I'd like to read a poem about John Dryden if I can find it.
Here it is, he's also he was mentioned
in the poem about the chainsaw.
This poem is called "John Dryden."
"Dry, they call him, and dry is what he hopes never to be.
Though spring water is all his drink six nights
after the welfare comes, and most all his feed too,
I sometimes think.
So once I saw him bring down a hare at seven rods
with a stone, and it didn't look lucky either.
When I asked him if he knew a famous poet had the same name,
he looked at me not quite contemptuously.
And yet I took a while to see his scorn wasn't because he
was smarter than I credited, for a fact, he can't read
but about half what's printed on the welfare check.
But rather because he'd been asked so damn many times
before, and he figured I should have known.
I should have too.
Dry is not dumb, he's only crazy.
Well anyway, that's the general impression
around the plot, which is what they call this section.
My neighbor rounds up her kids and locks
her door when Dry comes striding and caroling up
from up the hill from town in his outsized rummage pants,
with a carton of grub held like an offering in both arms,
and his coat gone slanty-wise from a fifth of Sauternes
in the pocket.
Paranoid, I'd say, but there's more than a few
in these mountains, and sometimes I'm
not just certain about myself.
But I know Dry, I know he hasn't worked four consecutive days
on any one job in 15 years, that's indicative.
Once we were haying up at Marshall's and Dry
took offense because a car with a shield on the door
drove into barnyard and Dry thought Marshall
was telling the CIA on him.
And he came after Marshall and me with his hay fork,
chasing us around the tractor, his face dead white like snow
that's thawed and frozen again.
He did, and it wasn't funny either.
My kidneys ached for two hours after
from thinking about that fork.
Finally, he saw he couldn't catch us.
He threw down the fork and marched off, straight as a bee,
over the meadow, the pasture, the orchard, the fence,
and was gone.
That year, Marshall and I made the rest of the hay alone.
One time Gilbert told how he and Dry were cutting
sugarwood for old man Saunders up toward Codding Hollow,
and Dry took one of his spells and came after Gilbert
with the axe, and Gilbert yanked quick on his chainsaw string
and remarked, Dry, you damn fool, listen here.
Just you set down that thing or by the jumping Jesus Christ
I'll cut off both your arms.
Dry set it down about three inches into a black birch
stump, and marched straight as a bee over brakes and brambles,
hobblebush and thornapple, and he was gone.
Which may be indicative too, he can be took right sudden,
but when he's licked he knows it.
And he's a fair hand at marching.
He told me once it was here 40 years back.
Them days was cruel, he said.
Awful cruel.
Things were turning on the slow reel.
And he made a motion like so, like the bobbins
down to the woollen mill when they run half speed.
Why hell, he said.
I had one of them $5 gold certificates, you remember?
I felt like I was rich, and I was too.
But I spent it running the cunt, and it come back,
and I spent it again, then it come back again.
So help me, over and over, till the damn thing wore itself out.
I carried the pieces for years, but they're gone now.
One time Dry vanished, clean gone.
No one knew where, and don't know yet.
But when he came back, I met him up in the woods,
and he stood on a spruce log and threw out his arms
and said, God Hayden, it's Moxie in the can being
back in these here goddamn mountains again,
and he laughed.
The last what you could call steady job
Dry had, as far as I know, was 1945,
down at the rendering plant in Burlington
where he slugged cows with an axe
and pushed their guts through a hole in the floor all day.
Stink?
Jesus, I guess I stunk like a she-bear in whistling time.
But I made good money, 40 a week,
and that weren't bad in them days.
But I spent it all running the cunt, every dime.
I got throwed out of five fleabag rooming houses,
and I wasn't even drunk, just owed the landlady a week
or two.
Well, running's what we say a bull does when you turn him out
to pasture with the cows.
So you can see how Dry it felt about that, at least
providing you've ever watched a bull in action.
But now, goddamn it, Dry spit and grinned sly-like
with his uppers, which is all the teeth I've ever
seen him wear.
Now you could lay a big slobbering juicy one
right there, right there, ready and open,
Him leaning and making a kind of slicing gesture along the log,
and I couldn't do nothing.
I couldn't touch it, I couldn't hardly spit on it.
And he spit and grin.
It'd be all wasted, Hayden, I'm fucked,
fucked, and I ain't but 59.
How old are you?
That's Dry all right, the nailhead every time.
Well he lives up in the old Connell sugarhouse
now that he's shingled all over with sap bucket covers
to keep the wind out, till it looks like a big tin fish
in among the pines near the brook.
And there's plenty more he could tell you,
like how he got bit that time by the cattle grub,
and took the purple aguey, or how
he has a buckshot in him that keeps
going round and round in his veins,
catching him sharp-like on his collarbone
when he don't expect it every now and again.
Or how he eats 40 aspirins a day and hears sweet patootie
music in his ears, or how he fell in a cellar hole
at blackberrying time and landed on a bear.
I says, woof old bear, get you away from me,
and then I climbed the hell out of there.
Or how-- but have you noticed I can't talk about him
without talking like him?
That's my trouble.
Somehow I always seem to turn into the other guy,
and Dry's the kind that brings it out the strongest.
But his trouble is what I'm telling about now, for it's not
just buckshot in his blood, it's worse, a whole lot worse.
His reel is turning slower and slower, no mistake.
Crazy?
I reckon he is.
I sure don't want to be there when
he's took bad, even now, if he's got a fork or an axe
within grabbing distance.
But I'll go up to call on him in his sugarhouse.
I believe old Dry is preparing to march again,
or any way preparing to prepare.
And I believe he'll go straight as a bee, white as a squall
of snow, knowing what he damn well knows,
over the goldenrod, the birchwood, the pines
and hemlock, over the mountain, and he'll be gone.
And then Marshall and I shall make this hay alone, by God
and curse old Dry.
But in our thoughts will remember and remember
how that man could march."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.