My impulse is to say good morning.
I just woke up.
Can you hear that, John?
I presume you can hear it.
I'll read you some poems, the first of all from The Storm.
And then some more poems from the second book.
Can you hear all right?
The mic is working and everything?
Not very well out here.
OK.
How do you adjust the volume on this?
You don't.
You don't at all?
[LAUGHTER]
I know how to adjust the volume on me.
But I have a tendency, I notice, to speak softly.
And if I am speaking inaudible for you
back there in the course of it, please
don't hesitate to raise your hand
or to yell out or something.
A lot of the poems in the first book
are poems which have to do with a place I grew up,
which is in Florida near the Everglades.
And I lived about half of my life
in town and half of my life out on farms that my father ran.
And the part that stayed with me mostly I think
was the part that I spent on and around the farms.
So I left by the time I was 11 years old.
But when I started writing poetry,
I found that some of the first poems that I was writing
were about this area.
"Whiskey Creek Bridge"
"Standing on the wooden bridge at Whiskey Creek
where my father's old and new farms meet and join.
I listen for a moment.
Everything is silent, save mosquitoes
and the stiff dry sounding dragonflies
that skim the waters smooth back for dark specks.
Below me, poised and waiting in silver webs
that flex under the bridge, huge spiders
shine and dangle in the dark, the harmlessly exotic
and the deadly.
A black widow looming by the dry shell of her mate.
Her womb filled with seed fed by its father's flesh.
The hourglass of blood set in her belly.
Where water clear as amber runs, I watch the sluggish traffic
from the swamps drain toward the Gulf.
Cypress branches wrapped in moss, half sunk, rigid garfish,
mullet and dull swarms, cottonmouth and perch,
broad leaves turning slowly in the underwater light
and a variety of turtles, some soft shelled and graceful,
some with brilliant faces, orange and yellow streaked,
as if their bud shaped heads were splitting into bloom
and some harder, darker whose horned beaks crack
the other's shells and dream them
while they die, all moving downstream
to feed the broad Colusa hatch where
fresh water and salt collide and mingle,
where seabirds, sand sharks, and bull gators wait.
When a branch snaps and falls, breaking the surface,
I start with the fish, shivers of rising silver
that feign and turn, vanish into the spreading calm
with a shadow of my childhood holds them all.
A darkness deep, almost beyond my sea."