So this will change the mood a bit.
You know, when we come here, we are always
asked to pick some book from the shelves
and recommend it because I knew I would be reading--
and it's an impossible task because I
walk through those shelves and I see so many books
that I would love to stop and sit down for three days
and only read that book.
And your book, after book, after book.
But I decided that my recommendation
would be a big selected poems by the Norwegian poet Olav Hauge
because I knew I was going to read this poem tonight.
So it comes not from a quote from one of his poems
but from those little biographical notes they
put in anthologies and things.
So there was this sentence about him.
He spent his whole life in Ulvik working
as a gardener in his own orchard,
and somehow that struck me.
And so-- by the way, Robert Bly visited Hauge in Norway
and said that on this little eight-acre apple
farm where he lived was the best poetry library in the country.
"In Ulvik."
"I too would like to work as a gardener in my own orchard.
Every Friday, I would pay myself a decent, living wage,
taken in foldable cash from my own wallet.
And sometimes, if the weather was bad,
I would give myself the day off and thank myself
for my kindness and answer myself, it's nothing,
nothing, go on now, put your feet up, find somewhere warm.
And then I would go back into my house and think of my kindness
and wonder if my gardener was warm now also.
And if I was right to let myself go away from my own orchard's
tending even so briefly, and each of us
might be thinking, too, of the apples, cold and wet
and hanging an outside wind and fattening on their own trees
without us.
And one of us first, then the other,
might start to wonder a little, while pushing a cut of cured
applewood into the fire, about loneliness and separateness
and what it is lives outside one person's skin and inside
another's.