I can’t explain, but it’s true.
At ten years old, I beheld the lemon and slate
of the slender fish, flashing below the surface.
My father told me to settle back:
my gawking over the gunwale rocked our canoe,
E.M. White Guide’s Model with feathered hull-planks,
the one he called a work of art.

It is. I have it now.
I’d taken a minnow –or I should say that he had–
from the bait pail, which I called a cage.
I’d run the hook –or rather he had– through a dorsal
and then cast feebly. Five yards, maybe six.
The bobber shivered. Yank! yelled my father.
I set the hook and the world took on a meaning

it had never had.
I know. What a claim. I know.
But that’s how it felt:
a thrill, but also something like trauma.
That’s how it felt.
No, I can’t explain.
The only way to reel the new world back

to something I could grasp (and did I want that?)
would be to boat my catch.
Easy after all.
I’d learn in time a pickerel’s not a prize,
not to so-called serious anglers.
True, the fish made a desperate rush
toward a spread of pads, just then folding their lilies,

but then came back, almost docile,
to the long-handled net that awaited.
My father used forceps to pull the hook,
for fear of the menacing teeth.
An evening star stole out.
Mist began to sheathe the shore.
It slipped a gown on the dockside pine.

I could just discern the eyes of the fish,
like tiny shards of china.
I dreamed I’d glimpsed the course of my future years,
rife with exploits and color.
Why would a child fetch up such a ludicrous vision?
I’m not the one to answer.
And yet, however tame my life may have been,

compared to some, at least,
I believe that vatic moment held some truth.
Oh, I’d catch bigger, better fish.
I’d know bigger, better things at large.
But the pickerel gleams to this day
in the hands of that gentle parent, dead too young.
Full dark looming, he eased it back to the lake.

Tink shouted, “Did you hear my bad news?” I turned
from bucking up firewood and killed the engine.
How different he looked, our tough old bantam
neighbor– a rascal, but stolid as stone.

Here stood a suddenly tinier version.
No one in town would believe he’d cry.
Things had to be bad. He told me why:
“Mike’s gone. Some business called… aneurism.”

I caught my breath. Mike? His grandson?
Fallen at forty. Tink and Polly
had practically raised him up from a schoolboy.
(There were troubles with the in-between generation).

Tink’s gone, but I see him back twenty years,
red oak sawdust pooled at his feet.
I still can’t believe he actually weeps.
Two-stroke exhaust smoke loiters on air,

no matter I’ve choked the saw dead quiet.
Mosquitoes strafe us. I somehow recall
Mike passing in front of our house last fall,
trailed by the 6-point buck he’s shot.

Two flecks of blood have dried on one cheek,
and in spite of November’s chill, he sweats
from dragging that whitetail out of our woods.
For years he’s been bigger than Grandpa Tink.

So is the deer. (Mike will give our family
good venison backstrap later that autumn.)
Who’d predict I’ll go over to Tink and hug him?
Not even I. It’s surprising he lets me.

How long does he soak my shoulder like this?
Long enough, it seems, for me to sense
something like splendor in this awkward clench
by which I’ll always feel shocked and blessed.

On becoming my state’s poet laureate, I made it my mission to visit as many of its community libraries as I could. I paid many, many such visits, and savored each and all. Certain colleagues at the “prestige” colleges where I taught for over forty years seem always to have surmised that intelligence faded the moment one stepped away from an ivied campus. I always knew that attitude represented the worst sort of provincialism. I am the more assured in that knowledge for the library trips I’ve made, the more persuaded that there are a lot of smart people out there, however extensive or otherwise their formal education. Perhaps certain of the scholars would do well to spend time among them.

I’ve especially enjoyed that my audience members tend to ask not the allegedly sophisticated questions, which I’ve heard more than enough of in four decades of professorship; their questions are more basic, and thus more important, in that they represent concerns that everyone feels on contemplating a poem for the first time: who’s talking? why? where? And so on. For my taste, too much current poetry can’t answer those questions on the page, and even as a lifelong lover of poetry, I turn away from such work’s obscurantism.

The most frequent questions I hear, however, involve form and meter. There are those who wonder if something can be called poetry if it does not have a regular meter, regular stanzaic shape, and often as not, a rhyme scheme.

Now I am a formalist myself, something not all that common in our day (though I think and even hope this is unobvious when I read, because I pause in my recitation when the grammar does, not when a line does). I even use a goodly amount of rhyme and half-rhyme. And yet I employ these tools merely because they enable me, not because they represent capital-P Poetry.

Indeed, I steadfastly refuse to grind any ax in the free verse/formal verse debate, partly since it seems to it make advocates on either side suddenly go brain-dead. Of course poetry can exist in an unrhymed and unmetered format: consider, to pick an ancient and glaring example, the biblical Psalms. Of course poetry can be formally constrained without being “academic”: never mind my own small example; consider Robert Frost, a die-hard formalist…who managed to capture the sound of actual speech far more effectively than an Ezra Pound ever did.

The passionate free-versers may believe that their mode is anti-establishment, a claim that could be made for it if this were 1920; since then, and surely now, free verse reigns supreme in virtually every academic MFA program and among the most celebrated poets of our time. In short, it is the establishment practice.

The other sect of blind debaters, however, alleges that free verse shows sloppy thinking, shoddy technique – as if that applied, say, to Robert Lowell or, more contemporarily, to Louise Gluck. In short, these aspersions are no more or less bright or accurate than those of the free-verse crusaders, who impute coldness, sexual frigidity, political reaction, and – again – “academicism” to formalist delivery — as if any of these charges were relevant to the giants of the twelve-bar Delta blues, a mode that is surely America’s greatest formal contribution to world culture, and whose format, in the words of my friend, the excellent Vermont poet Baron Wormser, constitutes the American sonnet.

As I hear the free vs. formal debate rehearsed, I am too depressingly reminded of political dialogue in our day. I am never shocked by the slogans on either side of the liberal/conservative divide. It’s as though there were no real need for any of us to look at a given issue from more angles than just one: we liberals already know what the conservatives are going to promote; but we fail to see how perfectly predictable our own orthodoxies are.

When I was appointed poet laureate, I claimed in my address that a little humility never hurt anyone. The humble but crucial questions I encounter at the state’s libraries assure me that there remain at least a few open minds in the nation.

The widower pushed the tailgate shut and fell.
The two sounds –click and thud– seemed synchrony,
As if one in fact were function of the other.
The red calf, bound for veal in the pickup’s bed,
Looked rearward over his shoulder. No one there.
A ginger-hackled rooster, framed by the door
Of the loft, screamed loudly, sun igniting him
To noontime flame. He sent six hens in a dash
For cover under bush and sill, as though
His love-assault might be a thing far worse
Than the farmer felt – or rather did not feel,

The death so quick and commotionless his livestock
Didn’t notice. Everything once had purpose
Here, and meaning, and might still have, if only
He’d stayed to read them. Now a skinny cloud
Rode unremarked on a breeze above the barn,
Unsafe and leaning. His horse, a spavined relic
From other ages, whickered behind the house,
All canted too, its paint mere scattered flakes.
Meaning and purpose had blurred in recent years
But the farmer kept right after them no matter.
Who’d free the weanling now, who lead him to slaughter?

So: how do poems get generated in my mind? Well, they certainly never begin with what, in my teaching days, students called “ideas.” They tend rather to begin with some sensory recall, more often than not auditory. This can be the sound, say, of a certain woodpecker on a very still spring morning; a snatch from an old Monk tune; or, as in this case, most typical for me, a small chunk of conversation that has lodged itself in mind, whether or not I know it.

After a reading last year, somehow an audience member mentioned a farmer of his acquaintance, one who like all small farmers in the era of agribusiness, had struggled to keep his place going, and one who’d just dropped dead while closing the gate of his pickup on a veal calf.

For whatever reason, I vividly heard the click of the tailgate and the thud of the man’s body when it fell.

And then my mind shot back more than fifty years to a farmer whom I had worked for in those old summers. He’d lost his wife and, age supervening, was finding the relentless labor of his calling more and more difficult. He said to me, a boy not yet eighteen, “This place used to have a meaning and a purpose.” The click and thud instantly married that remark, and I fused the two countrymen into one. I had only to fill in the physical details of the farmhouse and farmyard to finish the poem. Whatever its merit, then, “Abbatoir Time” was all but given to me. If that’s inspiration, so be it, inspiration in such a case really being a sort of selective and synthesizing memory.

Which leads me to a terse answer to another frequent question: are my poems always founded on my own factual experience? Well yes, of course, who else’s? Yet the facts per se may have transpired at different times, in different places. There is, for example, no actual single farmer who experienced the specific moments I render here; and yet I hope my imaginative construct, my blending of two figures, shows a “true” account of a human being in the situation I describe—I hope it is true in the sense of being more or less faithful to anyone’s sense of loss and diminishment.