They want to share that's not about yourself, that's OK too.
We'd like to print one more newsletter before the year is
up and we still need some news.
So if you'll give us a call tomorrow and no later
than Monday, we want to get everything
turned into the printers Monday afternoon.
So we accept only good news, so please give us a call.
If there's something you want to share that's not
about yourself, that's OK too.
I hope you can all come over the union
to meet Roger Weingarten tonight.
We'll be in the terrace lounge as usual.
Roger's come to us from Arizona State University,
where he's the director of the creative writing program.
He's also taught at Western Michigan University earlier.
His most recent works are "What are
Birds Worth" from Cummington Press,
"Ethan Benjamin Boldt" from Knopf,
and forthcoming in the fall, "The Vermont Suicides,"
also from Knopf.
He's been a winner of National Endowment for the Arts grants,
Vermont Council for the Arts Grant,
his work has been given special selection
by the Associated Writing Program--
The Vermont Suicides which I mentioned earlier.
We're very happy to welcome him tonight. Mr. Roger Weingarten.
[CLAPPING]
Hello.
Can you hear me back there?
Well, I'm going to do something a little different tonight,
I think than you've had happen here before.
I'm going to read one poem.
It's in sections, as short poems like this
usually are. It's called "The Tale of the Green Rose."
Jon, can you hear me?
OK.
It's the last poem in The Vermont Suicides, which
isn't a particularly happy title for a book
but it's not the most depressing book I've read or written.
Anyway, I'm just going to try and read this to you,
after Steve Orlen sharply criticized me
for my reading habits, and see if we can try a new way.
Anyway, this poem mostly takes place in Vermont, a shade of it
takes place in Southern Quebec.
And I think that's all you need to know.
It's mostly about a courtship, about triangulation
of relationships and new love of courtship, friends,
those sorts of things.
The first section of the Tale of the Green Rose--
come on in, sit down.
It's called Will of the Wisp in the Northeast Kingdom.
The Northeast Kingdom is the name of the Northeast section
of Vermont and I think it's the nicest area but the least
touristy, the poorest, and you get the feeling living there,
as I had up to a year and a half ago,
that you're living in the 19th century.
And I think in a lot of ways, most of Vermont still is.
Many of you haven't been there maybe
you want to get there someday anyway and get a sense of that
before the new freeways totally wash that away.
Will of the Wisp in the Northeast Kingdom.
The young doe in the clearing, the buff colored mark
of her chin, in her small M-shaped humid
and black nostrils, bruised the night soil.
Through her teeth that grind the kelp
blooded vetch, hemlock bark, and the white rooted memory
of winter.
There is the huffing communal whisper of the herd,
the buck and fawn still among the raspberries,
nosing into a slender bouquet of hawthorn and Yankee paintbrush.
Those blood spools drying in every syllable that
steps out of the carriage.
As I, like Renoir, a choirboy concealed
behind the great organ alone with his voice and one
with anyone there in the small light,
Transplant behind a typewriter, the margins
of four lights on a raised double hung window.
Above the silver pines, knotted into shag
against a dark exclamation of balsam.
A porcupine dining alone bites into the oak and pane
apothecary door, unhinged by Pasini Demolition and Salvage,
and a woodcock hen, leaving her eggs for a tug of war,
and nightcrawler, and the limitless undertow of her beak,
weave a fisherman's sorry net of echoes
around the white throated sparrow
song, that sweeps this valley under porch light
as if they were points of light in a lagoon.
The amaranth.
The amaranth in cobalt sun climbs to elms, like a jugular.
Like a juggler, waving sticks in a ball over a dream.
In the pond of beaver, slaps and dives circling around
the olive green two legged pot, out
of which a shimmery work shirt, an 8 o'clock
shadow, and a finely etched chimney of a nose.
Pardon me, and a finely etched chimney exhale smoke.
Low silhouette of a mud and stick island or tee pee
with a ghost of white cedar for a center pole.
At the periphery, I'm straddling a fallen elm
while a blue heron eclipses the sun, becoming
pterodactyl above the copper bald crown
the fisherman claims is an erotic land airstrip--
brown and blue feathered over the marsh
of this dream of former pleasures, friendship,
and neighbors: the exhibitionist, beaver trapped,
and Barry,
deep rooted in the sunset, his torso
confused with the reflection of lilies
that drew a bridge of bodies from the old world
to the new and swam under it to teach
in an experimental school.
Walking his creel in a stringer of rainbows back to his porch,
where a certified letter fabricated how he could
be laid off after 12 years.
Even though I, less seasoned, would not comprehend it.
I climb the ladder down out of the sleeping loft
and call to the life at her desk.
Who overcomes loss: of our love affair,
her marriage partner executing chin-ups in and out
of the closet or almost everything painful.
Who drives over for a walk on the sponge cake
earth of the checkering bog, who insists
that I don't have the strength to separate those two.
Take her bowling, for a beer at the Thrush.
What really counts is your evening
with my best female friend imported from a Middle Eastern
bedroom town on the Hudson.
Sliding her forefinger and her pink thumbnail
around the side of my scrotum, she
tells me that the boys who wear the rubbery faces
of men whose job is killing still
masturbate with the memory of Marilyn Monroe in folded linen
from the Waldorf.
But she wonders if I could arrange passage
to the Bay of Fundy with a railroad tycoon
and patron of the literary arts for her folding bed
her husband and cow.
Between a low cedar hedge and the river birch
that skirts the rocky twist in the Winooski,
we face each other on our sides, earlier with a tractor, winch,
and a hand from Walter Smith's Guinea hens,
geese, ex-cons and sophomores, Duncan Mitchell intuitive engineer
tugged the fallen galvanized silo cap up onto the hay wagon
painted US PLAINFIELD in black letters on both sides
engraved with dried rural life and dead cocoons
whitewashed in chicken shit.
With a pitchfork chained to his back,
the silver lynx illuminated in the sun.
The prongs fanning out over his mossy profile.
He took the wheel like Polynesian royalty
into a float, through the locally famous 4th
of July parade.
She would be there.
I would strut by and say a little more than hello
with my eyes, my heart reaching into the coffin of my throat,
sporting male colors of violet shirt,
a wide cowhide with a tarnished round brass buckle,
and dungarees, blue, and fading into the swarm.
She is guarded on the left by a bald short Albanian
with a full charcoal beard that curls like his memory for names
and faces loyal to the bones of the man
Deborah lived with and loved for a third of her life.
And Catherine to her right would arrange to be there.
When Tom returned to a nearly bare clapboard house
on his black and silver Kawasaki,
Deborah, to escape their claustrophobic hold,
takes Duncan's hand as it pulls her onto the float.
So everyone up from Yonkers, Marblehead and down the road
could see the ordinary joy of new love
kicking its bare heel in her eyes.
We ran into each other near the fairground stalls
where she was holding Hannah Mitchell's hand.
The only one in town without an opinion.
Where friends from both lives ride motorbikes, blow glass,
dip their hands in pans of developer,
split hairs and kindling, dissolving
into the dark spinach shade of an Independence morning.
Holding foam cups to their chins, steaming polarized lenses.
We break from the nine headed, two story
loaves of sourdough and puppets.
The silver pockets of gossip spit on the green.
Korshak's tawny specters in harness,
tug of war with Bartlett's mules.
While we, on our sides behind the hedge,
could have knotted our shoes together
over our shoulders crossing the river twice to my Chevrolet.
Instead, we brushed what we could off our clothes
and ungainly walked our grass stained elbows back
through this uneven midsummer's dream.
We met at breakfast.
I was holding forth in the Northwest corner.
My subject grew wild and poisonous
beyond a self-made house framed out of rough sawn boards.
A clear plastic sunroof over the kitchen
climbing toward the waves of a stainless steel roof,
surrounded by lime green tamarack
with their tight little cones.
To my right, Tony,
a carpenter, stabbed a sausage with a fork while Alice, mother
of nearly three appetites, scouted for bits of yellow egg tangled
in his beard.
And watched his tobacco stained finger scrape
the air for that passionate word stuck between his tongue
and an inherited tooth bent inward.
She appeared in the Southeast, barely awake,
not late enough to miss a spotted griddle
cake, a lacquered wave of bacon, and the forehead
of the carnelian orange
bearded, medium tall, skinny man next to her--streaked violet
and aquamarine under the ruptured glass lamp--frowned,
nd they were introduced as Tom the glass blower
and Deborah the sculptor.
Sniedze, a Latvian weaver, reached across the equator
for a brown crock of whipped butter
and said she loved the wild mushrooms in the mixed forest
behind her farm.
Her calloused fingers steaming over a coffee mug
and listening to me chant Armillaria mellea,
Amanita muscaria.
Sniedze replied, her hair woven into vines,
that honey mushrooms are fall mushrooms
and this was not even July.
Deborah joined our walk.
And Tom would, but he was met at the screen door
by a protege who blew milk white shaded glass
revolvers, shouldering a Machiavellian
dagger shaped punty that would gather
from the iron pots, blooming on the furnace floor
gingers of milky opaline, that they
would embed within and overlay the red foot of the mouth blown
goblet joined to the blowing iron rim.
Then, after he warmed another punty
and thrust it into the bottom of the webbed foot,
she filed the lip into a jagged edge,
broke it away from his pipe, balanced like a swan roasting on a skewer.
Then Tom flaring the whip with a tongue
pressed the shoulder with a pin snip.
Then all together, driving it home into the glory
hole after which he gave it, like a sleeping flamingo,
to the infinite disregard of the annealing oven.
Ambassador Lanes.
Kneeling over the bean row, your back
to the river, the breeze throwing your black shoulder
length hair across your eyes, you groom and prune a bush.
Catherine-- your live in lover's part time
mistress in another room furnished for a queen- sized
mattress under your ceramic, relief
on the wall and the memory of the anonymous corpse
of your friendship buzzes the blue flowered rosemary
on the windowsill.
She refuses our invitation to drive anywhere
we please after a meal of carp roe and summer onions
cut on the diagonal.
Plenty of wine and you both whisper
over the length of my thumbs, follow the ravine
up the back of my neck.
At Ambassador Lanes we slide three fingers
into the swirling red and black holes.
Deborah's throw pulls straight into her father's twisted wire
furniture factory, above the chairs burning to the ground.
Floor of bankruptcy and welfare, a split.
Her mother loses herself in a sequence of other men.
I hook into the gutter my right arm and leg arching upward
into the new Stone Age statue of a messenger,
who having swallowed courage in the face of 10 enemies
was bringing it up.
Balanced on one shoe, dyed the purslane colors of memory.
The smoldering beds of cedar shingles, hose, and firemen
percolate on the evening news after brother Jeff
and I drove home from the shortest day of summer
at the retail yard.
At the Thrush, we lick salt off a shared margarita
and the cobweb from our private cellars of purpose and desire.
Under the green stripe canopy, under the stars
bleeding into rain, we run for the bucket seats
of the Chevrolet.
In the driveway (your man in the house just a lamp
glowing through the window shade)
we touch hands and Deborah, Luna moth against the windshield
says, no one should feel remorse.
Come at 7:00 on the 2nd of July, Tom
will be off blowing glass at the Bennington fair.
We kissed.
She threw her arms like coral snakes
against the glass, her fingers opening
into the white tentacles of sea anemone
and said, suck my blood.
In love, I drove down Eva Foster Road,
where a doe in my headlights missing an ear
bounded out of a cornfield and into the ferns.
While Deborah walked back into an arrangement of arms,
her eyelids like skin divers swimming into the aquamarine
atmosphere of solitude, knowing that night when Tom reached
for her she and I would be elsewhere
and occasionally watching Tom in the clear, unsympathetic dark.
A Glass of Burgundy.
The powder blue boxer shorts fly out the window.
This is dawn unraveling, our several nights
rowing the porcelain tubs of the Windmill Arms, the Doll House
Hotel, and the Do-Drop-Inn.
A French-Canadian trucker, a ceremonial pipe feather
that ensnares the sunlight behind the cab swerving
on the right, shakes an orange and green eagle on a fist.
Throws it into neutral and screams,
Vive La France, driving us into the left shoulder
of another conversation.
At the beaver pond under the lime yellow light dashing
the foliage, we clamped a log between our legs.
Your bitterness like fields of salvage, the mounds of seagulls
picking it clean, explained that Tom littered the house
with students and other androgynies.
Limbo walking from the screened porch to the kitchen.
Your privacy and half a room to squeeze clay
into the torsos and facades of other centuries
a premium he couldn't afford.
Your ambition, the clear orange lacquer of embarrassment.
A size 34 arm around your waist, you
spotted the exhibitionist beaver climbing
over his intuitive engineering to bring a river birch
to a point.
And I having seen through a knot hole in your words,
something so large that it could not
be traced without appearing surrounded
by the outline of my marriage, buried a year ago
in a glass of burgundy.
Its opaque surface now marooned in shadow. And the light breeze
over the pond passed through the room papered
with mica thin poplar leaves.
Where we took a shortcut the evening before
and you climbed the ladder down, removing yourself from the loft
and summer trappings.
Shorts in an open apartment--
Shorts and a chartreuse tie dyed affair
climbing to an orchid double knot
marking the equatorial latitude of a suntan.
Joining you, we look away to the offerings of a pine: bronze
and ivory filigreed cones, inches from
the complimentary reflections on the sill
around the L-shaped ottoman.
And connect our birthmarks like constellations
upon the thick and scratchy blue triangle of a white rug's
shifting currents.
First, I shrivel like a snail under the tap of a shoe.
Then you become the airdried plumage of a waterfall,
and then you step out of the shower,
white leaf draped around a sugar beet, into a house in the woods
without shades, night, and all the lights of every window
a portrait of you and me in the moon
sliding across the skylight illuminating
the white fingernail under your eye.
And your surprise seeing yourself
turn an argument against marriage
into an argument for the moonlit movements of deer, their way
through the back clearing.
The moon lifts in silence, filling the window
over the black iron stove.
You break the vigil, the deer twitch
their ears, the deer leap.
You are sure if you took a husband
it must be someone who could listen in the dark for hours
without fear.
My throat started giving out a bit there.
Summer Constellations.
She pinched a daydream of black flies under the house on piers.
We sprawled with the panic grass around the gelatinous
brown and cream rimmed cups of mid-July, humidity.
Dead bees and moths circling away
under clouded butterflies along the concrete pillar.
An intensive specialist, she applied thumbs
to the rawhide knotted in my tailbone.
Her curling dark Mediterranean hair
fell on my shoulder blades pressing on to the chicken pox
crater where my eyebrows, like the black pearl handles
of dueling pistols, crossed straining
to hear Deborah, her sister through the floorboard.
Tom at the other end of the line eventually
made headway into her tolerance for the techniques
of blame and stress, offhanded and sarcastic.
Until she felt herself flaring up like sailfish
into the vengeance of insulin floundering
in the air which caves in, coming back out of breath, crying.
Having promised her and ourselves
that we could hold back, but close enough
under 12 tons of plexiglas and western red cedar
we crawled out into handfuls of wood soil and morning glories
trailing up the porch.
Well Deborah, her knees tucked into her neck, her fists
like milkweed pods crammed against her eyes,
was about to burst.
Tom arrived moments after we left
for the neon arrow of the Jockey motel,
broke a knife between his fingers and at a still moment
he put his foot through the louvered pine door
leaving Cynthia in the deneivehosture of a porcelain bowl
her belly turning the fear and cereal.
Of Another Life.
We took a room with moss rose wallpaper and a balcony view
above the lobby.
A fairy ring of perch washed up and spaced four feet apart
like sentries guarding the lake.
A tap at the door and the embarrassed voice of a girl
asked that we pull the curtain inside the stall.
That evening we poked at fat herrings, chopped and swimming
on their sides in sour cream, washed down in dark ale.
Staring off into the knotty pine, images of Rembrandt
like old men pointing their gnarled storybook thumbs
at children and stocking caps.
Floating out of the rain stained ceiling,
we joined them in a grand promenade
around the lounge and ottomans arranged like a newspaper
labyrinth, where a silver haired gentleman bites
into a tortoiseshell cigarette holder
twisting the Montreal star into a rush rag.
On the outskirts, a dowager pressed a diamond solitaire
to the side of her nose.
By the side of a willow rocker and under our room,
a dark irradiating ectoplasm like
an overturned Russian cathedral watermarked the red carpet.
Outside a cat went from one fish to another surveying
the loss of the House of Denmark.
We walked stones across the water.
The moon cut the corner off a cloud floating in the lake,
the best throw spinning still across it before it sank.
We might as well have chased the cat
or given ourselves, with the Isabella moths,
to the coming severity of winter.
Three things were perfectly clear:
the formal Dane had powdered the sickle shaped bags
under his eyes with a red diagonal stitch.
Confused by the current passing between us,
he didn't charge for the herrings that choked in ice.
And we were afraid that all our concoctions whipped in fever
and without sleep would evaporate
after American customs and with the dew.
Stopping for the expected search through the ashtray,
we lost ourselves.
Familiar back roads over hung with the jade-green finery
of mid-July, afraid even to sit on a rock
and eat a sandwich because the man she left,
the "Tom I'm going away to think a while" letter,
had a temper.
The killing arts tucked under his sash
and having lived together for nearly nine years,
they kept their short flings from each other, the loose keys
in their pockets.
But they came together with the international diplomacy
of alley cats.
And when one morning Tom walked downstairs and split open
her cheek just under the eye with a dew claw,
she tried hysterically, all 93 pounds of her, to take him back.
The Russian Hour.
I caught you eating snapped beans
as long as Tolstoy's fingers out from under his muslin, turnips,
albino white, wild pheasant and not your first humid succotash.
The laundromat I was calling from
was your native stamping ground in the Northeast Kingdom.
Moat of poverty, mud palace, blood on snow,
you're about to leave Writer's Mecca, Iowa for Athens,
Ohio, climb 3 flights and teach on a hill.
Have your child again and a second wife.
A poet whose words radiate like the nicotine gold
flourish of your right thumb under kerosene light.
She took you for drives along a clear tributary of the Hocking
river, a ladle handle scooping up
into a cave over which a spray cools
the air of her blonde hair fanning out on the water.
While the three of you bathe, chewed on
the altogether round and peppery leaves of watercress,
waiting up the stream to tease the big mouthed chubs
and suckers.
By then, we wouldn't speak to each other for the fourth time
in our lives.
Like spittle on a shard of pottery
emerging from a mound of ash, a part of me
would offend a part of you.
Between us we shared four wedding ceremonies
alone with our wives.
But I began this page calling you away from supper.
To say I'm in love but overturned by all the harm that
scattered in and around us.
Our friend in Montreal takes his demolition derby jacket out
of the closet, where his child, wife,
their refrigerated vitamins and their ziplock bag
must eat the door handle for breakfast.
Deborah has been living with another man in 3 states, five
towns and for nine years.
I met her at a morning feast, took her along
with a Latvian Penelope to a mixed forest.
Deborah was thawing squid for the deep fryer for Tom and me,
if I would come.
Tom was scraping silver off the marver well into a sunset
and so this small figure of a woman--who
might have been a Daughter of the American Revolution,
a Mediterranean street vendor, or the portrait
of a powdered obelisk at the Palace of Versailles--
set me down in a living room wrapped
with earth colored clay, knotted metal, and certain rat tail.
She opened her leather portfolio of photographs across my lap
to a ceramic long ship tattooed with industrial gears
and the fragments of kitchenware exploding out
of the spheres across a page to the right stoneware and linen
mop bodied quadruped.
A crustacean stepping out of a prehistoric assembly line.
Her eye for the abstract and too real, believably
culled from the ancestral memory of gold and red breads
braided into yards of sweatshop gabardine
flung across the mud walls of Poland
to the needle trade district of New York
and captured in clay for any dreamer with an eye.
For a highly textured figure pulling the cords of my memory
through the clear convex corneal membrane just as an Indonesian
faith healer's fingers pass through the living
walls of the belly.
Into the living walls of the belly.
Tom walked into the scene of my fingers
stirring in the burial ashes of her low fired wall relief.
We shook hands and cheese over a garlic butter
and green tentacles of parsley while our conversation
glided halfway up a hill.
Deborah uncovered a box of her father's letters written out
of anguish and bankruptcy.
The slow dissolve of marriage and the belief
that his failures would smear his children
and anyone who touched them.
Tom picked up his fiddle, crossed the room,
and sat the evening out.
And when the life of the party appeared and joined
our meditation on a man who would curl up on a couch
after a meal one hand pinched between his legs
fall asleep and mumble son of a bitch, son of a bitch.
Still watching the furniture factory smoldering coals
or having walked the frozen Hudson to the two story
in West New York.
He is just unlocking the door to no wife boiling milk
or five children screaming around the machine twisted wire
furniture that he designed before a crusade
of legal battles
led him into the present.
When his playboy brother wills him a fabric store in Miami
underneath a velvet red apartment
complete with a garden on the roof.
I saw that Tom and Deborah's marriage
had taken on the ritual of ivory and black keys
falling like the willing resignation of martyrs
to a waltz in ragtime, or was I hypnotized.
Steven, what would you do if you were
leaning against the pale hospital walls of laundromat
in my boots?
I'd take off my pants, pinch my nose
and jump while the water's warm, while the days are
as long as our friendship.
Congratulations, and marble fauns,
and my love to your Deborah.
[CLAPPING]
Thank you.
[CLAPPING]