Now for something completely different.
I want to read a draft of a poem that is very new.
I mean to say I've been working on it for a year and a half,
but I have only--
I haven't read it like this I read it once
some time ago in an earlier version.
So I'm trying something out on you.
I hope you don't mind.
It's in three parts.
And it's called egg, chicken, rooster, hen.
From the dark yard by the sheep barn
the cock crowed to the sun's pale spectral
for blossoming eastwards in June and crowed and crowed.
Later by clock through fall and winter,
grand conquistador of January drifts.
How he strutted.
This almost useless vain thrower with wild monomaniac eye,
burnished swollen chest, yellow feet serpent
scaled, blood red comb who mounted with a mighty flutter.
His busy hens.
Generalissimo, rooster of nobody's army.
When he was old we cut his head off
on the sheep yard chopping block watching his drum major prance
his last resplendent March and boiled him for hours.
Our fricassee Sunday dinner with gravy, potato,
and ragged mountainous dumplings.
Two.
At the Depot in April parcel post
went cheap, cheap in big rectangular cardboard boxes
each trembling with 50 chicks.
Brutally packed eggs hatched on the journey.
And when we opened the carton in the cool tool shed,
50 down to flowers cheap shipping
rolled and teetered like yellow tennis balls with tiny feet.
All summer I looked after them.
Twice a day I emptied their fouled water
and freshened it from the trough.
Twice a day I trudged uphill to the grain
shed filled sap buckets at wooden grain tubs
and poured pale grain into v-shaped feeders
watching the birds fluster and shove.
One summer I nursed a blind chick six weeks,
pale yellow, frail tentative, meek,
who never ate except when I gave up space for her.
I watched her grow little by little
but every day outpaced by the healthy grabbers.
And one morning discovered her dead, meatless, incorrigible.
Three, the final part.
At summer's end the small roosters
departed one day by truck, squawking with good reason.
Pullets move to the hen house laying miniature eggs,
growing as the year turned colder among fallen leaves
in the strange snow falling.
Extruding each day, new eggs harvested morning and night.
They roasted in darkness locked from skunk and fox
and let out at dawn footed the hard yard tilting on stiff legs
to peck the corncob clean, to gobble orange peels,
carrot tops, even the shells of yesterday's eggs.
Red feathered pigs turning garbage to eggs.
They labored for our breakfast at the square table
for egg boxes the egg man took twice a month, fresh eggs.
Singing in the hen yard church, (SINGING)
work for the night is coming when we work no more.
Then the egg making frenzy ceased
each in our own time set for weeks
as if setting itself made eggs without making eggs
and therefore danced on the packed soil of the hen yard,
her final headless jig and boiled
in her naked shape, fatherless as an egg consumed
like everything else as she joined again
the round of the fixed gear.
If you hear-- thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
If you hear a lack of conviction as I read the last line,
you're right.