ABC OF READING

a.

Today in town a woman student from Bennington College in high leather boots and tight jeans approached me on the sidewalk as I pawed through $1 LPs in crates and asked if she could take my photograph. I had already noticed her from afar. I looked into her face and asked what the photographs were all about. She said she was on a school project, something about sidewalk life and people in Vermont towns. Bright eyes. A smile that worked well. Acne. I smiled and said, "Okay" and just kept on looking through the LPs. We were alone. Sunny sidewalk. People passing by and the slowed down midtown traffic. I heard her camera shutter work six times before she had enough and then she said, "Thank you", still smiling. I said, "Good luck."


b.

After town today, and all the errands, we came home to work in the woods. I hand split all the cherry tree that was waiting down in the woodlot. It's a huge pile. Spread through the sun. It'll be three truck loads to get it home on Wednesday. Now you know what will happen on Wednesday when Junior Pilot, our son’s puppy, is back again with us and the cherry wood comes home and gets stacked. We made this plan sitting on a stump taking a breather while we each ate an apple Sweetheart brought from the house in a bag with a bottle of cold water.


c.

Then came evening, after supper, Sweetheart fell asleep by the fire still dogged by the lyme disease and still making the most of every day. Sunshine in the face, hard at work daytime pushing it through, and I’ve got more stovewood to bring in for this fire. I tell myself this. The woodfire (a friend) always tells me this. Should I check into the Angels and the Yankees game, or Phillies? and I get to neither. Instead I look and read through the new and big beautiful book of Jim Marshall’s photographs with Janis blue sky on the cover. San Jose shot, 1968; a wonderful memory and in Marshall’s eye not gone at all, not gone at all. And when I’m done with the book the phone rings like a fire engine in the night within these small rooms of woodfire and lamplight. It’s Janine Vega to tell me her very good friend and her poetry a very good friend to me Lenore Kandel has passed away. Janine once went to Hawaii with Lenore, when they were both young. Flying into and with that blue sky San Jose day.