As I was telling you before, I grew up
in an old, depressed, post-industrial city
in upstate New York.
And when I just came from Salt Lake City before I came here
and I had never seen anything like those mountains
before in my life.
I'd seen mountains in New Hampshire
but they're not as visible because of the pine trees
somehow.
And I realized that if I lived in that landscape
I would have a different problem entirely
as a writer and a different subject matter
because mountains like that, and I think your mountains here
too what I've seen of them, seem to give so much.
They're intrinsically majestic, and grand,
and every time you look at them, you
have intimations of immortality or at least a notion
of grandeur.
Well, the place I grew up in was bleak, and flat,
and I felt as if it took me years to begin to love it,
and to begin to let it be mine, and to admit that this
was what I had to work with.
And even now I live in the Midwest, it's really flat.
And there isn't much to talk about in terms of scenery,
it's just kind of flat.
This is what I was given.
And I think what this did to me I look upon imagination
as a place to live.
And this is something I keep coming back
to in my work: imagination, this refuge,
and how one can take through imagination, take a world
and transform it, and make it anything so that I didn't
have to be in Troy, New York.
If I didn't want to be, I could be anywhere.
This poem is about that, the quality of imagination,
imagination as place.
It's called The New Affluence, and the affluence
and the richness is the richness of imagination.
Let me say "we," for I am not alone in this desire
to live where the land is neither dramatically
flat nor high, where it snows enough to keep the world
the bitter white of aspirin.
People with such needs grew up snow belted,
rust belted in towns like mine where muscle cars dragged down
main streets and the fountain's aigrettes outside the Miss Troy
Diner offered welcome hits of pink and blue in a landscape
largely the non-color of lard.
Our choice was to love or hate the slight reprieves
from plainness.
The fractious birds, the scrappy trees,
and most of all the things that didn't live or breathe,
factories tearing up the sky with smoke,
tugboats sweet as toys along the poisoned river, a budget,
if not famine, our lives, or perhaps a sweepstakes
with prizes so slight no one cared to enter.
We wouldn't have become susceptible to the tag
ends, seconds, as is of experience,
given better scenery.
And we wouldn't have gotten this notion
that happiness is mined like ore from rock through efforts
of imagination.
We the poor, but not in spirit.
We the not especially blessed, who work in cold hours
at dull jobs, drank, gambled, went mad,
or grew anomalous as water, a compound that
expands while freezing.
Disciples of steam and dust, we take
pleasure in considering the glaciers beginning
in the clouds, the picnic springing up
around the subatomic particles others call the vacuum.
And our sensory thresholds, the nerve centers
that decide what to let us know, let
us know too much, which makes us terrible at parties.
We seize upon the slight conflicting riffs
and idle chit chat the way we tick behind a smile.
It's exhausting and a social hindrance.
Twitchers, fainters, cringelings,
I'm here to say you'd like it where I live.
In this converted bakery, everything's
left to the imagination.
The golden smell of molten sugar,
the customers gazing at pastries baked from scratch
into planes and turrets, fanciful as women's hats.
A tub of lard sealed and dated 1900
was the one remaining trace of baking
and we left it sealed imagining a cache of rancid snow within.
The local paper gives advice to liven up our days:
quote, colored towels add eye-spice.
Look for cotton run-on sales.
A blub blub of vinegar adds zip to many dishes, try it,
it's terrif.
It was the absence of spectacular views
that made us see the sparrow hopping warily
as if the ground were strewn with acid.
Medieval legend says it hissed "he lives!"
to Roman soldiers at Calvary, for which
God bound its feet forever with supernatural string.
Lacking diversions, we've turned furtive in order to observe it.
We toss crumbs while light pours crisp as seltzer,
as peppermint oil through air.
The hyacinths need these cold weeks
to grow into fragrant vases full only of themselves,
their particular being like everything else.
So summer comes to meet us.
Soon, children will sell chances on rocks and leaves
from sidewalk stands.
Children!
They think these things are valuable, and we always buy.