Bill Moyers Journal (1993-1994); 1004; A Life Together

What is the magic of a mountain? You rise inside me, blue, ghost. What is the power of a memory? White apples and the taste of stone. What is it about love that makes a merry? I am the blossom pressed in a book. Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon have spent their lives answering those questions together. Tonight, a visit with poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon. Major funding for Bill Moyer's journal is provided by Mutual of America, building America's

future through pension and retirement programs, encouraging dialogue and discussion, the spirit of America, Mutual of America. Funding has also been provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a catalyst for change, and by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation as part of its commitment to poetry. Great blue mountain, ghost. I look at you from the porch of the farmhouse where I watched you all summer as a boy. Steep sides, narrow flat patch on top. You are clear to me like the memory of one day, blue, blue. The top of the mountain floats in haze. I will not rock on this porch when I am old. I turn my back on you, kiss eyes.

I close my eyes and you rise inside me, blue, ghost. Beneath the looming New Hampshire mountain called Kersage, the poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon make their home. Rare it is that two poets marry and make a life together. Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon are an exception. Hall's career stretches back 40 years. He is the honored author of more than 20 books of poetry, as well as volumes of plays, short stories and children's books. Kenyon is an award-winning poet and translator.

They met in Michigan, but have come to live in New Hampshire in Hall's ancestral farmhouse at Eagle Pond. Hall and Kenyon are deeply connected to community life. Hall is a deacon in the local church, where his grandparents and great-grandparents also worshiped. And both he and Kenyon often read their poems in the local town hall, and in cities and towns all over America. But most often you can find them in their New Hampshire farmhouse at the foot of Mount Kersage. Your poems are marked, as someone has said, by either the pleasure of sound or the spirit

of place, and sometimes by both. And this one to me is the one that combines both the pleasure of sound and the spirit of place, Mount Kersage, to talk to me about the sound in that poem. Place and sound. The sound of it is something I remember very well, working on it, improvising, not knowing what I was looking for, and then finally getting it, so I said, yeah, that's it. And later I looked back and tried to find what it is. I remember toward the end, working on where the lines broke. I had Kersage, I closed my eyes, I had an ending one line, and then I changed it, so I close, as the end of one line, and my eyes begins another line. Now that means you hold on to O's, with the long O and the Z sound you can hold on to it.

Meaning I close my eyes, you say, I close my eyes, that's what I expect with the line that people will hold on to that. So the way I end the poem is O, I, I, I, O. I say you read poems with your mouth, not with your ear, and that they taste good. Mind you, when I read a book silently sitting in my chair, my throat gets tired. I mean, my mouth is really working, listening, hearing, chewing on these, these sounds. I know, with that explanation, read it again. Okay. Sure. Great blue mountain, ghost. I look at you from the porch of the farmhouse, where I watched you all summer as a boy, steep sides, narrow flat patch on top. You are clear to me, like the memory of one day, blue, blue. The top of the mountain floats in haze.

I will not rock on this porch when I am old. I turn my back on you, dear sides, I close my eyes, and you rise inside me, blue, ghost, ghost. I have to contact myself with my hand, you know? This is a poem written about where I live now, but it was written when I didn't live here, and when I thought I couldn't live here. So it's a poem saying I can never live there dammit, you know, and reading it now, I realized I was wrong, and how wonderful to have been wrong about that. This is your ancestral home, that's it. I had a great grandfather, he's up on the wall there with a white beard. In 1865, he bought this valley farm, and that's where my grandmother was born. And then her daughter, my mother Lucy, born in 193.

Your mother was born here? Your grandmother was born here? And I came here all my summers when I was a kid. As a boy. But then you said I will not rock on the porch when I'm old. Well, I think I won't come back there. I wanted to write poems rather than having an apple orchard or a strawberry farm. And I pretty much gave up the notion of coming here. And then amazingly, I was able to do it. What do your neighbors think of having a poet around? You know, it's marvelous compared to the colleges, the universities. You go on the university and somebody will have a couple of martinis and say, and how was our great poet today? You know? Crazy. It drives you nuts. Around here, I meet somebody and he says nice piece about you in the paper. And that's the end of it. Do they ever get the idea that you might be hovering, listening for something you're looking for material? Sure. And I get teased about it. I get teased about a lot of things.

Teasing is a big thing in the country here. I wrote a prose book in which I invented an abandoned railroad on Ragged Mountain up here. Teased about that every day still. I mean, I wrote that 30 years ago and I still get teased about it. And I remember talking to Gifford Wiggand. I put this in a poem, but Gifford Wiggand was a man's real name, who reminisced a lot for me. And then, as I was leaving, he said, you're going to put this in a book. And I said, well, maybe, Gifford. And he said, told you a lot of lies. This is a poem out of how we talk in New Hampshire. And I kept taking notes on things that people had actually said. And finally, assembled them into a poem written in the out of short lines so that I could sort of note where the pauses came and everything, try to imitate our speech. And in it, at one point, I say, west said something and I'm lying a little bit, it was less. Less foreign said it.

So I just arbitrarily changed into west. And there is a reference to a restaurant called Blackwater Bills, and now called M&Rs. But you can understand why we still call it Blackwater Bills. I mean, lots of call it M&Rs when you can call it Blackwater Bills. So this is speeches. It's in a bunch of parts, but I'll just pause a little bit from speech to speech. Two old men meet at the lunch counter of Blackwater Bills after the first hard frost. And how did your garden fade? Sure, never was afraid of work. Chester Ludlow told me stories about my two great-grandfathers, Chester remembered, about frogging 100 bullfrogs, about his old steam tractor, Gretta, that blew up on the 4th of July. And when I stood to go, Chester asked, you gunned the right this down in a book, maybe told you a lot of lies.

All of you who's driven on Route 91, know where I got the name Chester Ludlow. That's an exit, you know, it's an exit, Chester Ludlow. I love the name. I think I've used it before somewhere, but it's really Gifford Wiggins from Danbury, who was a subject there. I like to lie, you know, told you a lot of lies, right? Then a little exercise in prepositions, it's down to the store up by Wilmot Way. Then my grandmother's characteristic decisiveness, if you ask, does it look like rain during the year's worst downpour? Kate said, maybe, I guess, crap, I suppose so. Wes said, saw a piece about you in the paper. I told him, oh, I turn up every place.

Yep, said Wes, just like, or shit. That's why I changed Wes to less, for that benefit, that benefit. Lila dialed Bertha to tell her, go, look out her, parlor window, east. It says, pretty, as a picture, postcard. Fellow lost his bobhouse, works down to Henry's. See the bud boy's wife ran off with the bread driver, Hates Beaver. Those abnams with TNT, no, that's not him. At Blackwater Bills, Jenny yells to Claude in the kitchen, hey, Froggy, nuke us some beans. Each of us is going to read one poem by the other. So I'm going to read one poem by Jane, it's a poem I particularly love to read.

It's called, twilight after hay. Yes, long shadows go out from the bales. And yes, the soul must part from the body. What else could it do? The men sprawl near the baler, reluctant to leave the field, they talk and smoke, and the tips of their cigarettes blaze like small roses in the night air. It arrived and settled among them before they were aware. The moon comes to count the bales, and the dispossessed whip or will, whip or will, sings from the dusty stubble. These things happen, the souls bliss and suffering are bound together like the grasses. The last sweet exhalation of Timothy and Vetch go out with the song of the bird.

The ravaged field grows wet with dew. I want to read Don's poem called, The Long River, it's a poem I've loved for many years. The musk 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 musk ox moves when the boat stops in hard thickets. Now the wood is dark with old pleasures. It was you who persuaded Don to come back here, it was you who imagined a future here. How I did, strange to say, I didn't know what I was saying when I said it. Did riding poetry help you to settle in? I'm sure it did. I'm sure it did. And it was natural for me to write about these things that were going on in my own soul.

What was going on? Well I felt quite disembodied for a while. Someone said that when you move it takes your soul a few weeks to catch up with you. And when we came here, of course, this house is so thoroughly full of Don's family. His ancestors, their belongings, their reverberations that I, at times I felt almost annihilated by the otherness of it from room to room. Here in this house among photographs of your ancestors, their hymn books and old shoes, I move from room to room a little dazed like the fly. I watch it bump against each window.

I'm clumsy here, thrusting slabs of maple into the stove. Out of my body for a while, weightless in space. Sometimes the wind against the clabbered sounds like a car driving up to the house. My people are not here, my mother and father, my brother. I talk to the cats about the weather. Let's be the tie that binds, we sing in the church down the road. And how does it go from there, the tie, the tether, the hose carrying oxygen to the astronaut, turning, turning outside the hatch, taking a look around. How does the mind go from singing the tie that binds down the road of the church to the astronauts in the heavens? Well, it's really a visual image of the astronaut floating out with this umbilical cord from the mother ship.

Oh, yeah. How's your metaphor? Mm-hmm. This is one of your short but beautiful ones. Finding a long gray hair. I scrubbed the long floorboards in the kitchen, repeating the motions of other women who have lived in this house, and when I find a long gray hair floating in the pale, I feel my life added to theirs. I really like that. There's the connection between the generations, the transformation of tradition and making theirs your own. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Dust to dust. Mm-hmm. And one called the suitor about settling in, coming back to yourself again, the suitor. We lie back to back. Curtains lift and fall like the chest of someone sleeping. Wind moves the leaves of the box-elder.

They show their light undersides, turning all at once like a school of fish. Suddenly, I understand that I'm happy. For months, this feeling has been coming closer, stopping for short visits like a timid suitor. Why did you choose Portray as a way of life? Oh, I loved it so much. There's no question. I think, you know, what other reason would you have for choosing Portray? I loved other people's poems. I wanted to make something like what I loved, and this is how it started when I was a kid. I mean, I started writing at all when I was 12, but I really got serious when I was 14. That's when I decided I'd be a poet the rest of my life. At 14? At 14? And I never changed my mind. Do you remember one of your poems at 14?

Do you have any evokes? I don't remember any of those. I remember one at 12. I remember the first one I wrote. This was when I was reading Poe, and it doesn't sound like Poe. It doesn't have the sound, but it has the morbidity, you know. Have you ever thought of the nearness of death to you? It wreaks through the day. It shrieks through the night. It follows you through the city until it calls your name in monotone's loud then comes the end of all. From the mouth of a 12-year-old. Or the end of all. Anyway. I don't know. I don't know. Right, the 12-year-old. Right, a morbid 12-year-old. And you wrote a morbid kid, though. I think I was. I think I was. I don't know why. I mean, I have thoughts about why. I know that when I was nine years old, a bunch of the Connecticut great aunts and uncles died in a row within a year, maybe three of them died, cancer. And I remember lying in bed when I was nine years old, saying a sentence over and over again to myself.

And now death has become a reality. I was a rather literary nine-year-old, I suppose, and vain, sort of writing my own biography for whole at the age of nine. Deaths became a reality. But you know, the feelings were real, all the same. There are some other clues to why you became a portrait, or at least they seem to me the sluice that they might be clues, it's the opening of conducting work here. The question. Yeah. Canto I. These are little epigrams I wrote longer ago. The question. Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who is Donald Andrew Hall? I wrote that first when I was a freshman at college, and I went on and answered it. That was my mistake. You know, finally, by the time I'm in my fifties, I know better, I know to leave it alone, right? Yeah. There's another one. I am no foused, unsalored my sin. It is from love, I asked the devil in. All right. Now, what do you think looking back, you meant well about that? It was from love, you asked the devil in.

Well, I'm partly making a joke and making a little couplet and finding pleasure in putting unsalored into its metrical shape. I mean, don't ever discount that. I mean, just the wit of making a couplet, the pleasure of the wit of making a couplet. But also, I'm at college, I mean, I think it goes way back then and sowing my oats, and with my puritan background, I'm wondering about that a bit. Sure. What does that mean? Unsalored. The devil doesn't have to pay me a nickel. I'll go and do all the bad things I want, just because I love it. I love to do it. You don't have to pay me for it. Somewhere there's a passage where you write, bullied, found wanting. My father drove home from his work at the Lomba Yard weeping, and shook his fist over my cradle. He'll do what he wants to do. You quote your father as saying.

Yeah. Did that really happen? Yes, it did. He didn't work at a Lomba Yard. I mean, that's my fiction there. But this was the family stories that you go up with. Make you. They build you. They create you. And I remember being told about that from a very early age, indeed, I don't know, but it was repeated endlessly, that he could come home when I was a baby in the crib and said he'll do what he wants to do. And the implied matter is he is not doing what he wants to do. My father had wanted to be a teacher, but he went to work for his father. His father, the tough self-made man for whom we could never do anything quite right. And he was miserable in his work. He was miserable in the business. And he died there. There's a haunting reference to your father in white apples. I've written about him a great deal. White apples. White apples. When my father has been dead the week I woke with his voice in my ear. I sat up in bed and held my breath and stared at the pale, closed door, white apples and

the taste of stone. If he called again, I would put on my coat and galosh it. Let me tell you about this poem I did indeed have the experience I write about of hearing him call me after he was dead and not getting out of bed to go see him. It was clear that he was calling by the front door outside in the cold and it was snowing and I was scared to go and he didn't call again. So I wrote it down and I wrote it and I wrote it and I wrote it. And one day I was crossing the yard of the house where I lived in Ann Arbor. And the line came into my head, white apples and the taste of stone. And there was a little tag on that line that belonged with this poem. I ran up to the attic and the desk and reached into a drawer and pulled out this poem and wrote in white apples in the taste of stone.

Which syntactically is disconnected, yes, from the rest of the poem and spatially disconnected to just stands there in the middle. What is a white apple? It's perhaps an apple made of stone that you'd break your teeth on. It may be a snowball and certainly it is not nutrition. I mean, white apple is oxymoron, really. And it is frightening to me. Well, I thought of it. I mean, I couldn't figure it out. Just reading it as a layman, white apples in the taste of stone. And I thought of a cemetery and white apples that are sometimes on the trees of some of the big terrys and the taste of stone and I thought a little boy writing his poem would be thinking about his father lying there. This is just one of those things where you find out something more about a poem years after you finished it. That house where I was living, that was backed up to the cemetery. I could look when that line came into my head. I could look and see monuments behind the stone.

Thank you. Well, a poem is, even though it tries to capture what was, is a living phenomenon because of what it brings out of the reader. But that's where it came from. I'm sure. That's what I thought of it. That would stump me. I said to everything. Why? You know, the things I said are true also and it's not logical. It's not syntactical, it's not logical, it is like a piece of color in the painting that draws your eyes to it and that makes everything else march in the painting. Poetry is playing with words, is playing with the sounds of words, is arranging them on the page so that they might be read aloud the way you hear them. It's arranging the syntax and the punctuation so that we read with the pacing and the rhythm that you want. It's all sorts of hard work with language on the page and I find it wonderful fun. Over the many years, I've written many different styles, many different kinds of poems and I'll begin with one I wrote when I was 25, called My Son, My Executioner.

My Son, My Executioner, I take you in my arms, quiet and small and just a stir and whom my body warms. Sweet death, small Son, our instrument of immortality, your cries and hungers document our bodily decay. We, 25 and 22, who seemed to live forever, observe enduring life in you and start to die together. This was a poem written when my first child was born, My Son Andrew, some years ago. I worried about what my son would think of it when he grew up and when it was about 14, he said to me, you know, that wasn't really about you and me, that was about you and

your father. The, I think it was in some way, that my father was still healthy, well, he had not contracted his cancer, but he died just a year and a half later. And he was not a vigorous man, he was a man who shook a lot and trembled and was in that way an old 51 or 50 when, I guess he was 50 when my son was born. And I think perhaps I was worried about him and thinking about him and thinking about to myself replacing him upon him so often, obviously and correctly pointing south and at the same time something under it is going north. What do you mean? There is ambivalence coated into it. You are aware of one half of it and unaware of another half which contradicts the first half and they're both true, they're both true, they're both there.

In order to write it, you cannot be aware of the second part. You couldn't write it if you were. This has been true again and again for poems of mine and that later I discovered that I was not only saying north, I was saying south as well, not knowing it. When I read February thinking of flowers, I imagine you're here in the midst of this gloomy winter which sat on us today thinking of your garden, would you read that one? February thinking of flowers. Now wind torments the field, turning the white surface back on itself, back and back on itself like an animal licking a wound, nothing but white, the air, the light. Only one brown milkweed pod bobbing in the gully, smallest brown boat on the immense tide.

A single green sprouting thing would restore me, then think of the tall delphinium swaying or the bee when it comes to the tongue of the burgundy lily. Was there, do you know if that's a deliberate effort to break through the melancholy of winter, to lift yourself out of the shroud? Well dreaming of gardens is something that always elevates my mood. You've written a lot about depression. Yeah, well it's something I've suffered from all my life really. I'm manic depressive actually and I was not properly diagnosed until I was 38 years old. Depression is really the land of the living dead isn't it? It surely is. Is it hard to read poems about depression to people?

It can be. What's their response? Usually people are moved by them I find and many people, even if they've never experienced such unhappiness themselves, no people who have. I read last week in Louisville, Kentucky and as I was reading this poem, a man in the second row who had been looking at me very intently as the poem went on and it talks about just unrelenting depression. He took his hand and put it over his heart and then he went like this and just looked in my face. And I knew that he also suffered. From the nursery, when I was born, you waited behind a pile of linen in the nursery and when we were alone, you lay down on top of me pressing the bile of desolation into

every pore. And from that day on, everything under the sun and moon made me sad. Even the yellow wooden beads that slid and spun along a spindle on my crib. You taught me to exist without gratitude. You ruined my manners toward God. We're here simply to wait for death. The pleasures of earth are overrated. I only appeared to belong to my mother to live among blocks and cotton undershirts with snaps among red tin lunch boxes and report cards in ugly brown slip cases. I was already yours, the anti-erge, the mutilator of souls. When you say I was already yours, you're talking about the depression? Yes. There is a genetic component to this, my father had it and I believe his mother had it.

And I really take after my father's people and I'm sure that it came down his line. Bottles. Eleville, Ludiumil, Doxapin, Norproman, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax, Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil. The coated ones smell sweet or have no smell. The powdery ones smell like the chemistry lab at school that made me hold my breath. Even from a friend, you wouldn't be so depressed if you really believed in God. Often. Often I go to bed as soon after dinner as seems adult, I mean I try to wait for dark.

In order to push away from the massive pain in sleep's frail, wicker, coracle. Once there was light. Once in my early 30s I saw that I was a speck of light in the great river of light that undulates through time, I was floating with the whole human family, we were all colors, those who are living now, those who have died, those who are not yet born. For a few moments I floated, completely calm, and I no longer hated having to exist. Like a crow who smells hot blood, you came flying to pull me out of the glowing stream. I'll hold you up, I never let my dear ones drown.

After that I wept for days. I'm trying to explain to people who have never experienced this kind of desolation what it is, and I want to ease people's burdens. What about this poem which you call back, it's about drug? It's really about coming back from a depression and being recovering your life, feeling finally as if you're among the living, back. We try a new drug, a new combination of drugs, and suddenly I fall into my life again, like a vol picked up by a storm, then dropped three valleys and two mountains away from home. I can find my way back. I know I will recognize the store where I used to buy milk and gas.

I remember the house and barn, the rake, the blue cups and plates, the Russian novels I loved so much, and the black silk nightgown that he once thrust into the toe of my Christmas stocking. There are things in this life that we must endure, which are really all but unendurable. And yet I feel that there is a great goodness. From Matthew, chapter 4, verses 12 through 23.

And Jesus went about all Galilee teaching in their synagogues and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people. Like John says, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. There is something in me that will not be snuffed out even by this awful disease. Joining other poets from around the country, Paul and Kenyon traveled to Waterloo, New Jersey, where they shared their poems with thousands of people at the Geraldine or Dodge Portray Festival. One year I made a New Year's resolution to stop writing poems that had I in it. I began to feel that it was time to talk about something else.

And the first poem of the New Year, I wrote, is this poem in which every stanza begins with the word I, so much for human resolution. Briefly it enters and briefly speaks. I am the blossom pressed in a book found again after 200 years. I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper. When the young girl who starves sits down to a table, she will sit beside me. I am food on the prisoner's plate. I am water rushing to the wellhead, filling the pitcher until it spills. I am the patient gardener of the dry and weedy garden. I am the stone step, the latch, the working hinge. I am the heart contracted by joy, the longest hair, white before the rest. I am there in the basket of fruit presented to the widow.

I am the musk rose, opening, unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. I am the one whose love overcomes you, already with you, when you think to call my name. I am going to read praise for death and I just want to give one note on it to begin with. A very ironic title, as it's clear in the poem, praise for death. Let us praise death that turns pink cheeks to ashes, that reduces father from son and daughter that sets tears in the tall widows eye, let us praise death that gathers us loose limb and weeping by the grave's edge in the flat yard near the sea that continues. Let us praise death that fastens my body to yours and renders skin against skin, sometimes

intolerably sweet as October sweetens the flesh of a Macintosh apple. Let us praise death that prints snapshots, thickensing an afternoon forty years ago on a sandy lane while we stand holding each other, let us praise death as a dog praises its master bowing, paying obeisance, rolling over, let us praise death as a spaniel praises a pit bull. Do you think about your own death? I always have, but I've been quite ill in the last few years and I have more reason to think of it, with cancer. I had three years ago, as we speak, a little over three years ago, I had colon cancer, and then last year the colon cancer returned two and a half years after the operation, it metastasized to deliver and I lost two thirds of my liver, the right low, but the liver.

And my chances for, I'm already 64, but my chances for living a 70 are not terribly good. At the moment I have no discernible cancer in me, it's just statistically people with my history, mostly don't live very long. I'm very likely to get a return of cancer, and I have thrown all these organs out of the back of the sled, you know, with the wolves following the sled, and I'm going to run out of organs to throw to the wolves before law. So I'm aware that probably I don't have a great deal of time left. The results of this living under the shadow, like this, with many, many people new, of course, not unique in this, has been a greater access to joy, occasional panic and occasional morbidity and tears, but more joy, more intense joy, more living in the moment. And that is true for work, but it's true for love as well.

How did you receive the word of his illness? Well at first with disbelief, I mean it's classic, then there was a lot of howling around here. Howling? Yep, not a Yankee trait, but there was a lot of howling around here. And well, what we have is the present, that's all we ever had really, except for memory. And so we're trying to learn to live in the present. You're right, poems too. Yeah. Yeah. Was this one to Don, Pharaoh? Yes. Can you read it? I'll try. The first time I tried to read this, I embarrassed myself, Pharaoh. The future ain't what it used to be, said the sage of the New York Yankees, as he pounded his mitt, releasing the red dust of the infield into the harshly illuminated evening air.

Big hands. Men with big hands make things happen. The surgeon, when I asked how big your tumor was, held forth his substantial fist with its gloved class ring. Come again, we live as cheerly as strangers. Things are off, touch, wrinkles, food is not good. Even the kindness of friends turns burdensome, their flowers sadden us so many and so fair. I walk in the night to see your diminished bulk lying beside me. You on your back, like a sarcophagus, as your feet held up the covers. The things you might need in the next life surrounded you, your comb and glasses, water, a book, and a pen.

There really is consolation from sad poems, and it's hard to know how that happens that there's the pleasure of the thing itself, the pleasure of the poem, and it works against the sadness somehow. She's written a poem about you, called Feyro. Yeah, yeah. You just don't let it stand there? No, I'm writing an answer to it. She doesn't know that yet. I have a Pharaoh or the sarcophagus talking back. I love that poem. I mean, it's spooky to read it, of course. This was a poem that Jane wrote when I was just recovering from the low back to me, the loss of two-thirds of the liver, and I was back home, but I was pretty sick, and it's a, I think it's a very beautiful poem. There's a poem, is it in that book, Tubes, which I think you must have written at that time?

Well, I wrote it. Now I suddenly realized that. Who that is. I wrote that in between the two. Would you read that? Sure. This is the poem you wrote after you'd been alerted to your mortality, as they say. And I have, I'm humorous about it here. The man with all these tubes in him is not really going to be making these long speeches. I do know that, but he has a sense of humor, too. The first one, actually, is my favorite of the, there are five little speeches here. They're all sort of death-bed speeches. Up, down, good, bad, said the man with the tubes up his nose. There's lots of variety, however, notions of balance between extremes of fortune are stupid. Or the best unobservant. He watched as the nurse fed pellets into the green nozzle that stuck from his side. Hmm, said the man, good, hmm, next time more basil. When a long desired baby is born, what joy.

More happiness than we find in sex, more than we take in success, revenge, or wealth. What should the same infant die? Would you major the horror on the same rule? Grief weighs down the sea saw. Joy cannot budge it. Here's another one of his speeches. When I was 19, I told a 30-year-old man what a fool I had been at 16. Listening, he looked crestfallen. We were always, he said, looking down a fool three years ago. The man with the tubes up his nostril spoke carefully. I don't regret what I did, but that I claimed I did the opposite. If I was faithless or treacherous and cowardly, there was much to fear. But I regret that I called myself loyal, brave, and honorable.

We are all dying of something always, but our degrees of awareness differ. He said, offering the vein of her choice to the young woman with many test tubes. We die of habits, deplorable ones, like merely living. Finally, fatal. The last one's my second favorite of these. Of all illusions, said the man with the tubes up his nostrils, IVs, catheter, and feeding nozzle, the silliest one was hardest to lose. For years I suppose that after climbing exhaustedly up with pitons and ropes, I would arrive at last on the plateau of walking level forever among moss with blood blossoms, or the other one of lulling in sun looking down at old valleys I started from. Of course, of course.

A continual climbing is the one form of arrival we ever come to, unless we suppose that the wish for height and house of desire is tubes up the nose. Well, that's one of my favorites. Well, good. Jane likes that one too. Let evening come. Let the light of late afternoon shine through chinks in the barn, moving up the bales as the sun moves down. Let the cricket take up chafing as a woman takes up her needles and her yarn. Let evening come. Let dew collect on the whole abandoned in long grass, let the stars appear and the moon disclos her silver horn. Let the fox go back to its sandy den, let the wind die down, let the shed go black inside, let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop in the oats, to air in the long, let evening come. Let it come as it will and don't be afraid. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come. I'm going now to read a poem that I have read a Wilma before, a little narrative poem called Oxcart Man. This is a poem that came from my cousin Paul Fenton, who told me the story and told me that when he was a boy, he'd heard it from an old man and that the old man had told him that he had heard it when he was a boy, from a really old man. So I took it from the air and made a poem out of it. In October of the year, he counts potatoes dug from the brown field, counting the seed, counting the cellar's portion out and bags the rest on the cart's floor. He packs wool, sheared in April, honey in combs, linen, leather, tan from deer hide and vinegar

in a barrel, hooped by hand at the forge's fire, he walks by his ox's head, ten days to port Smith's market and sells potatoes and a bag that carried potatoes, flax seed, 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 yoke, and walks home his pockets heavy with the years coined for salt and taxes. And at home, by fire's light, in November cold, stitches new harness for next year's ox in the barn and coves the yoke and saws planks, building their cart again. When I wrote the poem, I was conscious of an exhilaration about the story of great excitement.

Human life is a circle and I found it thrilling, absolutely thrilling. If I wrote it with that feeling, I worked on it for a year or so before I headed pretty much the way I wanted it. When I published the poem in a magazine and when I read it aloud, I discovered to my astonishment that not everybody found the story thrilling. They didn't read a different poem, but they reacted a different way to the same story. It wasn't that they misread or misunderstood my poem. I think that they misunderstood life, you know. Not the poem, not anything as serious as a poem, just something as trivial as life itself. As for many people, it was a story which was all that work and then you have to do it over again. It is a story about work, a story about a lot of work, and a ceaseless work, more or less. But I suppose that's why I found it so exhilarating in my masochism or whatever, but I don't really mean that, I should say. I don't mean that for a minute.

Were you admiring of the simplicity and cyclical life of the ox cart? Absolutely. A life of work, a life of productive work, a life that sustains itself by expending itself, by putting out everything and waiting for it to fill up again. It's also the life of a perennial plant that died down in the fall and come up again in the spring. But I've always said, somebody told me this later, reminded me of this later, as advice to writers, to young writers, don't ever hold anything back. Put everything out, everything you know, that can possibly belong in that poem or story, put it there. Don't save anything for the next one. That's the only way to work, it's the only way to live. I got out of bed on two strong legs.

It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. All morning I did the work I love. At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise. We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have been otherwise. I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls and planned another day just like this day, but one day I know it will be otherwise. I'm here,vééééééééééééééééééééééééééééééééééééééééééééééé.

Major funding for Bill Moyer's journal is provided by Mutual of America, building America's future through pension and retirement programs, encouraging dialogue and discussion, the spirit of America, Mutual of America. Funding has also been provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a catalyst for change, and by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation as part of its commitment to poetry. To order a video cassette of this program called

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