So one of the poets that I adore,
as I adore many, many poets, was W. S. Merwin, who
was a great influence to me.
And when he died, I wrote two poems for him.
And I read one of them at Antigone's a week or two ago,
and I'll read the other one tonight.
So I had the great privilege of hosting him
when he came here to read in Tucson several times.
And I even had one of the most beautiful nights of my life,
a dinner party for him and Gerald Stern at my house.
Unbelievable.
This is from that night.
It's called The Trowel.
One day in the city, there was someone on my porch
who had never been there before.
Someone who had written against war and for rain in the trees.
Someone who had asked the Earth what
it needed to flourish after having
been ripped raw the marketplace for other ways of being.
Someone had greeted the loquat tree
in my back yard with quiet respect and admiration,
as I had greeted him, and the books that
had become a terrarium for me.
Little locusts of beauty to counter the decay that seems
so rank, but makes soil capable of invention.
I could say he was compost to what I might hope to grow.
After dinner, he saw the trowel resting
on the crimson concrete of my porch.
That's a good trowel, he said.
The best trowel comes from, and exacting as he was,
he named the catalog.
[LAUGHS]