:09.470 - that needed painting 01:25:09.986 --> 01:25:16.234 - the house that needed painting, were but eccentricities and not a measure of our true worth. But in 01:25:16.234 --> 01:25:22.794 - farm country, everyone knows that everyone knows, and there would have been no use in trying to disguise 01:25:22.794 --> 01:25:29.042 - our too well-known state. So we continued to tie the twine and pull together the rusty metal pieces 01:25:29.042 --> 01:25:35.289 - of fences put up a generation or two before, when men went out to the fields with posts of new wood 01:25:35.289 --> 01:25:37.726 - and rolls of town bought metal fencing 01:25:38.274 --> 01:25:44.820 - and hoped that that year the crop would come through that would release them from the land they so hated 01:25:44.820 --> 01:25:51.180 - and so loved. Lacking visions of later men tied to the farm, lives of twine rotting black in the sun, 01:25:51.180 --> 01:25:57.539 - the neighbors clucked tongues over as they drove by and spotted the white and black fences being made 01:25:57.539 --> 01:26:03.774 - by a smiling father and a raging son standing by a ball of twine somewhere far too short of plenty. 01:26:11.394 --> 01:26:19.480 - On the cusp of praise, we enter the world armed with silence, bare of song. Given the prize of speech, 01:26:19.480 --> 01:26:27.566 - do we plead for the animals or bother to notice their loveliness? Through mound-shaped tunnels, we led 01:26:27.566 --> 01:26:35.966 - archaeologists to study inscriptions on coins. The earliest scrolled maps pointed north. Long ago, scribes 01:26:35.966 --> 01:26:40.990 - carved medallions, believing the only counterpoint to happiness 01:26:41.122 --> 01:26:50.095 - to be self-worth. Why can't we speak for the animals of the way of immersing themselves within the world's 01:26:50.095 --> 01:26:58.566 - breathing? Compare the bravado to the way a wave greets land, the way clouds graze the moon's teats, 01:26:58.566 --> 01:27:05.694 - and sky opens to receive each falling care, slivers of meteorite, strings of prayer. 01:27:47.554 --> 01:27:53.358 - Here it is, folks, News of the World. Thank you very much for coming this year. We want to thank again 01:27:53.358 --> 01:27:59.219 - our sponsors, Ronciple Spoon and Matrix, our guest, Tony Brewer, and our musical guest, Swingin' Beats. 01:27:59.219 --> 01:28:03.614 - Don't forget to mute the food around the corner in the room 1B. Thanks again.