I want to read you a poem--
I don't read only sad poems.
Even sometimes I can't stand the intensity.
Let me read you a couple of love poems.
Birds, photo flowers or something.
I don't write those kind of poems, but I talked to my wife
on the phone the other day and I called her long distance
and we were talking and she said to me,
said to me a very funny thing, she said,
you don't smile at me very often.
Which struck me very deeply because I suspect she's right.
And she deserves a smile every now and then.
That's a joke.
This is called "Mission: 1 January '70."
I wrote it in New York after I'd left Minnesota.
"Weeds are in her face.
She skates in 20 below thin air, skipping
the risen pockets of lake ice, moving
with urgency in her dance.
We have swept an ice rink in a circle
and wetted it down with lake water
from the electric pump, the auger holes on the beach.
A white goose is the dance of me, the vatting ice,
the green surface eyes in the dance.
For she seeks her gone children there, in this dance.
Goose thin, the nostrils like stalks.
Her sons shimmering in the lake ice.
Goose and crescent, perfect, two figurines.
In this decade, I expect the environment
to pull each into place as weed banks giving cover to my goose.
I stroke her open-ended neck and watch the air.
To watch my goose in dance, to watch her fly.
And with the breakup ice in spring,
to fish our children back, to make them sing before her eyes.
Then watch my goose, my dance, her arching neck a crescent,
open-ended."