I am going at such a clip that it's amazing me.
Here's a poem called "Solitudes."
It's got a lot of sections, but they're not important.
So I'm not going to bother to indicate them.
It mentions a two-year-old playing with a pickup.
It's a toy.
It mentions chicory flowers which happened
to grow wild around me.
And probably down here, and you're
not going to be able to pick it up perhaps the first time
through.
There's a suggestion about a nursery, not a nursery rhyme,
but a fairy story, Hansel and Gretel.
What else should you know?
Goldfinch is a kind of bird.
Forsythia is a kind of flower.
I don't really have to go through this.
[LAUGHTER]
I'll just read the poem for you, "Solitudes."
Beyond the fence, my chattering two-year-old
pushes a pickup which is as blue as annual chicory flowers.
Nothing new has happened in years.
The questions our eyes hold.
You, my visiting friend, withdraw
to study the wheated rows, peer down
and say we're fixed by now.
Not one of us will be getting better anymore, more weeds.
I have a rage that settled like a house.
I'm a child dribbling crumbs who finds the birds consume them.
Making it home is less a chance than a long shot.
And the air is cold.
I am numb.
For all my schemes, I'm by a sink, towel in hand.
How old am I?
I dreamed the horse my father promised till the plate gleams.
Outside an overgrown garden, Forsythia shining,
it's that day.
Sagebrush, a goldfinch's yellow breast, the similar touch
of fur on the wind.
I stoop at a dropped feather-like someone
in fairy tales where shade is sprinkled with light
and the forests crossed by paths.
And their aftermaths are visits trail, the gardens of children,
and such solutes as age.