[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Alison.
And good evening.
Can you hear me?
No.
Can you hear me now?
Can anybody hear me?
[LAUGHTER]
I have no control over this thing.
As Alison said, I come from the Northeast
and lived for many years in the part of Vermont--
where she also lived-- up in the North.
And I wrote about that country and about the people there.
And my first poem is called, "Regarding Chainsaws."
"The first chainsaw I owned was years ago--
an old yellow McCulloch that wouldn't start.
Bo Bremmer give it to me, that was my friend.
Though I've had enemies couldn't have done no worse.
I took it to Ward's over to Morrisville.
And no doubt, they tinkered it as best they could.
But it still wouldn't start.
One time later, I took it down to the last bolt and gasket
and put it together again, hoping somehow I'd
do something accidental-like that would make it go.
And then, I yanked on it 450 times, as I figured afterwards,
and give myself a bursitis in the elbow that went five years.
Even after Doc Arrowsmith shot it full of cortisone and near
killed me when he hit a nerve dead on.
[LAUGHTER]
Old Stan wanted that saw--
wanted it bad.
Figured I was a greenhorn didn't know nothing,
and he could fix it.
Well, I was, you could say, being only 40 at the time.
But a fair hand at tinkering, Stan, I said,
you're a neighbor.
I like you.
I wouldn't sell that thing to nobody,
except maybe Vice President Nixon.
But Stan persisted.
He always did.
One time, we was loafing and gabbin' in his front dooryard.
And he spied that saw in the back of my pickup.
He run quick inside, then come out and stuck a double sawbuck
in my shirt pocket.
And he grabbed that saw and lugged it off.
Next day, when I drove past, I seen
he had it snugged down tight with a tow chain on the bed
of his old Dodge Powerwagon.
And he was yanking on it with both hands.
Two or three days after, I asked him, how you getting along
with that McCulloch Stan?
Well, he says, I tooken it down to scrap,
and I buried it in three separate places
yonder on the upper side of the potato piece.
You can't be too careful, he says,
when you're disposing of a hex.
[LAUGHTER]
The next saw I had was a god-awful ancient Homelite
that I give Dry Dryden 30 bucks for.
Temperamental as a ram too, but I liked it.
It used to remind me of Dry, and how
he clapped that saw a couple times
with the flat of his double blade ax to make it go.
And how he honed the chain with a worn down file
stuck in an old baseball.
I worked that saw for years.
I put up 45 run them days each summer
and fall to keep my stoves het through the winter.
I couldn't now, it'd kill me.
Of course, they got these here modern Swedish saws now.
They can take all the worry out of it.
What's the good of that?
Takes all the fun out too, don't it?
Why, I reckon, I mind when Gilles Boivin snagged
an old sap spout buried in a chunk of maple,
and it tore up his mouth so bad, he couldn't play Tea for Two
on his cornet in the town band no more.
And then, when Toby Fox was holding a beech limb
that Rob Bowen was bucking up.
And the saw skidded crossways and nipped off
one of Toby's fingers.
Ain't that more like it?
Makes you know you're livin'.
[LAUGHTER]
But mostly, they weren't dangerous.
And the only thing they broke was your back.
Old Stan, he was a buller and a jammer in his time,
no two ways about that.
But he never sawed himself.
Stan had the sugar all his life.
And he weren't always too careful about the diet
and the injections.
He lost all the feeling in his legs from the knees down.
One time, he started up his Powerwagon out in the barn,
and his foot slipped off the clutch.
And she jumped forward, right through the wall
and into the manure pit.
He just set there, swearing like you could
have heard it in St. Johnsbury.
Till his wife come out and said, Stan, what's got into you?
Misses, he says, ain't nothing got into me.
Can't you see?
It's me that's got into this here pile of shit.
[LAUGHTER]
Not much later, they took away one of his legs.
And six months after that, they took the other,
and left him sitting in his old chair with a tank of oxygen
to sip at whenever he felt himself sinking.
I remember that chair.
Stan reupholstered it with an old bearskin
that must have come down from his great great grandfather.
And had grit in it, left over from the Civil War,
and a bullet hole as big as a yawning cat.
Stan latched the pieces together with rawhide, cross-fashion.
But the stitches was always breaking and coming undone.
About then, I quit stop-- stopping by to see old Stan.
And I don't feel so good about that neither.
But my mother was having her strokes then.
I figured, one person coming apart
was as much as a man can stand.
Then Stan was taken away to the nursing home, and then he died.
I always remember how he planted them
pieces of spooked McCulloch up above the potatoes.
One time, I went up and dug.
And I took the old sprocket, all pitted and et away,
and set it on the windowsill, right there next
to the butter mold.
But I'm damned if I know why."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
That Tom is in the speech of Northwestern Vermont,
the Champlain Valley.
Two levels of speech.
The speaker in the poem is literate.
Stan is probably not literate.