I'll do few poems from The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir.
This first one-- these will be Montana pieces.
And this first one is called "Hot Springs."
This is a town near a lake where I go fishing up
in the Indian reservation.
And as you drive into it, you sort of
think, well, maybe there's 3,000 - 4,000 people living here.
There are quite a few buildings, but it seems almost deserted.
And then you come to find there's only about 700 people.
That's because the rumor that the springs
had therapeutic values proved to be false about 30 years ago.
And so people who build a lot of motels and things,
thinking they would make a lot of money, went broke.
And people stopped coming.
"You arrived, arthritic, for the cure,
therapeutic qualities of water, and the therapeutic air.
Twenty five years later, you limp out of bars,
hoping rumors will revive.
A doctor will discover something curative in natural steam.
You have a choice of abandoned homes to sleep in.
Motels, constructed on the come, went broke
before the final board was nailed.
Operative still, your tainted fantasy and the deluxe hotel.
You have ached, taking your aches up the hill.
Another battery of tests, terrible probe
of word and needle.
Always the fatal word.
When we get old we crumble.
They wave from the ward, and you creep back down to streets
with wide lots between homes.
When that rare tourist comes, you
tell him you're not forlorn.
There are advantages here.
Easy pace of day, slow circle of sun.
If someday a cure's announced, for instance, the hot springs
work, you will walk young again in Spokane,
find startling women.
You wonder why you feel empty and frown
and why goodbyes are hard.
You go out healthy on the gray, thin road,
and when you look back, no one is waving.
They kept no record of your suffering,
wouldn't know you if you returned
without your cane, your grin."
I should explain, whenever I start
to read there's just this kind of pall
comes over the audience.
And I know my poems.
This is very heavy stuff.
I just want to assure you that in real life,
I'm lots of fun not--
[LAUGHTER]
--not like those people back in that church.
So I'll be glad to talk to you after the reading.
But anyway, we'll make our way through these gloomy poems.
[LAUGHTER]