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Morton Marcus: Good evening, everybody. This is Mort Marcus. This is an attenuated Poetry Show and I'm very happy to be here. You're listening to Django Reinhardt, of course, and his dancing fingers usher in a very interesting show tonight, we've

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got two wonderful poets from the southern part of Monterey Bay. Morton Marcus: Great. And Bill, the same with you. And we have- we're going to try to get through the show, even though we were a little late here and Bill Minor is- among many other

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things, he has written a sequence of poems to music. Bill, why don't you tell us about it? They've both written books and I'm talking particularly about Elliot Roberts, who is also a wonderful translator as well as

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the author of several books of poems, and Bill Minor, both of whom have visited the show before. Bill has also visited some Sunday night specials I've done in connection with some very interesting jazz books he's written. One of them, as you may

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remember out there, "A Journey to the Soviet Union," when it was the Soviet Union, when he had actually recorded and interviewed a whole lot of the pioneers of Soviet Jazz. So, Elliot, welcome to the show once more.

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Elliot Roberts: Thank you, good to be here. Bill Minor: Okay, actually, the poems came first. It was a book called, "For Women Missing or Dead." And there are 50 poems in the cycle and I've taken 22 of them and set them to music. I

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did not want to just do a background or ambience and read over the top of it, so they're actually, they're tunes. I play the piano, I'm a musician. And this is- I'm going to read the poems and then there's a recording from a concert that

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was given. The singer is a soprano, Elise [unidentified]. And the guitarist is Carl Dobritz(?), a very fine guitarist from our area and I'm playing piano, and I'll read the first poem and then we'll hear what it sounded like on stage.

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I TOUCH THE DAWN WHITE MILK WARM BODY OF A WOMAN. No, not the moon. Her sleep is like the clock that tells me it's just about morning. I've never met an analogy I didn't like. What time is it? Eternity. Surely, I thought to put one's

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socks onto. [music] I took two poems and put them together and I'll read them and then Elise sing those, I'm playing piano again.

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WHEN TWO SHIPS PASS THEIR SAILS, A Dacron white are worn for longer than it takes to happen. This all occurs in the mind of course, or should they collide the shutter of those sails? The splitting holes remain for just

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a second, maybe two. This is the way I've read the world of love, often with an absurd and pleasant preference. I cried, of course, when they told me that you were dead. Frankly, I'd forgotten already, Brigadoon. You called me that when good for

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a night a day, I failed to return. Your 19 year old body bruised to the touch, not dramatic, this the simple operatic division of cells. Now, it is the hand of death that grants the gift of life itself.

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[music] Morton Marcus: to music on piano and the poet in here in the studio with us tonight. Bill Minor who is one of two guests, the other is Elliot, Elliot Roberts. And that was new work

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by Bill Minor. And Elliot, what do you have for us by way of new work? Elliot Roberts: Well, I'd like to start with a poem just written several months ago. One of my dear friends and

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neighbors, Dick Riley passed away. And Dick was also for six decades a active fighter for civil liberties in this country. And I was asked to read a poem at his memorial service. And so I thought I would write a poem, an elegy for Dick. And when I

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sat down to write the poem, all I could think of was not the civil liberties battles that he had won, but the fact that he was my neighbor, and I knew he was home when I would hear him splitting wood. And so this poem, "Splitting Wood: Elegy for

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Dick Riley," and you'll hear echoes of very familiar poems in here. You'll hear echoes of Matthew Arnold's, "Dover Beach," Robert Frost's, "Two Tramps in Mud Time," and Gary Snyder's, "Axe Handles."

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SPLITTING WOOD: ELEGY FOR DICK RILEY The metal maul, striking the metal wedge, like the clapper hitting the inside of a bell drifts up the mountainside over the Coast Highway, rings above the tremulous cadence of the

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waves. The ocean speaking as oceans do of the eternal note of sadness in a world so like a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night. Splitting wood, the heft of the 12-pound maul, the deliberate slow raising above the shoulders, the

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grip on earth of outspread feet, the life of muscles rocking soft and smooth and moist. The arc above the head, then falling of its own weight, guided by the miracle of human sight, shoulder, arms, hands, eyes so coordinated that the flat head

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of the maul strikes solidly, squarely on the flat head of the wedge, hits true and rings and the woods splits, the halves of the round falling cleanly from the block. The way your mind worked, focused so clearly, so cleanly, you knew the grain of

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what stood before you, how to place the wedge, you cleaved issues. And while you could not, no human can, some things too narrow to split, stop the waves from echoing on the shore, stop the turbid ebb and flow of human misery, you let us hear the pure

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sound of what could be, of a world attune to the common good, where love and need are one and all honored. Now, only memory the sound of you splitting wood, the maul handle you have worn smooth waits for our hands. You have shown us how we go on. Now

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before us the woodpile, cypress, pine oak, madrone, eucalyptus, waiting to be split. The next poem was written for dear friends and neighbors. And one of whom was at the time this poem was written just about to

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enter a very- it was in the midst of a series of chemotherapy treatments. And this poem is called: WHAT WE NEED, FOR JANE AND RANDY Afternoon sunlight on her hair, loose strands form a halo of

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light. One strand hangs in front of her face, it glitters like gold filament. When she looks up, she looks past it to him sitting opposite her. Light falls full on his beardless face, his bald head in the slanted light, like a burnt

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ash-covered hillside. He looks to her, at that moment they see past cornea and iris, past retina, lens and optic nerve. A stillness settles over the room, time no longer matters. Even those perpetual dancers, the dust motes, are motionless. Then

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the dog scratches, yawns, she brushes away the strand of hair. He shifts his weight, the chair creaks, a hummingbird, wings invisible in their swiftness, hangs suspended at the feeder, its slender tongue finds sweet nectar. We have what we need.

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And then in a slightly different tone, we, my wife and I, recently took a trip to China. And one of the highlights of the trip actually was a visit to the new Shanghai museum. And on one of the exhibits there was a hanging scroll by a Ming Dynasty

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artist and it was entitled, "Lady in the Clouds," and showed a woman standing in the clouds. So this is called: LADY IN THE CLOUDS Forte. It is not that she walks on the clouds. Clouds form

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everywhere she sets her feet. I know a woman like this, lovely in her skin. For every movement turns the earth to sky and then to cloud. Even when that movement is my eye across the cumulonimbus swirls of her body and serious strands of her hair.

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Neither blink of eye nor turn of head changes the clouds to grass and soil hard-faced stone and rooted tree for oh, how the cumulofaction of her body taketh me. Morton Marcus: And that was Elliot Roberts. We're talking to

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Elliot Roberts and Bill Minor tonight and we're going to continue after a short musical break and some PSA announcements. This is Mort Marcus again, this is the Poetry Show you're

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listening to. That was, of course, Django Reinhardt. This Tuesday at the Bookshop Santa Cruz, the regular National Writer's Union readings are going to feature Robert Sward and Catherine- Catherine Lynch. I urge you all to go, the

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readings start at eight o'clock and of course they are free and they are sponsored by your National Writer's Union as the regular monthly reading at the Bookshop Santa Cruz, Robert Sward and Catherine Lynch this Tuesday 8pm. Right after this

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show, stay tuned for "From the Bookshelf" hosted by the inimitable Billy Harris. Tonight, Joseph Keller McNeilly reading excerpts from his pre-published novella, "The Seaman's Tongue," which is about the relationship of a man and a

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woman in their 70s. We are right now talking to Bill Minor and Elliot Roberts and we heard from Bill and then we heard from Elliott and now we're going to hear from Elliott again with new work. Elliott has just returned from China, in fact, and besides

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being a wonderful poet, he is also a an excellent translator. Elliot, why don't you read us some poems, I see that you're all set over here. Elliot Roberts: Well, more or less. Actually, I thought I

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would read a series of poems which has a theme of ideal places, since that seems to be a fit together here. And the first poem is a poem called, "Paradise," and it it has starts- it has a kicker quote by Toni Morrison, "It's not my

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place to define paradise for anyone else." PARADISE A halo of beaded sweat, glittering like pearls rings his forehead. Little rivers ran down his chest to the curve of his

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white undershirt, over the musculature of his arms, dark rivers over his dark black body, his movements keyed to the hymns he sang to sweet Jesus. The press coming down on beat, a cloud of steam, the garment pulled from the hot pad, draped

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on a hanger, put in line with all the perfect trouser creases, perfect skirt pleats, perfect rounded shoulders of overcoats, jackets, blouses until I, 14, working that summer in my father's small shop, came to sort them. Then the presser

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touched each garment as though blessing it, marked numbers in his little book and turned back to the press and Jesus. And I would wander among the perfect order of trousers, blouses, overcoats, suits, skirts, all dry cleaned, pressed, numbered

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and set in place where I had put them and where they would hang the way skin would drape over bone where there are no muscle, heart, blood, all neat rows, one above the other, as though the very heavens were filled with clouds of clean clothing. While

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steam rolls around him like a nimbus, I would wait just beyond his world. And when he paused for some water or came back from taking a leak, I talked to him about Jackie, Cathy, and Duke about home runs and RBIs and thefts at second base, dreaming

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of the cool green of the outfield at Ebbets Field about being up in the bleachers shouting, hey Duke! Hey Duke! While my father stood at the front counter handling the soiled clothing he never let me touch, the six day a week silty

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stream of urine stains, vomit, lipstick smears, grease, blood, everything clothing on a body endured, which he bundled up in jackets, empty sleeves embracing empty fabric. That work done, he would slip across the street to the bar, and behind its brick

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facade and heavy wooden door, sit and drink. If it were morning, a cold beer, scotch on the rocks before lunch and anytime after. And for a time forget how he busted his chops from 5am when he left home to pick up the specials until 7pm

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when after one more drink he returned. In the steamy kitchen, my mother waited. On the Big Island of Hawaii, there is a sanctuary called the Place of Refuge. And in earlier times, when anyone had committed

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a taboo or was escaping from other warriors, if they could reach this place of refuge, then they would be absolved. They wouldn't be punished, they wouldn't be killed and they could- they would be absolved by the priests, and then returned

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to society. So this is called: PLACE OF REFUGE: FOR TAY IN CELEBRATION OF OUR 40TH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY Here we see how tenuous our hold on life, how miraculous every

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living thing. The love of black earth stretches to the sea, yet somehow life has thrived, trees, birds, humans, how fragile our hold, how little we know. Can we ever be grateful enough for these gifts? The way waves pulse on the shore and blood through

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our bodies, the way palm leaves flutter in the wind, and hair on our skin dances, how we find every day refuge because we know where absolution lies. What are the sacred laws of life but what we find sacred? Shadows alive with movement take us away from

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words. 40 years seem so long, yet they have passed like the clouds and what remains is this marriage, a place of refuge, where we sanctify each day here where white ocean pulses against shore, where flocks of birds like empty thoughts move through

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the shadow of trees, where we step carefully, over rough-faced lava paths, this union like palm trees, like birds, a miracle. And then actually a poem written in China to celebrate our 41st anniversary. It's a haiku actually and it was- In China, a

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lot of the decorations on the walls and the temples and in the palaces also have symbolic meaning. And so, as we were walking through one of the temples, there was a tree with two birds in it. And we were told, well, that's one bird in a

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tree is single happiness and two birds in a tree is double happiness. So, Shuangxi in Chinese is double happiness, so this is: SHUANGXI (DOUBLE HAPPINESS): ANNIVERSARY POEM

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Two birds in a tree, 41 years, a long time, double happiness. This poem was written for a friend and actually former colleague who died this past December. He was a teacher down in Monterrey for many years and at one point, bought a farm out

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in the country, and there he planted apple trees, acres and acres of apple trees and I wouldn't see him in the classroom, but I would see him in the farmer's market actually where he would bring his apples for sale. And so this poem is

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for Walt Schroeder, it's called: THE APPLE FARMER He always gave you more than your money's worth, an extra apple or two in the bag, rounding off to the lower pound,

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name and history of each variety, his mouth salivating and so the words Parkdale beauty and Beverly Hills with juicy slivers like those he carefully cut for you to crunch and tongue as you stood before the bushels of fragrant apples set on the

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folding table underneath the umbrella in front of his pickup. From the convalescent hospital, he telephoned home his son said, seven or eight times a day. He always left the same message. His mind was not there, not in that orchard of rotting fruit

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waiting to fall to earth. "They're painting the house. I should be home," he said, looking at his watch. Right now, they're gathering apples for tomorrow's market. And he saw his apple orchard, rows and rows of trees, apple-life passing

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before him seamlessly, the way they say your life flashes before you the moment your body realizes death has just reached out to pluck you from the tree of life. The spring flowering, filling the orchard with apple flowers scent and bees glowing

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in sunlight. Tiny apple globes forming as leaves, canopy, limbs and trunks, the slow apple time ripening of apple flesh, the coldness of the fruit picked in early morning before the sun has fully risen. The apple farmer did not think he would die from

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the cancer before the year's end, as his son knew he might. And he did not know what it took for his son to bring him home to die, or what the sudden dying meant to his son, only that he was home in his freshly painted house, looking out at his apple

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trees, leafless and fruitless, their bare limbs still filled with sap. Next year's buds, promising bushels of Mutsus, Jonathans, Golden Delicious, Granny Smiths, Galas, bushels of ripe apples, like memories, always giving more than your

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money's worth. And I'd like to finish with a poem that was just reprinted in the last issue of Cæsura, the journal for the San Jose Center for Poetry and Literature. And it's called:

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THE DOG WHO WALKED ON WATER And it's for Winnie. And it begins with a quote from Matthew 14, verses 29 to 31, "And Jesus said, come, and when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water to go to

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Jesus. But when he saw the wind, boisterous, he was afraid, and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him and said unto him, oh, thou of little faith. Wherefore didst

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thou doubt." Geese afloat, mallards adrift, pelicans awave, gulls supernatant, effortlessly, ghostly like Jesus walking on water and you at the edge of the lake drawn to this miracle of

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buoyancy, barked and bounded, not so much after is towards them, leaving solid land for 1, 2, 3, 4 steps you were walking on water. Then to our boisterous screams of disbelief, you stopped, hesitant, turned your head towards us, saw our lack of

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faith, and with your whiskered face now puzzled and fearful, sank into the murky waters, which did not part for but covered you. Before we could even think to reach out our hands, you had gasped to the surface, now like any normal

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dog, dog paddling and panting your way furiously toward shore, where once on solid ground, with a shake of your tiny baptized body, like a priest anointing his flock of little faith, you rebuked us with holy water, and made believers of us all.

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Morton Marcus: Thank you, Elliot. That was Elliot Roberts, one of our two guests tonight reading some new work that from Cæsura Magazine, the magazine of the San Jose Poetry Center. Wonderful, let's just read that this is really an organization

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that people should join. They put out a marvelous magazine, which also has an article by you on translation in this issue. Elliot Roberts: Oh, yes. Morton Marcus: Yep and it's, this is Cæsura for fall 2000,

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it's only $3 and if you're interested write to the San Jose Center for Poetry and Literature at 110, that's 110 South Market Street in San Jose 95113. That'll be good enough that you get to them, 95113 in San Jose. A marvelous organization started

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by Naomi Clark years and years and years ago, right. Yeah. And it's continued on and has some other poets who we've had on on the program. And now back to, and this sounds like a round robin here in some way, now back to Bill Minor and Bill has a

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prose poem. Bill Minor: A prose poem, your favorite. Morton Marcus: Yes, my favorite poem. Bill Minor: In fact, we used this for the writers conference,

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I think on a seminar we did. Okay, it's gonna change the mood a little bit. Morton Marcus: Good, fine, mood changes are fine. Bill Minor: This is called Q-TIPS.

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I love q-tips, sticking them into my ears. Doctors say you should never put anything smaller than your elbow in your ears. But I disobey this commandment as often as I can, which means frequently and with the same zeal and relish I

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reserve for dairy products such as cheese. Yes, I love q-tips, an invention I place right up there with a wheel. Some people swoon while having their neck massaged, some go for the lower back, others are even into toes and feet. And those spots are

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all well and good, I suppose but I'm an ear man myself. I love what I call a good ear solace and I love going all the way. Special services, not just the foreplay of external cartilage, having your auricle stroked, or following the, in some cases

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delically hair fringed entryway to that cheese ripe, tender auditory inner canal itself. But oh, to feel a good stiff q-tip ease its way into that fuchsia pink custom made interior where two separate but hungry entities collide, at first with

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abstemious pride and then give in, give up, give all their mutual desire now riding past that ridge that opens and closes stirring and squirming, prodding, probing, coaxing, turning, twisting, twitching from side to side until you

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touch the tympanic membrane itself. Those ossicles tickled small sensitive parts malleus, incus and stapes flouncing, bouncing, sliding and gliding toward the inevitable cascade. Suddenly aground in a pool of wet wax, it's driving,

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thrusting, surging and purging the merely proprioceptive self, beyond all boundaries, all physical restriction, massaging the cochlea, steadily pushing and pumping toward that pharyngeal door that leads to bright lagoons, softened by

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shadows and sallow moons, the innermost chamber, the brain itself, with all its sweet clanger of cells. Some of you look discomforted, some of you have actually been squirming. Perhaps you feel offended or shocked. You may feel I've gone

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beyond the bounds of good taste, beyond a simple appreciation of what an innocent q-tip purchased without suspicion or resistance at K-mart or Long's was designed to do. But you are wrong, you have misunderstood me. You think I've been talking about

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something else but that's not the case. I have been talking about q-tips, q-tips alone, no dirty little secret, no sin, no shame, just one of the joys of life, an object of love in and of itself.

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One more prose? Morton Marcus: Absolutely. Bill Minor: What I've been doing is taking songs that I love and that have stayed with me over the years and just keying off of

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them. And there's a song that Nat King Cole sang called, "Sorry." And generally, I do this with a piano for just the beginning, but I'll have to do it acapella tonight. "What can I say, dear, after I say to you that I'm sorry? What

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can I do to prove it to you, I'm sorry? I didn't mean to ever be mean to you. If I didn't care, I wouldn't feel like I do." For how long now have I not been able to chase this tune from my head? Too long, much too long. Oliver Sacks has written about a

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client of his, an Irish woman afflicted with a neurological disorder he called "incontinent nostalgia," the same songs and songs she did not even like, song she did not care for at all, repeating themselves in her head against her will as if some

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crazy neighbor, as she described it, was subjecting her to torture by playing the same tune over and over and over again. Yet I chose this song. I love it, or I did. I just feel there should be space now in my brain for more than "what can I say,

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dear, after I say that I'm sorry? What can I do to prove it to you, I'm sorry?" I have no neurological disorder, at least not one that I know of. The selection must be psychological then. I must want badly to say that I'm sorry, but for what?

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The tune at least a song by Nat King Cole, with his perfect pitch and exquisite, no, brilliant phrasing, makes me feel as if there's not a single thing in this world to be sorry for. The sequence of chords, the modulations, the simplicity of

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musical statement and structure. Well, I'm sorry for those of you who aren't musically inclined because there's just nothing musically in this tune to be sorry about. Why then do I love repeating the words to the song over and over and over again?

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"What can I say, dear, after I say that I'm sorry? What can I do to prove it to you, I'm sorry?" Because I love hearing the damn thing, sorry. So much, I automatically start thinking about all the stuff I must feel sorry about.

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And of course once you stick a quarter in the ancient jukebox of that Pandora's box, well the list of regrets is endless. Sorry for what one didn't say that day, but then again, sorry for what one did. Sorry for what one didn't do that day but then

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again, sorry for what one irretrievably did. Sorry for the time as he just reminded me, I made my now 40 year old son, then seven or eight, run to his room and cry for two hours because I laughed when the Green Bay Packers lost to the Colts in

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the very last minute of play. Believe me, son, "I didn't mean to ever be mean to you. If I didn't care, I wouldn't feel like I do." Yeah, this is a love song beyond the lesions of fathers and sons at the Green Bay Packers. This is the

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intimate stuff. You start with the words, "dear," and, "if I didn't care," and you realize that just within that single sphere of activity, love, there is if you truly let yourself go and think about it, plenty to feel sorry about. The time I

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didn't approach you in time, or the time I did. The time I couldn't say no to my order or the time I did. The time I watched you walk off into the night alone, or the time I did. God, it's like going to confession again and being asked

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to list all of your lifelong love errors, mistakes, oversights, inconstancies, indulgences and discovering that when you were in love, that's just about all you ever were or did, it's endless. I'm Catholic, of course, as you may have

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suspected, or sorry, I once was, I suspect that whatever your denomination, or lack of one, the fine art of confession, the act itself, whatever form it may take, even silence is not wholly unfamiliar to you. We've all been in love at one time or

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another. And while we may be thankful on occasion, we also have much that makes us sorry. All those things I never told her and all the stuff I shouldn't have, but did, failing to understand at just that right moment, or the resentment I

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caused because I thought I did, falling in love with so many others when I only should have cherished you, or feeling sorry for myself because looking back now, those others were so few. God, I'm afraid we got more on our hands here than Nat King

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Cole's honey ripe voice and perfect pitch, more than even love, or the Green Bay Packers. What is it then? A spiritual cleansing, absolute absolution, attaining Amazing Grace by purging the soul through song, coming face to face with our own

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fallibility, original and not so original sin? I apologize for the cliches. I am genuinely sorry. Perhaps I'm attempting to make this issue larger than it really is, yet I have so little that's specific, so little that's not just generic to go

00:43:30.480 - 00:43:47.100

on. I lack this specific year of sin, or that specific fall from grace. Waiting impatiently, endlessly for something you wouldn't or couldn't do, then being embarrassed, actually crushed by it when you did. The time you left for good and I

00:43:47.100 - 00:44:07.680

wouldn't or couldn't follow, or the time I did. Gazing at you as if you wore no clothes or the time you came to me naked, and I embraced you as if you did. Sorry for the times I made you cry and sorry for the times I did. Love, love, love, the more

00:44:07.680 - 00:44:23.160

we fall into it, the more we have to give and forgive. Each of us falling asleep at night lying beside a mate and absolutely alone, dreaming of love, or the Green Bay Packers, what could more perfect? Not even pitch, not even Nat King

00:44:23.160 - 00:44:49.980

Cole singing, "I was all wrong but right or wrong, I don't blame you. Why should I take somebody like you and shame you? I know that I made you cry and I'm so sorry, dear. So what can I say, dear, after I say, I'm sorry?" Falling asleep with that

00:44:49.980 - 00:45:05.310

universal cry of contrition on one's lips, a cry that seems not to be attached to anything at all. That surveys the whole human condition from afar with infinite compassion, not finitity and having seen and heard and felt it all can only

00:45:05.310 - 00:45:18.920

say, even from the depths of gratitude for remaining alive, I'm sorry. Morton Marcus: Thank you. That's a beautiful piece and you know what it reminds me of, it reminds me of some of the stuff

00:45:18.920 - 00:45:33.240

that Al Young was doing but taking off now in a different direction. Very, very interesting stuff, very interesting stuff. Have you showed that to Al? Bill Minor: I think maybe he's he has heard this. I've done

00:45:33.240 - 00:45:42.480

several others, other songs, I'm not sure what I showed him. Morton Marcus: Very, very interesting, interesting stuff. Where should we go from here, Elliot? Elliot Roberts: Well, I could do another poem.

00:45:42.590 - 00:45:52.170

Morton Marcus: That sounds good to me. We've got a you want to stop some Tankas, right? Bill Minor: No, I think time's running out. Let's do some poems. Yeah, I have a poem I wrote for earlier and maybe

00:45:52.220 - 00:46:02.700

we'll close out with that. Morton Marcus: Okay, that'd be great. Elliot Roberts: Okay, we want you want to love poem or a well, they're both love poems actually. One, a love poem to a-

00:46:03.270 - 00:46:19.700

to my wife or to my brother. Morton Marcus: Well, how spontaneous I am. Why don't you do- to your wife? I'm all for keeping families together. Elliot Roberts: Okay, this is called WET T-SHIRT and it's a-

00:46:19.700 - 00:46:34.060

Morton Marcus: Maybe we ought to do the other one. Elliot Roberts: And it's in celebration of our 39th wedding anniversary. Like a folded bud, shy and self-conscious as the night we

00:46:34.060 - 00:46:50.800

met 40 years ago. Yet, here you are in public, your t-shirts soaked with water from the ladies room sink, tender fabric outlining the sweet curves of your breasts, nipples and areolas, little rose blossoms in a field of white. Only we aren't

00:46:50.800 - 00:47:07.000

in a smoke-filled club, you swaying, twisting, shyly delighted by the cheers and whistles of a Wednesday night wet t-shirt contest, but at Wendy's, at the intersection of State Highways 140 and 59, the outside temperature 103, the

00:47:07.000 - 00:47:23.860

van's air conditioning on the fritz, us halfway between the 8000 plus cool feet of lush Twomey Meadows, where summer has just begun, and the chilling gray fog that covers the brown hills of Pacific's edge. No one hoots as you pass, the only

00:47:23.860 - 00:47:40.750

sound's from the restaurant air conditioners' spastic shutters, and the rapturous speed of my heart. Everyone else preoccupied with ketchup and mustard, relish and salt, no one but I sees as we walk outside into the dry valley heat waves, this dance

00:47:40.750 - 00:47:57.620

that is your walk, the delicate goosebumps on arms, torso, muscle and bone outlined, and this late in the season, the flowers. Oh, the flowers, the flower still in bloom. Morton Marcus: Very nice, very nice.

00:47:58.430 - 00:48:09.150

Should we go back and forth a bit? We're getting about that time. Bill Minor: Are we? Yeah, okay, well, I'll read a poem I wrote for Paul Oehler who was-

00:48:09.150 - 00:48:15.240

Morton Marcus: Here with you last time you were here. Bill Minor: I did a show together with someone was with Paul and we did a book together called, "Natural Counter Point." Morton Marcus: Yep.

00:48:15.270 - 00:48:29.210

Bill Minor: And also for Sarah Maxwell, who you also know. This is called: TALKING WITH THE DEAD for Paul Oehler and Sarah Maxwell. So many dead and I walk on, not trudge. Although the trade off

00:48:29.210 - 00:48:46.670

is there, the slowing down of circulation, knots in the legs, fiery esophagus, uncertain balance and the breath going short and tight. So what? My brain still soars and aspirations accumulate like dreams and lust among the young.

00:48:47.660 - 00:49:05.660

And these two stand remembered. Paul and Sarah, dead, not dead, as real as when they were real, a daily gift or presence. I look at Sarah's drawing and I find a touch, a nuance, a small special flourish unnoticed before when she was here, or did she just

00:49:05.690 - 00:49:21.560

put it there? So many possibilities like plans for the future. Paul makes his appearances late at night just as he did while alive, that brilliant three o'clock in the morning conversationalist. What do we talk about? Poetry mostly,

00:49:21.770 - 00:49:39.680

the weather some here and there and what it's like to be soul, our perspectives unique and not exactly the same. So many over there dead but not gone. And these still, these two still prove the strongest presence suggests there shall not be rest

00:49:39.740 - 00:49:56.360

but resurgence, the forever is forever, not a lie, hanging in there for dear life. Slightly different if they speak as if from a distant room claiming that nothing should be taken for granted. Lessons are soft, like a fine line drawing, like good

00:49:56.360 - 00:50:13.640

talk at three o'clock in the morning and all my ills, esophageal, gut, legs or inner ear seemed less imposing somehow. I've read all the books on grieving for oneself, or all those living in that over populated land. These two so

00:50:13.640 - 00:50:27.700

close at hand suggest what feels like grief is good and will not last too long. Morton Marcus: Thank you very much. Tonight we have been- our guests have been Bill Minor, and Elliot Roberts. This is the

00:50:27.700 - 00:50:42.700

Poetry Show and I am Mort Marcus. I want to remind you that next Tuesday, Robert Sward and Catherine Lynch are going to be reading at the Bookshop Santa Cruz, downtown Santa Cruz at 8pm. And I would like you to stay tuned now for "From the

00:50:42.700 - 00:50:58.270

Bookshelf" hosted by Billy Harris, on which Joseph Keller McNeilly will be reading excerpts from his pre-published novella, "The Seaman's Tongue." And three weeks from tonight, we are going to present a recorded interview that I did this past

00:50:58.270 - 00:51:13.780

Friday with Ray Gonzales who is out on the West Coast,; it is a fascinating interview. And if you love poetry and you want to hear not only the directions it goes in, but a brilliant, very, very thoughtful thinking of a poet and critic, do tune in

00:51:13.780 - 00:51:28.690

three weeks from tonight and of course every Sunday night, we want to thank everyone out there for the Great Octopush(?) that we had last month. And this is Mort Marcus thanking my guests again, and Howard and Kristen for all the help they've given

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us tonight. We will be seeing you, good-