I want to read a sort of a clump of poems from this sequence
that I've been working on.
I don't know how many of you lived in one place in one town
before then you went off to school or went off to wherever,
but I did.
And I think that's probably less and less
common to the American experience.
But I lived in the same town, in fact,
in pretty much the same house.
And then I realized a couple of years ago that now that
I've-- since I moved to Vermont, I've lived in the same place
almost as long as I lived that other place.
So, this is a sequence of poems that tries to deal with place.
And the ones that I will read tonight
are all set in the part of Virginia where I grew up.
Short Story.
My grandfather killed a mule with a hammer,
or maybe with a plank or a stick.
Maybe it was a horse.
The story varied in the telling.
If he was planting corn when it happened, it was a mule
and he was plowing the upper slope west of the house,
his overalls stiff to the knees with red dirt,
the lines draped behind his neck.
He must have been glad to rest when the mule first
stopped mid-furrow, looked back at where he'd come,
then down to the brush along the creek he meant to clear.
No doubt, he noticed the hawk's great leisure
over the field, the crows lumped in the biggest
elm on the opposite hill.
After he'd wiped his hat brim with his sleeve,
he called to the mule as he slapped
the line along its rump, clicked and whistled.
My grandfather was a slight, quiet man,
smaller than most women, smaller than his wife.
Had she been in the yard seeing him heading toward the pump
now, she'd pump for him a dipper of cold water.
Walking back to the field, past the corn crib,
he took an ear of corn to start the mule,
but the mule was planted.
He never cursed or shouted, only whipped it,
the mule rippling its backside each time the switch fell.
And when that didn't work, whipped it low on its side
where it's tender, then cross hatched
the welts he'd made already.
The mule went down on one knee, and that
was when he reached for the blown limb
or walked to the pile of seasoning lumber,
or else unhooked the plow and took his own time to the shed
to get the hammer.
By the time I was born, he couldn't even lift a stick.
He lived another 15 years in a chair,
but now he's dead and so is his son who never meant
to speak a word against him, and whom I never
asked what his father was planting and in which field,
and whether it happened before he had married,
before his children came in quick succession,
before his wife died of the last one.
And only a few of us are left who ever heard that story.