WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.680 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.680 --> 00:00:03.270 align:middle line:84% Staying in the same book, but moving to another place 00:00:03.270 --> 00:00:07.500 align:middle line:84% entirely, I'm going to read a poem called "Traffic." 00:00:07.500 --> 00:00:10.473 align:middle line:84% When I was a kid, I spent all my summers at the farm, 00:00:10.473 --> 00:00:11.640 align:middle line:90% hanging with my grandfather. 00:00:11.640 --> 00:00:13.223 align:middle line:84% But I didn't live there in the winter. 00:00:13.223 --> 00:00:15.390 align:middle line:84% It was my mother's place, where she'd come from. 00:00:15.390 --> 00:00:17.910 align:middle line:84% I spent my winters in Connecticut. 00:00:17.910 --> 00:00:21.720 align:middle line:84% And it was a family business, a big dairy, 00:00:21.720 --> 00:00:24.420 align:middle line:84% the other side of the farm, a dairy that 00:00:24.420 --> 00:00:27.300 align:middle line:84% bought raw milk from farmers, processed it, and delivered it. 00:00:27.300 --> 00:00:30.558 align:middle line:84% It was the Brock-Hall Dairy in Hamlin Connecticut. 00:00:30.558 --> 00:00:32.850 align:middle line:84% I've always wanted to be able to write more about that, 00:00:32.850 --> 00:00:36.210 align:middle line:90% but also to write about-- 00:00:36.210 --> 00:00:39.210 align:middle line:84% I still would like to write more about business. 00:00:39.210 --> 00:00:40.920 align:middle line:90% I write so many pastoral poems. 00:00:40.920 --> 00:00:44.310 align:middle line:84% I love to, I love the country, but the business of America 00:00:44.310 --> 00:00:46.740 align:middle line:84% is business, as our great President Coolidge said. 00:00:46.740 --> 00:00:48.000 align:middle line:90% [LAUGHTER] 00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:50.580 align:middle line:84% There is so much of this that was in my background, 00:00:50.580 --> 00:00:53.160 align:middle line:84% that I know about, that I've written about so seldom, so 00:00:53.160 --> 00:00:55.440 align:middle line:90% rarely. 00:00:55.440 --> 00:00:57.240 align:middle line:84% Well, this was an attempt to do that. 00:00:57.240 --> 00:00:58.830 align:middle line:84% I had to write it many, many times. 00:00:58.830 --> 00:01:00.570 align:middle line:84% And when I first wrote it, I tried 00:01:00.570 --> 00:01:03.280 align:middle line:84% to have it full of phrases, like accounts receivable and so on. 00:01:03.280 --> 00:01:03.780 align:middle line:90% [LAUGHTER] 00:01:03.780 --> 00:01:05.172 align:middle line:90% And I couldn't pull it off. 00:01:05.172 --> 00:01:06.630 align:middle line:84% I mean, I so wish the hell I could. 00:01:06.630 --> 00:01:10.750 align:middle line:84% But it is, at any rate, on that subject. 00:01:10.750 --> 00:01:13.050 align:middle line:90% I think everything in it is-- 00:01:13.050 --> 00:01:15.510 align:middle line:84% I've told you the place and the place names that 00:01:15.510 --> 00:01:18.570 align:middle line:90% belong to that place and so on. 00:01:18.570 --> 00:01:20.850 align:middle line:90% "Traffic." 00:01:20.850 --> 00:01:23.940 align:middle line:84% Trucks and station wagons, VWs, old Chevys, 00:01:23.940 --> 00:01:28.480 align:middle line:84% Pintos drive stop and go down Whitney Avenue this hot May 00:01:28.480 --> 00:01:33.630 align:middle line:84% day, bluing the course air, past graveyard and florist, 00:01:33.630 --> 00:01:37.560 align:middle line:84% past this empty brick building covered with ivy 00:01:37.560 --> 00:01:41.280 align:middle line:84% like a Mayan temple, like a pyramid grown over 00:01:41.280 --> 00:01:44.100 align:middle line:90% with jungle vines. 00:01:44.100 --> 00:01:45.840 align:middle line:84% I walk around the building as if I 00:01:45.840 --> 00:01:49.650 align:middle line:84% were dreaming it, as if I had left my planet at 20 00:01:49.650 --> 00:01:52.410 align:middle line:84% and wandered a lifetime among galaxies, 00:01:52.410 --> 00:01:57.180 align:middle line:84% and come home to find my planet aged 10,000 years, 00:01:57.180 --> 00:02:04.110 align:middle line:84% ruined, grown over, the people gone, ruin taking their places. 00:02:04.110 --> 00:02:07.890 align:middle line:84% They have gone into graveyards, who worked at this loading 00:02:07.890 --> 00:02:11.910 align:middle line:84% dock, wearing brown uniforms with the pink and blue 00:02:11.910 --> 00:02:15.390 align:middle line:84% lettering of the Brock-Hall dairy. 00:02:15.390 --> 00:02:19.320 align:middle line:84% Freddie Bauer is dead, who watched over the stockroom. 00:02:19.320 --> 00:02:22.680 align:middle line:84% Agnes McSparren is dead, who wrote figures in books 00:02:22.680 --> 00:02:24.600 align:middle line:90% at a yellow wooden desk. 00:02:24.600 --> 00:02:27.960 align:middle line:84% Harry Bailey is dead, who tested for bacteria, 00:02:27.960 --> 00:02:29.820 align:middle line:90% wearing a white coat. 00:02:29.820 --> 00:02:32.520 align:middle line:84% Carl Capp is dead, who loaded his van 00:02:32.520 --> 00:02:36.150 align:middle line:84% at dawn, conveyor belt supplying butter, cottage 00:02:36.150 --> 00:02:38.480 align:middle line:84% cheese, heavy cream, B, buttermilk, 00:02:38.480 --> 00:02:42.360 align:middle line:84% A with its cream line, and left white bottles 00:02:42.360 --> 00:02:47.100 align:middle line:84% at back doors in North Haven and Hamden for 30 years. 00:02:47.100 --> 00:02:51.300 align:middle line:84% My father is dead, and my grandfather. 00:02:51.300 --> 00:02:53.970 align:middle line:84% I stand by the fence at lot's end, 00:02:53.970 --> 00:02:58.320 align:middle line:84% where the long stables stood, 50 workhorses alive 00:02:58.320 --> 00:03:02.220 align:middle line:84% in the suburbs, chestnuts with thick manes, their hooves 00:03:02.220 --> 00:03:06.150 align:middle line:84% the size of oak stumps that pull 40,000 quarts 00:03:06.150 --> 00:03:09.840 align:middle line:84% through mists in the early morning to sleeping doorsteps 00:03:09.840 --> 00:03:12.870 align:middle line:84% until new trucks jammed the assembly lines, 00:03:12.870 --> 00:03:15.570 align:middle line:90% when the war ended. 00:03:15.570 --> 00:03:19.680 align:middle line:84% I separate ivy, like long hair over a face, 00:03:19.680 --> 00:03:23.340 align:middle line:84% to gaze into the room where the bottle washer stretched 00:03:23.340 --> 00:03:27.840 align:middle line:84% its aluminum length like an Airstream trailer. 00:03:27.840 --> 00:03:30.560 align:middle line:84% When our teacher brought the first grade to the dairy, 00:03:30.560 --> 00:03:35.340 align:middle line:84% men in white caps stacked dirty bottles at the machine's end. 00:03:35.340 --> 00:03:39.420 align:middle line:84% And we heard them clink 40 feet to where they rode out shining 00:03:39.420 --> 00:03:42.690 align:middle line:84% on a belt to another machine that turned them instantly 00:03:42.690 --> 00:03:47.190 align:middle line:84% white, as if someone said a word that turned them white. 00:03:47.190 --> 00:03:52.890 align:middle line:84% I was proud of my father and grandfather, of my last name. 00:03:52.890 --> 00:03:54.780 align:middle line:84% Here is the place that was lettered 00:03:54.780 --> 00:03:56.580 align:middle line:84% with my father's name, where he parked 00:03:56.580 --> 00:03:59.790 align:middle line:90% his Oldsmobile in the '50s. 00:03:59.790 --> 00:04:03.510 align:middle line:84% I came to the plant with him one summer, when I was at college, 00:04:03.510 --> 00:04:05.790 align:middle line:84% and we walked across blacktop where people 00:04:05.790 --> 00:04:07.920 align:middle line:90% my age washed trucks. 00:04:07.920 --> 00:04:10.920 align:middle line:84% Both of us smiled and looked downwards. 00:04:10.920 --> 00:04:14.100 align:middle line:84% That year, the business grossed $16 million, 00:04:14.100 --> 00:04:17.519 align:middle line:84% with 400 people bottling and delivering milk. 00:04:17.519 --> 00:04:21.959 align:middle line:84% And Agnes McSparren was boss over 30 women. 00:04:21.959 --> 00:04:25.680 align:middle line:84% At the roof's edge, imperial Roman cement urns 00:04:25.680 --> 00:04:29.280 align:middle line:84% flourish and decorate exhausted air. 00:04:29.280 --> 00:04:32.040 align:middle line:84% Now suburbs have migrated north, leaving Whitneyville 00:04:32.040 --> 00:04:36.090 align:middle line:84% behind with its dead factory beside a dead movie. 00:04:36.090 --> 00:04:38.070 align:middle line:84% They lived in Whitneyville mostly, 00:04:38.070 --> 00:04:42.450 align:middle line:84% Freddy Bauer, Agnes McSparren, Carl Capp, Harry Bailey, 00:04:42.450 --> 00:04:46.290 align:middle line:84% who walks to their lives into brick, whose hours turned 00:04:46.290 --> 00:04:50.700 align:middle line:84% into milk, who left their lives inside pitted brick that 00:04:50.700 --> 00:04:54.720 align:middle line:84% disappears beneath ivy for 1,000 years, 00:04:54.720 --> 00:04:56.550 align:middle line:84% until the archaeologists from a far 00:04:56.550 --> 00:04:59.190 align:middle line:90% galaxy chops with his machete. 00:04:59.190 --> 00:05:01.710 align:middle line:90% No, no, no, no. 00:05:01.710 --> 00:05:04.680 align:middle line:84% In a week or a year, the wreckers, 00:05:04.680 --> 00:05:09.750 align:middle line:84% Derek with a 15-ton cement ball on a flatbed trailer, 00:05:09.750 --> 00:05:13.530 align:middle line:84% will stop traffic as it squeezes up Whitney Avenue. 00:05:13.530 --> 00:05:15.150 align:middle line:90% And brick will collapse. 00:05:15.150 --> 00:05:19.020 align:middle line:84% And dump trucks take clean fill for construction 00:05:19.020 --> 00:05:24.030 align:middle line:84% rising from a meadow 10 miles in the country. 00:05:24.030 --> 00:05:28.965 align:middle line:84% I wait for the traffic to pause, shift, and enter the traffic. 00:05:28.965 --> 00:05:31.530 align:middle line:90% 00:05:31.530 --> 00:05:32.400 align:middle line:90% At one point in-- 00:05:32.400 --> 00:05:35.886 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:05:35.886 --> 00:05:39.870 align:middle line:90% 00:05:39.870 --> 00:05:42.090 align:middle line:84% At one point in writing it, I had a long passage 00:05:42.090 --> 00:05:46.320 align:middle line:84% about how supermarkets, loss leaders, 00:05:46.320 --> 00:05:49.890 align:middle line:84% supermarket-made plastic gallons, loss leaders. 00:05:49.890 --> 00:05:54.702 align:middle line:84% And this is why the business failed and so on. 00:05:54.702 --> 00:05:56.535 align:middle line:84% I found I couldn't handle all that material. 00:05:56.535 --> 00:05:58.980 align:middle line:90% 00:05:58.980 --> 00:06:00.480 align:middle line:84% So I made, perhaps, a different kind 00:06:00.480 --> 00:06:04.190 align:middle line:84% of poem out of it, probably more like my other poems.