I'd like to read some new poems, if I can find one in particular.
There's a carpenter that I met in Nova Scotia,
a 70-year-old man.
And it's a very rural area.
We go there in the summer for a month.
It's the kind of area where people would come up to me
and say, you read books, don't you?
And I would say yes.
And they'd say, I thought so.
They'd say, Ted Porter reads books, too.
You should get to know him.
And sure enough, Ted Porter read books, and he's this carpenter.
And besides, he's self-educated.
Loves poetry, and knows something about it.
And we became good friends.
He even understood that carpentry was
a metaphor for poetry as well.
And he's just a marvelous man.
I think this poem just attempts to really transcribe
the kinds of things he does and says.
"The Carpenter's Song."
"When I'm no longer young, let me
be able to make wine from chokecherries,
and care enough to let it age.
And when friends come, let them sip it on a torn-out car
seat under a tree.
And let my house smell of books and pipe smoke,
and let its disarray be the luxury
of a man who makes cabinets.
And after it gets dark, let's move
to the room where the squeeze boxes sing songs, and talk
Iceland by freighter, Newfoundland on a whim,
all the arrivals one doesn't plan.
And let the evidence be deep in my voice, the lines of my face,
and let me call this style.
Let me rebuild then the lighthouse my father
rebuilt years ago.
And let me know the history of old houses haunted
by rats and shadows, good people and bad.
And when asked, let me sense what can be redeemed and what
can't.
And yes, let me be able to say I'm a builder of houses,
a man who works slow and knows how hard it is
to get the inside just right.
I let my metaphors grow from that.
Something lives, stretching out, trying to make contact
with something else.
And let me call this my work.
And when I'm no longer young, let there be poets in my life,
their words aftertastes on the tongue.
And let me speak those words like a man who has heard a spar
snap on a ship, who has been lost once or twice
and come back.
And let me declare I've been a lover of women
without declaring it, and feel I've treated them
better than wood, knowing I've been a husband of wood,
have cared for it with my own hands.
Let my hands be thick badges of power, rarely used.
My fist and inner fist, the size of a heart.
And let this be visible to men.
And let the old death dog sense me coming a long way off,
ready to forgive anything I've done.
And let me call all this some goddamn luck."