I have written, to my recollection,
two poems in my adult life which remember back.
There are some poets whose entire work
is made of remembering things that happened a long time ago.
And perhaps because I have quite a bad memory
I have only done this twice.
This is one of them, and it dates me quite nicely.
It comes from the first job I had
after graduating from college.
And the title is 1973.
The one thing that those of you who are not
quite so nicely dated as I might need to know, is it
goes back to a time when cars had manual chokes that you had
to pull out on cold mornings.
So for those of you who have never met a manual choke,
that's what I'm talking about at the beginning.
And I'm not eating artichokes for breakfast.
The other 70's references, it doesn't
matter if you don't get them, but that one mattered.
[LAUGHS]
1973.
That winter, we took turns stepping
into the barely-started mornings to turn ignitions
until they caught, complaining roughly of the cold.
Then ran back to finish our coffee, cereal, toast,
while chokes pulled full out, exhaust poured white
across the glass that kept us warm.
We'd named them.
Big Mama Tomato.
Snooze.
Each was our first, as we were each other's first,
in the farmhouse for rent for the first time in 40
years, surrounded by soybeans.
We'd whited over the pink room the son had painted when he
returned crazed with Vietnam.
We'd made the man come back for the thin black lab left
chained in the yard.
The 13 cats stayed, soon more, all wild.
Our own would come to the window by way
of a three-story oak and moss-shingled porch roof
to mew us awake and them in every day.
Kesey and Mountain Girl, scrawling their signatures,
snow mornings on the quilt.
We nailed planks from the old barns onto the walls
by our bed, scraped a dozen layers of peeling paper
from the next room.
The older they got, the more lovely.
That one we made cheerful yellow,
where I wrote the wildly sad poems of the very young.
When we got to the farm, you took a tractor.
I loaded my van with sacks of produce and drove off.
Kip supervised us all, the Peace Corps vet,
the kids just out of school.
Picking his peaches that summer, the best work I've done.
The closest to paradise I've seen.
Ladder propped in his trees.
All sold now.
Gone.
His farm, the one we lived at, the ground fall cider, the cars.
Us too, of course, long shaken free,
though I still cook bluefish the way you taught me, and carrots.
I thought I would love you forever,
and a little I may in the way I still move
toward a crate, knees bent, or reach for a man
as one might stretch for the three or four
fruit that lie in the sun at the top of the tree.
Too ripe for any moment but this,
they open their skin at first touch,
yielding sweetness, sweetness and heat.
And in me, each time since, the answering, yes.