[SIREN WAILING]
I'm going to read some new poems,
but first, I'm going to drink the water.
[LAUGHS]
This is the hardest part of the evening.
[LAUGHS]
I'm going to read some new poems.
[SIREN WAILING]
This one requires no explanation.
[SIREN WAILING]
I was educated for a life in the provinces.
[SIREN WAILING]
I was educated for a life in the provinces
in a place mostly ignored for good reason.
Home was a remnant of a forgotten farm
onto which my parents built a lopsided house on a corner
field, once planted in red clover,
which hummed with the authority of the neighbor's nine hives.
With the autumn violin of crickets,
nighthawk lonesome and whistling in the brush.
I was taught by example and by decree,
which wasn't always nice.
Here is how to trap the mice in the tin cat, how to drown them
in a five-gallon pail.
Here is how to climb the rail fence
and not catch your parts on the crown of barbed wire.
Higher, a little higher.
In church, I learned of Saint Martin betrayed by a goose.
Saint Lucy serving her eyes on a plate.
Job faced down on his heap of ash and lot,
leaving his salty wife to crumble in the dust.
Taken to the prairie moon museum, we marveled at old man
Russia's world of concrete.
The tower of Babel.
Daniel Boone stabbing an unlucky bear.
A cement python with a tin snip tongue
forever tasting sand prairie air.
Rush sat next to his wash boilers full of snakes.
A pot choked with a live snapper.
Quonset huts stuffed with the miraculous things.
Arrowheads.
A hundred-foot grapevine.
Taxidermied fox and rabbit eternally trapped in a log.
In school I learned of the Peshtigo Fire.
How to make pudding.
How to build a little shelf.
I learned the breeds and colors of every kind of cow.
Which sheep to graze in an orchard?
Which on rough range?
Whose wool had better crimp?
Which grew the best marbling in the meat.
On the class trip to the chick hatchery,
we saw the sea of yellow fluff peeping down a chute,
picked and poked with a vaccine beak-tipped shorn
with a hot wire, the halt and the lame falling to a bin
to be ground into mush for the minks.
I learned squeals, I learned stinks.
At 15 I was behind the wheel of a truck.
It was my job to keep in a state of miraculous repair,
keep unstuck.
I was taught much for a life everyone thinks I left behind.
Where is behind?
Just what has been abandoned?
Wherever I am I am prepared to reap or to kill, to castrate
or to shear.
I am there, here still.