I am going to read a sampling of my poems, which will be more or less chronological. I am going to begin with a poem, the first poem I wrote that sort of made some noise. I wrote it when I was twenty-five, when my son, my first child was born. “My Son, My Executioner”. Whenever he is in the audience, I have to read it every time. When I wrote it with that title, I wondered what he would think about it when he got old enough. And then when he was fourteen, he said, "That poem you wrote about me when I was born, that’s really more about your fathering you, isn’t it?" He had been reading Freud again.

My son, my executioner,
       I take you in my arms,
Quiet and small and just astir
       And whom my body warms.

Sweet death, small son, our instrument
       Of immortality,
Your cries and hungers document
       Our bodily decay.

We twenty-five and twenty-two,
       Who seemed to live forever,
Observe enduring life in you
And start to die together.

It made noise because it was published in the New Yorker and then picked up by anthologies for long time. It was the one poem I had in most anthologies. It’s outlived its life by this time.

I want to read another poem, which I wrote not long after, which is as different as a poem can be. That poem is written in iambic rhyming. This poem is certainly not and that poem is more rational and this poem is certainly not. It’s called “The Long River”.

The must ox smells
in his long head
my boat coming. When
I feel him there,
intent, heavy,

the oars make wings
in the white night,
and deep woods are close
on either side
where trees darken.

I rode past towns
in their black sleep
to come here. I passed
the northern grass
and cold mountains.

The must ox moves
when the boat stops,
in hard thickets. Now
the wood is dark
with old pleasures.

I have a gratitude to this poem because it is the first poem that I began and worked on without having any idea what I was talking about. I had earlier the dillusion that I should understand a poem before I wrote it and every poem that I wrote at that time that was any good really said something other than what I had intended and this poem had no question of intent.

Let me read a poem about this kind of poem written about the same time. It’s a poem called “The Poem”.

It discovers by night
what the day hid from it.
Sometimes it turns itself
into an animal
In summer, it takes long walks
by itself where meadows
fold back from ditches.
Once it stood still
in a silent row of machines.
Who knows
what it is thinking

A poem that I wrote a little later that comes after my father’s death and it is a poem that title of selected poems. I wrote it. I had a dream a week after my father died and I began to try to write about it right away, but I didn’t finish this poem for I think seventeen years. I had one part of the poem done, but it just didn’t fly. And one day I was walking across the lawn of the house where I lived and one line came into my head. Not on the subject necessarily, but it carried with it a little tag saying that it belonged with this poem and that’s the line that forms the title of my selected poems – “White Apples”.

When my father had been dead a week
I woke
with his voice in my ear
                        I sat up in bed
and held my breath
and stared as the pale closed door

white apples and the taste of stone

if he called again
I would put on my coat and galoshes

It was the line ‘white apples and the taste of stone’ that came into my head that time. Syntactically not connected with the rest of the poem at all, but some how I think giving it the power to take off the ground. At least I hope so.

There’s a poem I wrote quite a long time ago that I then, after writing the poem, I turned into a children’s book. It’s called “Ox Cart Man”. This is not the children’s book. This is the original story. Actually I took it from a story told to me by a New Hampshire neighbor who began, resides, crinkled and I knew he’d remember this story. He said, "Did you ever find them? Here’s one about the fellow who used to live around here. Every fall he loaded up his ox cart and drove it down to Portsmouth market." I took off from there, when he went out to tell me what happened.

In October of the year,
he counts potatoes dug from the brown field
counting the seed, counting
the seller’s portion out
and bags to rest on the cart’s floor.

He packs wool sheared in April, honey
in combs, linen, leather
tanned from deerhide,
and vinegar in a barrel
hooped by hand at the forge’s fire.

He walks by his ox’s head, ten days
to Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes,
and the bag that carried potatoes,
flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose
feathers, yarn.

When the cart is empty, he sells the cart.
When the cart is sold, he sells the ox,
harness and yolk, and walks
home, his pockets heavy
with the year’s coin for salt and taxes,

and at home by fire’s light in November cold
stitches his new harness
for next year’s ox in the barn,
and carves the yoke and saws planks
building the cart again.

It was when he told me that he sold the ox and walked home that I needed absolutely to make this into a poem. Human life renewed every year like a perennial plant. To work for awhile in your middle life.

I’d like to read now my poem about poetry readings. There was a time when all poets were writing a poem about poetry reading. This is a particular poetry reading and it has a particular title, which is To a Waterfowl. James Cullen Bryant wrote a poem called “To a Waterfowl” but in this case, the waterfowl occurs in the first line and then disappears forever.

         
Women with hats like the rear ends of pink ducks
applauded you, my poems.
These are the women whose husbands I meet on airplanes
who close their briefcases and ask “What are you in?”
I look in their eyes, I tell them I am in poetry,
and their eyes fill with anxiety, and with little tears
“Oh yeah?” they say, developing an interest in clouds
“My wife, she likes that sort of thing? Hah-hah?
I guess maybe I better watch my grammar, huh?”
I leave them in airports, watching their grammar,

and taking a limousine to the Women’s Goodness Club
where I drink Harvey’s Bristol Cream with their wives,
and eat chicken salad with capers, with little tomato wedges.
and I read them “The Erotic Crocodile,” and “Eating You.”
Ah. when I have precluded the disbursement of sonorities,

Crooning, “High on thy thigh I cry, Hi!” – and so forth -
they spank their wide hands, they smile like Jell-O
and they say, “Hah-Hah? My goodness, Mr. Hall,
but you certainly do have an imagination, huh?”
“Thank you, indeed,” I say; “it brings in the bacon!”

But now, my poems, now I have retuned to the motel,
returned to l’eternel retour of the Holiday Inn
naked lying on the bed, watching Godzilla Sucks Mount Fiji,
addressing my poems, feeling superior and drinking bourbon
from a flask disguised to look like a transistor radio.

And what about you? You, laughing? You in the bluejeans
laughing at your mother who wears hats, and at your father
who rides airplanes with a briefcase watching his grammar?
Will you ever be old and dumb, like your creepy parents?
Not you, not you, not you, not you, not you, not you.

That was a lot of fun to write. I remember when Gregor and I used to workshop together doing this poem with him when I wrote it and inventing Godzilla Sucks Mount Fuji right in his presence. And we all laughed for twenty minutes. This is another rather different poem. I like to move by opposites.

When I got back to...when we moved to the farm in New Hampshire, I had already written a great deal about it. I haven’t read you any of the earlier poems about it. Well I went there as a kid in the summer to hay with my grandfather. Spent the mornings working on poems while he was cutting hay in the fields, but then in the afternoon helped him breaking after and pitching on the old hay rack with one horse in front of it. I decided that when we went back there, I would have lost that subject. Living there, I wouldn’t be able to write about it. Ha! I wrote a great deal about it and i wrote about all the animals. And my favorite one of the animals poems is the one about the horses. It’s called “Names of Horses”.

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;

and after noon's heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning, led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,

and laid the shotgun's muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.

For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground - old toilers, soil makers:

O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.

It’s too big a book. I have trouble fumbling around in it. I wrote a poem about  a week after my father’s death. There came a time…he died when he was only fifty-two. And there came a time when I was approaching fifty-two and I found myself beginning poems, not knowing what they were going to be for, but each of poem was characterized by sort of morbidity that I finally realized was the fact that I was approaching the death of my parent of the same sex. Some of you have had this happen. Most people find it kind of a telling and kind of scary time. It’s as if you didn’t deserve to live longer than you father did or your mother did. Or it’s that you can’t possibly do it. I wrote a poem called “The Day I was Older”, which was in five parts, small parts, each of which has a title of a song. 

"The Clock"

The clock on the parlor’s wall, stout as a mariner’s clock,
disperses the day. All night it tools the half-hour
and the hour’s number with resolute measure,
approaching the poles and crossing the equator
over fathoms of sleep. Warm
in the dark next to your breathing,
below the thousand favored stars, I feel horns of gray water heave
underneath us, and the ship’s pistons
pound as the voyage continues over the limited sea.

"The News"

After tending the fire, making coffee, and pouring milk
for cats, I sit in a blue chair each morning,
reading obituaries in the Boston Globe
for the mean age; today there is MANUFACTURER CONCORD 53,
EX-CONGRESSMAN SAUGUS 80 - and I read
that Emily Farr is dead, after a long illness in Oregon.
Once in an old house we talked for an hour, while a coal fire
brightened in November twilight and wavered
our shadows high on the wall
until our eyes fixed on each other. Thirty years ago.

“The Pond”
                        We lie by the pond on a late August afternoon
                        as a breeze from low hills in the west stiffens water
                        and agitates birch leaves yellowing above us.
                        You set down your book and lift your eyes to white trunks tilting from shore.
                        A mink scuds through ferns; an acorn tumbles.
                        Soon we will turn to our daily business.
                        You do not know that I am watching, taking pleasure
                        in your breasts that rise and fall as you breathe.
                        Then I see mourners gathered by an open grave.

                        Last night at suppertime I outlived my father, enduring
                        the year, month, day, hour, and moment
                        when he lay back on a hospital bed in the guest room
                        among cylinders of oxygen – mouth open, nostrils and pale
                        blue lips fixed unquivering. Father of my name,
                        father of long fingers, I remember your dark hair
                        and your face almost unwrinkled. Now I have waked
                        more mornings to frost whitening the grass,
                        read the newspaper more times, and stood more times,
                        my hand on a doorknob without opening the door.
           
“The Cup”
                        From the Studebaker’s back sear, on out Sunday drives,
                        I watched her earrings sway. Then I walked uphill
                        beside an old man carrying buckets
                        under birches on an August day. Striding at noontime,
                        I looked at wheat and at river cities. In the crib
                        my daughter sighed opening her eyes. I kissed the cheek
                        of my father dying. By the pond an acorn fell.
                        You listening here, you reading these words as I write them,
                        I offer this cup to you: Though we drink
                        from this cup every day, we will never drink it dry.

I have written a certain number of poems, which I printed quotation marks as the speech of somebody else. Dramatic monologues itself are not dramatic by and large, but they are monologues. This is one called “Mr. Wakefield on Interstate 90”.

                        “Now I will abandon the route of my life
                        as my shadowy wives abandon me, taking my children.
                        I will stop somewhere. I will park in a summer street
                        where the days tick like metal in the stillness.
                        I will rent the room over Bert’s Modern Barbershop
                        where the TO LET sign leans in the plateglass window;
                        or I will buy the brown BUNGALOW FOR SALE.

                        “I will work forty hours a week clerking at the paintstore.
                        On Fridays I will cash my paycheck at Six Rivers Bank
                        and stop at Harvey’s Market and talk with Harvey.
                        Walking on Maple Street I will speak to everyone.
                        At basketball games, I will cheer for my neighbors’ sons.
                        I will watch my neighbors’ daughters grow up, marry,
                        raise children. The joints of my fingers will stiffen.
                       
                        “There will be no room inside me for other places.
                        I will attend funerals regularly and weddings.
                        I will char with the mailman when he comes on Saturdays.
                        I will shake my head when I hear of the florist
                        who drops dead in the greenhouse over a flat of pansies;
                        I spoke with her only yesterday.
                        When lawyer elopes with babysitter I will shake my head.

                        “When Harvey’s boy enlists in the Navy
                        I will wave goodbye at the Trailways depot with the others.
                        I will vote Democratic; I will vote Republican.
                        I will applaud the valedictorian at graduation
                        and wish her well as she goes away to the university
                        and weep as she goes away. I will live in a steady joy;
                        I will exult in the ecstasy of my concealment.”

I called it Mr. Wakefield because Hawthorne has a story called “Wakefield” about a man named Wakefield who does something like this, actually within his own city. He moves to a different section of his city, changes his name, lives totally anonymously, having abandoned entirely his earlier life. And I imagine that it is a fantasy that is a very common human fantasy to suddenly disappear and become someone else.

Finally, a poem called “Olives.” Now I began to write poems when I was twelve and I got really serious when I was fourteen. I was fourteen when I decided that’s what I was going to do for the rest of my life and somehow went and did. But by that time, by fourteen it was another element. I was a lousy athlete at school and I wanted to do something to be interesting to young women so I tried to pretend to be crazy. I was a poet. I was a mad poet. It didn’t work, but there was a line that I said all the time to prove I was crazy. And it concerns olives in a way.

“Dead people don’t like olives,”
I told my partners in eighth grade
dancing class who never listened
as we foxtrotted, one-two one-two.

The dead people I often consulted
nodded their skulls in unison
while I flung my black velvet cape
over my shoulders and glowered
from deep-set, burning eyes,
walking the city streets, alone at fifteen,
crazy for cheerleaders and poems.

At Hamden High football games, girls
in short pleated skirts
pranced and kicked, and I longed
for their memorable thighs.
They were friendly - Poets were mascots –
but never listened when I told them
that dead people don’t like olives.

Instead the poet, wearing his cape,
continued to prowl in solitude
intoning inscrutable stanzas
as halfbacks and tackles
made out, Friday nights after football,
on sofas in dark-walled rec rooms
with magnanimous cheerleaders.

But, decades later, when the dead
have stopped blabbering
about olives, obsess halfbacks wheeze
upstairs to sleep beside cheerleaders
waiting for hip replacement,
while a lascivious, doddering  poet,
his burning eyes deep-set
in wrinkles, cavorts with their daughters.