I should probably make up a program ahead of time,
but I hardly ever do.
Here's a poem called "Lady."
This is another poem that is about someone
whom I knew in Vermont.
Knew her quite well.
"Lady" is the name of the poem.
"Lady, they calls me.
Lady, and they always has my whole life long,
and I hated it.
God how I hated it.
You know?
But you can't go hating on a thing like that forever.
One time I says, what the hell's the difference?
Now they call me Lady same as ever, and that's OK.
Now my belly don't even twitch like it used to.
Hating.
That's for those other downcountry folk.
That's for your city folk.
What does it get them?
Gut ache.
Anybody knows that.
Well, what I got is this nice old house now.
Big barn and the shed, first rate metal, some fair hill
pasture, and a wood lot that's good enough for what I need.
And my horses, my Arabians.
Every one bred by my own stallion.
Yes, and them there silver whoduddies
you see on the mantel for showing all over the state.
I got me my Herefords too, registered, 14 head,
and I got me a job to make up what the horses and beef won't
bring.
Down to the hospital in Waterbury,
you know, the mental hospital.
Don't get the idea I'm one of those movie battleaxe types,
neither.
I'm not.
I work at the ward for the chronics on the midnight shift.
And there's a good lot of them poor bastards in there as
can't sleep when it comes night, and I know why.
Believe me, I know why.
I treat them right.
I talk to them and make them tell me their stories,
and then sometimes they can sleep.
Sometimes.
Then I come home and do my chores and sleep myself.
Later I make hay or mend fence or tend to poles
or whatever needs doing.
I got me a Ford 3,000 tractor, a bailer, a mower, side-rake,
a Dodge two ton platform truck, and when I need something else,
like a tedder or a teakle rig I borrows it.
We're neighborly around here.
We have to be.
Why we switch off labor for all our big jobs,
yes sir, and I do my share.
One time I was spreading manure down
in the lower pasture next to spruces.
It was late, see, past sundown, because I can tell you
I got to run 70 minutes to the hour to work this place.
And of course, that had to be the time the damn spreader
jams, so there's nothing to do but throw out
the stuff by hand.
I was just climbing off of the tractor with the dung
fork in one hand when this old she bear come out of the trees.
Popped right out of there, coming right at me,
big as a spruce-oil kiln she looked, and black as a stove.
I whooped, let me tell you, and threw my fork
and climbed back on that tractor in a kind of a hurry,
breathing a mite hard.
When I got back to the barn I found
I had more manure than I started out with.
I told Jasper the next day, he owns
that gone to Boston looking place over the hill,
with the bam-o-gilly in the door yard.
Jas, I says, I was plain scart.
Scart of that old she bear.
I shit my britches.
Jas, he looked straight and soft like.
Lady, he says, I don't blame you, none.
If it was me I believe I'd have shatten too.
That's one thing, small, that don't mean much.
You asked me who I was.
I'm Lady.
I'm what some folk might call uncommon.
Respect, maybe.
Well, I get along.
A good neighbor to good neighbors.
There's all kinds living around these mountains.
I raise beef, a little, I raise some damn fine horses here
on this hilltop farm, then I work out
nights in the loony bin.
That's all, mostly.
Though sometimes it does seem funny, don't it,
the way things happen."
[APPLAUSE]
I should say perhaps that a teakle rig in Vermont
is a block and tackle.
And bam-o-gilly is a Balm of Gilead,
which is a species of poplar that grows
in that part of the country.
Well, I'll move forward to some more recent poems.