Well, I had a long poem, a long elegy
that I was hoping to read.
But I think if I read it, you'll get tired
and I have some other poems after that I want to read.
So maybe I'll skip that tonight.
Let me read another elegy, a couple of elegies.
This one called "Last Words," for John Lawrence Simpson,
1897 to 1969.
John Lawrence Simpson my father-in-law
died last fall after several months of a suffering lung
cancer and old age.
And as I explained in the poem, we're
just a different kind of people.
He's a farmer, and a pioneer and we never
were able to talk very much.
And this poem was my way of talking to him,
I wrote it a couple of weeks before he died and he read it.
He liked it and I read it at his funeral.
"Last Words."
Like men who meet for the first time
from opposite ends of the Earth, we never talked much.
You sat at the kitchen table in a chair
only the smallest children dared to sit in, yelling at your sons
or telling some sly story, or silent, looking out the window.
And I sat next to you with my hands folded,
staring at your daughter, barely listening--
a writer of books, a poet.
Now what was faithful, most of a century to the Earth
and to the darkness of Earth is preparing to become the Earth.
And what was faithful to the light
is turning painfully into light.
Now I want to say what I have never said.
Old man, sometimes I felt like a child sitting next to you.
I watched your hands that were strong and twisted
as if pulled from the Earth and the blue smoke
curling upward in the silence and felt like a child.
There were many things I did not understand, how easily fooled I
was by your fierceness, your long silences,
your rants against communism.
How easily I assumed your distaste
for my long hair, my long face, and my long history
of childhood.
Still, I listened to your stories.
And I remember well the mules straining
in the darkness, the bitter thin air,
the mountain road covered with snow,
the huge logs covered with snow, and summer nights
in the old days.
Wild girls riding bareback over the foothills,
sisters of rustlers go into a dance,
and the old Indian hitting a big hole
and going down thrashing and burning in the gravel.
And I remember what I saw long after midnight
in the cold shed, the long rip in the cow's side,
the silent man with his arm plunged
in up to the shoulder, the cow's head secured in the iron
stanchions, her eyes black and enormous with agony,
the cloud of her breath, the cloud of mine--
no sound, blood everywhere.
I remember what I saw in your eyes.
And I see drifting through the smoke and fog the cool sun.
Through the wreckage of years, cars, dead pigeons, dead wives,
good deals, and foolish charity, money made and lost, made again
and lost again, a dead baby, a dead son growing
rich in the East, the leaves dying on the vine, the dying
sun through death and divorce, and dull disaster, a young
and tender spirit.
The road is paved, the hole filled in,
the girls lie under the stones of academy cemetery many years.
All the old mountain men gone for good back
into the mountains.
The sound of their laughter growing very faint.
And the wind keeps blowing.