I'm going to read you one here.
And then I'll take questions from you, OK.
This is about a very dear friend of mine Evelyn
who slowly is going blind.
And well, here we go.
Evelyn from North Carolina.
Evelyn dreamed both of you running
through a field of clover before you died, Joe.
After you and Evelyn painted kitchen cabinets
and trim boards with flowers, you died.
Why now Joe?
Evelyn is a woman in the garden by herself.
Each gemstone you worked on the grinder in your garage
she's carefully set in the pathway
in the garden of her heart.
She walks the dazzling cobbled path each morning.
The world is a broken gate, and she's an old woman who cannot
fix it anymore.
She has a soreness in her bones she cannot rub away.
A soreness at the far edge of her heart
like a polluted section of the beach posted keep out.
Even breezy sun sprayed waves cannot make attractive,
days brawl and scuffle, let goals for scraps of her life.
She scrapes and butts the pier of each night
like a battered boat without an owner.
Her heart is a limpid sail fall in a lump of gray sleep.
She would like to move to Arizona,
but she stays to take care of mama.
On weekends at her mother's house,
shade laced clapboard father built skirted by oak trees,
she spends her afternoons.
Over the flowers you both painted,
another winter wilts the tulips, scabs, roses with the old woman
still walks trailing the brush strokes of your passage
once across the ice, the snow, and the mud.
On evenings in her armchair, poodle and lap, Evelyn's eyes
blur more and more of this life out.
And her eyes become clearer, and clearer with the picture of you
both running in a field of clover.
Thank you very much.