the introduction of the people we ask that you hold your own eyes until the end of their presentation because they often will set up the sphere and you don't want questions are the kind of stir that and the end of here when people ask me what i do sometimes i say i'm an artist sometimes i say and i'm i'm an engineer and sometimes i'm other i in the high school i loved taking our classes i did as much as possible when i started college i wanted to major in art if i tested very well in math and so my counselors wanted me to study math or science related field i also went to a cooperative education school and i needed to pay for my college so engineering had it up being because there are a lot of jobs there weren't any jobs in art it worked out well for me because i knew kind of what an engineer they did that's what my father did and i like math a lot and i like drawing in my free time it was a nice way to relax and so i went to the university library got books out on the master's and took a pencil and paper and sketched in my free time when i went to graduate school i had less time but i still drew as much as i could and after my ph d in electrical engineering i b m hired me and so obviously i was focused on a career it was a big adjustment for me to in january leave my career and suddenly be at home with two small children so one of the thing i did was turn to art again so i drew and unfortunately i also saw classes being offered by kathleen berry birger on for a watercolor just at the community center and i thought they would be fun i knew nothing about watercolors i didn't know the paper the brushes paints and so i really needed someone to hold my hand through just getting the materials and getting brave enough to try it and wetting the paper down the engineering part of my brain though however kept leading me back to more detailed drawings and getting back into like using colored pencils a friend of mine that i was hoping she was later was unable to make it to me to colored pencils and drawing these gorgeous owls and i couldn't handle that much but i could start drawing small backyard birds at the same time for mother's day my daughter's gave me a beautiful book of photographs of birds i loved watching birds walking in those riverside as my diving taking pictures of birds so i started drawing pictures of thirds and then we also in my yard i have a couple acres in jericho and we've put first houses at the corners of each one of each corner of the yard and we have had really good luck as with the blue birds are there right now we've had really good luck each year with blue birds and trees swallows so i spent a lot of time watching them and if you've watched a bird house before there's a lot of activity at the start while there the male is trying to find somebody and he's working on building the nest and there's very busy around there and then also there's no activity for a while and then you can tell the birds hatched and so there's a lot of activity again and the parents are pretty frazzled they're really fun to watch using the binoculars they're exhausted every two hours they're in and out feeding the birds and at the end very end they're constantly in there feeding the birds right where the birds leave but then suddenly it will be no activity the birds can leave within twenty four hours or three to four days so it's really fun to watch and suddenly nothing's in there and two years ago i was watching a house with tree swallows way in the back of our yard so you had these binoculars it was very busy and all said monday morning there was nothing going on i didn't really think of it as a very hot sunny day all day long i notice there's nobody there in the evening when i was returning from a walk with my husband i noticed that the bird house was askew and i knew that wasn't right so i started to run out to the bird house and then i noticed there were clawing marks on the bird house in the roof was ripped off so i knew that was a problem and i couldn't go any nearer select my husband went close and it smelled really bad it was her thick scene and we checked the box and he just pitched it out into the field and we started looking around the area just in hopes that maybe there was something there and jim found a little baby bird nestled down into the grass you could barely could see it the grass was as high as the bird and i'm going to and it said let nature take its course i couldn't let nature take its course i'm like i know what that means i'm a mother i can't do that so i started calling everywhere and i placed a call that led me to another call that finally there was a rescue a licensed rehab place because the vermont laws i can't keep this bird for very long there's a licensed rehab rescue and release place south of her gens this is eight thirty at night my husband's looking at me like you've got to be kidding like why am i all this teenage daughter needed more nighttime driving hours for her driving permit and so i'm like hey we can do this so we're driving down at nine o'clock and i got down to her gens around ten thirty i'm sitting in the back with a little baby bird and also in a donna me we met him at kennedy brothers supposed to meet them at kennedy brothers of course you get there and they're not there so imo this is the stupidest thing i've ever done but ten minutes later sophia an adorable sophia twelve thirteen years old comes in the car with her dad hops out of the car just the sweetest girl she does this rehab program as part of a homeschool program as a bird cage and she looks right at pipsqueak and she's like oh this is wonderful usually we get birds that are much smaller this has a really good chance of success of living he is probably just like a week away from me a little fly and he would have lost his nasty but it's really good you brought him because he's very dehydrated if he's been you know out in the sun all night his parents weren't anywhere around so it kind of explained why i would drive an hour and a half for this little bird as i had a print of my card of the trees of some tree swallows taken at mil's river park and i gave a tour and i say i love drawing birds as birds are really special to me they're inspirational so this means a lot to me whatever you can do i had forgotten that my email address was on the back of the card so when i got home by the time i got home starting an hour and a half back i had received an email from a mother juliana and that started a lovely exchange of emails are the next couple months of what pipsqueak was doing and we've actually continued to correspond with each other and i have some photos but let me read a couple of things that she wrote so the first e mail your bird is adapting beautifully to this new environment sophia treated him for dehydration last night and this feeding him normally this morning although he's not gaping yet but i'm watching him and as i write to you he's perching on a little branch and preening he's sharing a nice pen with two other birds his age the sparrow and one a charming starling who has already taken your beautiful baby under his wing both literally they coddle and figuratively we hope they're gaping for food will soon have years jumping in and doing the same i look up the word gaping its ability to shove the beat down and open it to try to get insects she sent me photos and i'm going to pass these around because i know they're too small to see but what you'll see is sophie is holding pipsqueak in her hand whe first arrived and then there's another one where pipsqueaks on a branch with other baby are on a perch with other baby birds trying to become friends but they weren't ready for me and then sophia is feeding birds no see this is she's wearing a hat and the birds are all over her arms and hat and she's feeding the birds at the rehab center and then the last photo it inspired me to do the strong wind of pipsqueak snuggled in with a baby blue jay the blue jays name is gaap or and so got  very you know are you my mother type of situation copper would have been a predator to the nest and the real life because as goes out go after eggs so there's an actual photo that was inspired by this and pass these two things around so the next e mail i got was that squeaks doing great what a beautiful flier and as you can see he and governor have become fast friends cuddling regularly but pipsqueak is the best flyer in the whole flock i received a series of e mails of how obvious the focus is to rescue these birds and release them so they have a plan for how they are going to release pipsqueak and i at regular notes of what he was doing and how he was flying well turned out is quite the flight instructor for the summer because they brought barn swallow over because the barn swallow is having trouble flying and he was teaching barney how to fly and then they were getting ready to release both barney and pip squeak and said they're both ready to release but another rehab or has a single swallow that she's been planning to bring to us or hers can bond and then released with pip and barney so we have been waiting a little bit longer hopefully hers will come in the next few days we always like to include a lonely bird if we can because it increases the single bird chances for success without taking anything away from the others so obviously what i take away from this story it's really touching to me because it seemed at first pipsqueaks life was fairly insignificant it was a little bird down in the grass and could have let nature take its course but to me it is very symbolic of every life is very significant he was important to the rehab facility he was be friending other birds he was flying with and teaching him how to fly and increasing the success rate of their survival when they were released eventually net up releasing them and when they took him out he was the way she takes them outside as the birds are on their arms and apparently pipsqueak called to other tree swallows they had seen tree swallows in the area but he started talking or calling and some trees follows came around and they were able to release barney and pip squeak with the other swallows so that increases their obviously greatly increases their success rate so a couple of years ago diane invited me into her open studio and i had a display over there with all my bird art and when people came and i got really excited about telling them the story about pipsqueak and barney and cupper and everything and of course i got the reaction you need to write a book you need to tell this in a book and at the same time i was illustrating for the d c s award and the d c i'm still doing it but the d c off award is the dorothy canfield fisher award and each year they select thirty but they've been doing this for years i see some nodding had said forget like eighty years are very long time they've  selecting thirty books with the middle schoolers read if they read at least five books they can vote on which book is their favorite book and then they invite the author she can't come here she can't come every year but they try to have the author come every year to the randolph center and over six hundred middle school students attend a ceremony where they give an illustrated award to this author last six five or six years i've been illustrating the award and here's a copy of it it's much larger than this  but a copy of her hunger games and the rules i have been given to me is i have to be inspired by the book and not use any artwork in the book unless there's a graphic novel then i use the style of the book but i have to create a new scene so i have to read it very carefully and make sure you know exactly what the character looks like and do this illustration one illustration representative of the whole book lockley hunger games the character look just like my daughter julia and it is she did when she was cast the movie when i read it described her hair color you know i could see julia climbing a tree shooting an arrow and we had her actually doing that so she posed for me and the other thing is obvious i have to add the calligraphy on any after the painting is complete  i've been thinking for a while hey wait i have been illustrating for other books so maybe i could illustrate my own book but i can't write i really can't write it comes across forced and contrived and so that you start thinking back on all the illustrated books i'd read with your hundreds and hundreds of them with my daughters and i loved the book tuesday and it is an illustrated book without words and he conveys the story through using this special type of imaging or  to show different times so i thought well i could be creative with our use of the framing of this and maybe maybe i can do this so i wrote i started like everyone does i started with a story line and i found out it was very similar to writing even though i was writing with pictures i still had to come up with how you hook somebody in i still had to come up with a progression and like the chapters of a book i had to edit that was actually the hardest part i had i had him in that i knew belonged in there and that for three weeks i drew it every which way i could i enlarged it i turned it you know hundred eighty degrees it flipped it and finally i just had to take it out it did not fit so it was a classic editing so the book is up here there's twenty seven die and challenge me to finish as much as i could by this time so there's twenty seven of thirty two pages i have five being sketched at home so the way i i did like in blocks of chapters and i used the shape of binoculars so i could zoom in on the bird i didn't want to be more oh so i didn't want to say there a bunch of birds in there that got killed i wanted to look like there was only one bird left as the sun started to set and so i tried to use a scoping telescoping kind of effect and then i had an attack scene and i didn't want it you know to be violent or bloody i just wanted a matter of fact a raccoon probably crawled up and crawled down you know by the way of mounted my bird houses much more safely now they're on skinny metal posts six feet high and so i wanted the you know i wanted it obviously to get attacked but not h and then my daughter sitting right below you can see that and can the resemblance my daughter's a wonderful poem i owe the older daughters and have the patience to oppose it all this one has been fabulous she was like what do you want me to do hundreds of pictures later i have the one i want and so i had to go out and rescue and then start to drive pipsqueak to the wildlife center how i came up with a lot of the work behind it was i really said this is just a small sampling i spent a lot of time doing sketches of birds most of them were from my own photographs but i did use google images a lot to just learn how to sketch not to put them in my book or sell something but to just learn the anatomy of the bird and really try to sketch the bird and figure out how i'm going to make it look like it's flying i used my own photos this is from the top of mount file and then obviously julia and then i also did lots of sketches on paper these are the flying studies of the last pages and i compare them over to the same frame as this when i got it to where i wanted like here's a raccoon then i would put it on the window and trace it sometimes i would engage in this took a very long time for me to do the one in the corner where she's driving to the rehab center this is a lot of patience i did it detailed penciled in into over and then i traced it and then i painted it i finally did had to cheat and use words in one place i just couldn't make the jump without adding too many photos or i wanted to move the story along a little bit quicker so i did end up using a couple words here and there i also learned that i had to work backwards and forwards so i almost tried to hurry and finish this very early to be better to illustrate that i'm not ready to finish this yet because i'm not sure how some of the things look in it until i complete some things down there for example like the bird houses i learned i like them all out in the kitchen counter and i'm at the same time because i wanted them all to be the same color and all look look the same in the same again i have to go backwards and forwards so much like i'm writing a book you have to go backwards and forwards in editing how you do it the same thing as i display this is has been on display in my house but without the black framing as soon as i put the black framing on it and i could walk around like a film strip like a movie i got stuck on one page i already know i'm going to have to do redo one page it just didn't flow like i wanted it to so that was good to have it on display because now i realize it didn't convey the feeling i wanted and i would have to redo one page so again i have five pages  i'm working on sketching at home it'll be the you know flying and release pages and then i did try to figure out what do i do next with us obviously i'm excited about those i want to finish those and i met with a self publishing agent to try to figure out what the next step would be and what i learned from that was obviously a self publishing agent are happy to take your money and and i really want to honest criticism i really want to go through the rejection process i think recovery is i want to go i wan a manuscript because i know myself well enough in the engineering part of me really would crisp out the photos and make it as professional as possible which i want to have it before i ever self published it anyway so getting it to the point where i would submit it as a  manuscript i know i was for the time making it as clean as possible and ready to go and that i would hopefully get feedback if it got rejected so i get at it and modify it so i got will be another my next learning stage of this whole process and that's the end of my presentation thank you for braving the muddy muddy road to come here this evening it is such a deep privilege to be here in this incredible company thank you diane for holding this incredible event and  diana and mary jane my companions and in the word and the image and i was really reluctant to say this the last time but i was very reluctant to go to rehearsal it's just like night and it's of long way and it was such a wonderful experience and we realized that all of our work had a connected thread of some aspect of healing to it and so that is that was just a great surprise and truly delicious so for a full disclosure mary jane was my writing teacher in one nine hundred seventy three as she opened the door to so much to her to writing life and to her own incredible work and it's been  just a wonder to be connected with her all these years and i'm graced that she has her having our writing class on monday night so for the month of april so i've been writing for many years i started writing as a way to make sense of being physically different in the world and the way that that felt like that could work was somehow putting words down about it and it served well in later years as the bumps in the road arrived and a fairly significant hundred five i just had a smorgasbord of illnesses and cancers and writing saved my behind it really helped me make sense of what my experience was and i got to reclaim the story as my story as opposed to what i was being told i would do or what happened to me and that then led to the luckiest job in the world which is as i mentioned earlier i teach a healing art and writing class for folks dealing with illness and their family members and  the stories and images that people create every week are a ston of shing and and i just feel so graced to be in their company it's sort of like they are the teachers and maybe those of us that get older we found that there's a lot of teachers in our lives so the first several poems all read come from the earlier places of being different and working through healing with cancer and then the other poems will be  brandy new work and then i'll close with a memoir piece of that i'm working on about myself and my mother ruined the child is marooned on an island she is there because of her face it is an island in the middle of a family a school a neighborhood the color on her chin and neck is somewhere between grape and royalty where she goes the island goes her sisters whisper up against of the shore her parents gesture and flap overhead the cruel stones of boys cl no one touches her there except doctors and dentists but then they were dogs on the island birds and worms and violets a whole greenhouse full of the nest when cancer ward in the careful nest of my life was blown from its tree twigs scattered threads of birch bark and horse hair and fungus the breast further lining strewn one of two eggs pro can in a sense like yolk running out after the tests and the surgery i had to rebuild it stick by stick ask sits in the new woven bowl gratitude like spider silk braided in with fear to nation and invisible so fast forward to with this face of distinction more recently even ground lately when someone snags on my face especially a grown up and they cannot refrain from sneaking a glance at such marks the barest whites of their eyes showing like a spook to cower that doesn't comprehend the creature before it i tender a small smile when our glances cross they may feel foolish perhaps very human and there we are on even  ground i was had the amazing opportunity to be at a singing weekend with ysaye barnwell who is one of the members of sweet honey in the rock an amazing african american women score us and  september she tells me her cancer's lesson was joy uterine cancer look bad she arranged her affairs as doctors advise as if that word could the splay of life inside she was reprieved claim margins she began next morning to inhabit the life she had she tells me now i make my coffee and go out and visit the flowers and beings and grass and there is joy and i lay in a cute happiness for all but i am sure grin the by this week's running hustles to work past wasps at their apples quiet shout of morning glories where silver in the unknown grass clouds torn from each other as we begin to sing scales i see that in naming these things i received what was essential which is the calling of joy ok we're in sugaring season so here are some sugarin sap icicles along bostwick road cold wind froze sap from just prune maples sideways i saw a chickadee at an icicle tip so i stopped driving and put my tongue to the cold tears of the tree i tasted flint made full steam when it first rises off the pain on i tasted the shimmer of life pulsing up inside the cool grey bark as soon as the sun begins to apply those long warm hands the happiest child was tongue to that tree the saddest child grieved the lost limbs and together we grew up inside my black quilted coat and became this white haired woman who cared nothing for the cars hoose their load and stared so it isn't spring to me unless i have my head over the evaporator pan dog bragg's sugar house in the in the wind you just can't see a thing and so this is we were there one  day and he just visiting and he brought out these letters that his great great grandmother had written about what it was like to grow up and do this and so it starts with an epigraph from those letters grade b we had a nice warm day on the twenty fourth and some farmers got out there thompson tapped the trees then yesterday was one of the worst of the winter is snood and blued variously all day twelve inches the snow half or over mont today is warm again and the maple syrup is run in a letter from march twenty sixth one thousand nine hundred nine by dog brags a great great grandmother anna bixby brag spring does not begin in my body until my head is over dog brags evaporator steam around us like a creature warm pussywillow gray hinting sweetness as sap laps along the pans one day when march was coming apart out in the muddy yard i entered the sugar house and could not make dog out just heard the funk of vic wood into the boiler saw a suggestion of his flannel shirt near the orange ma when he took a break to ring up my bottles of gra b visited a bit and he pulled out a sheaf of letters and i was writing elegant and cramped lining out the vagaries of the season all of that tapping and hauling the hunkering alongside the boil however long it took the season all sweat and shiver like the flanks of the belgians that stood up burly and patient his soft boiled egg his ice cream and telling us how they're used to boil eggs in the sap on the farm just over the border the one he left with seventeen dollars jammed in a pocket when he was seventeen when i brought him the good stuff after living here for a while he smiled and showed his small square he held up the hand known to pigs and later hammers he said we got out spoons and we tapped that job and we did not talk but home the little so this series of poems really is inspired by my students so i drive to hope lodge which is right below fletcher allen hospital twice a week and i have come to confront my impatience which i didn't really want to realize that i had which this home addresses slow car yesterday our rusty bumper white sedan kept a steady thirty in the thirty five zone instantly impatience froth like sour foam in the mouth of a video horse chafing to be sooner to the classroom to set out ten cups of color pencils and little trays of paint the push to be early as red as an ambulance this urge to overtake is not no i would never admit the toxic rush of how it feels to pass on the double yellow line at the corner where i expected the car to turn as most unhurried cars do reluctant to climb the hill to the sprawl of hospital and what waits there it kept going straight along and i  ferd triangles prick over the back seat listening to invisible words from its human the hurry train the way all elwell for the white car flipped to gra like a big shouldered angel put her hand on mine and kept it there until exasperated and slowed and steadied and got the hell out of the way so even though i live in a tiny place compared to where i used to live there are still plenty of nature adventures and this is called squirrel karma rescue grey squirrels have been systematically dangled hind ankle wedged hard in the notch of the feeder on when have you gloves a jacket just shocked off boots i said i'm here to help you it replied a gravelly yes i reached out and pushed up squirrel hand or tangled royal suddenly squirrel high in the air twisting cat like landing pa's out on a cedar nearby my heart was quiet a shimmer in the place where we met where the me flickered out for an instant rescued from its invisible a bit of a bird theme for the next two ran in the storm watching the snow split and shriek around the back of the house something small floated out from the heart of stacked adirondacks longueville tail tilt carolina red cinnamon feathers helps numb to the body even as a gust splayed its tail and it tightened in place need and danger in balance as the snow spiraled a wide world it appeared at leaned into vanishing to the place my hunger would never lead what birds know what if we were never asked to be this ligament did scaffold of bones and red muscle organs and their actions of plus and minus i would be a bird for sure if i was loosened from being human or even in this body watch them more closely like last night's massive murder of crows on the campus perching roosting and leaving vast traces of black in the city lit night what if the soft copper breast of this winter robin appearing in from the sleeping branch of the tulip tree kept me company enough there on the shoulder of imagination it would mean that last week as i sat trapped at my mechanics the wife and then the daughter migrating in to air their worn complaints about stupid everything i could be rocked back in the gray grease stained chair graceful for the chatter grateful for the chatter of their ruffle feathered company how it reminded me of old relatives chewing the day in my grandmother's kitchen i would see how beneath all the bluejay jeering they were both as kind so this is up home i wrote in honor of a dear dear student who was an incredible inspiration and quite syrian dip it is lee i happened to be with her the day before she died and then the day she died in the room at the hospital and there were some absolute wonder about it and some very disturbing questions that came up for me and so this is called death questions for david cindy was propped up and gasping shallowing breaths then not her eyes flew open and closed last spark flaring before it went i want to save our part but after i am home i can only replay the ugly the anguish is red and black it forces to jagged questions is there a place or is there nothing after identical to from cancer recurrence in one nine hundred ninety eight i crafted a piece with this beyond death was an open stone placed at the center of knowing a door i had the key to a skeleton key that worked on any lock death was just this opening out now not knowing and the fear dark and hard he took a brass said he believed we were interconnected with everything matter became matter of a different sort all these strands of energy threaded among and between us as snow sparked in the headlights what he said became remembered in days the red car misgiving boyce and and grew green there was always a hand reaching through begins with an epigraph by linda mackerras tin from a poem called the apple tree and here's the lines from that poem more beautiful now than ever you were you stand past  past pretty miss in the winter of your winter in the forest colors coming in every breath or so a leaf releases and parts ticking through the tenuous lives of other lives in the distance the head of an aspen quivers still's i see the smooth wastes of beach crackled birch the stray added skin of fur and hemlock this is not a domestic place although a metal spoon in a white handle leaves bowl down in a nearby midden it's far to the north of the apple tree that blossom and fruit in our urban backyard and where my mother young with purpose filter apron with small mahogany apples to peel cook and sieve rotating the wooden pesto inside the long tin cone for apple sauce was a little too sweet and short lived i do not remember many years of spinning it warm but then everything telescopes for children the labor of mothers reduced to spoonfuls my mother banked on pretty her apron bro hung neat and lipstick ring the filter tips of cigarettes she held i later learned like bette davis she kept jewelry in small white cardboard boxes fixed with the arbor bands the words rhinestones or gold pins written on the covers in black ballpoint in the next door down she kept underwear organized in plastic bags the panties the bra's the girdles the slips separated by fanciness as a child i went through my mother's drawers often sliding my hands between of the slippery bags lifting out and opening the boxes she kept the special black underwear at the back of the drawer slips with lace and bras that hocked in front i knew to replace them exactly like her underwear drawer my mother arranged beauty carefully taking it on and off with care and ponds cold cream it was not something i realize now that she ever felt she owned but was something to be purchased carefully labelled and preserved i imagine this is what she wished to impart to me purchasing and padding on the thick makeup that hide to hide my birthmark researching treatments that caused more pain than are a sure my mother could not fathom why i would want to live with marks exposed why i would want to suffer so when i came out to her thirty one years ago over a limp salad in a mediocre restaurant she told me i've always been a masochist of the first water first the birthmark and now this another reason for people to tie me her mouth was stiff with these words her fork set down on formica with a sharp clack recently i looked up the term first water it is the initial water poured off after soaking wild foods it is poison when she died shortly before after turning eighty five her facelift had given way before she died in photographs that fall and summer she raised her eyebrows so that the skin around her eyes would look less loose my sisters and i always puzzled about the look of surprise gleni that was the law in the truth of a smile that merely lifted her lips over kept teeth until she died and we figured out what it meant for her to have her picture taken when she hated her face her body my mother did not think she was over priceless her body was no longer of beauty use the night before my mother took her life i helped she'd been forced to move to a new apartment by my father my father who compelled to upgrade underestimated the toll it would take on my mother as she struggled to find a purchase with a memory that was increasingly perfor the price it would take my appreciation of my mother's loosening body did my mother no good my appreciation slid off her waterproof skin like drops that escaped the towel like tears her skin was shedding to see my mother naked was a privilege her body like mackerras tins appletree past use past conventional beauty use past nourishing the the tree in this book is female and she steadily gives of herself to the needy and clueless man until all the and unsteady he sits is all bones on the stump of her she has given everything that made her own live to the man and now he sits on her stump past use my mother did not have roots and nuff to fathom telling off her better drops but she was more beautiful now than ever you were past pretty miss in the winter of your winter my mother had no receptor site for the distinction between pretty and beauty the first being what many men see the ladder a loveliness that lives above below and be on skin makeup or not once years ago the summer i return to my family after the first round of cancer i asked my mother to go swimming with me in the warm august ocean of the south shore of cape cod as we paddled about touching the ridges of sand with our feet and looking at our hands in the clear salted water i urged her to take up the top of her bathing suit the beach was deserted late in the day and golden let i've been talking to my mother a little about feminism about the rights of women to love their bodies as is about how good it might feel to flow freely about carers my mother looked at me her lip and then she did it slid down one strap and then the other flipped over the stiff copse of the bodice our breast bobbed just below and just above the surface the other thing i would like to say before beginning is that  us this the last very few years two or three years have been difficult for one reason or another we've lost people who were essential to us and this last year has been especially hard and so when last summer sometime in early summer diane said to me something about  ting a sequence of poems to go with this see this art sequence that she was working on on water i said yes that is my nature to say yes to more than i sure had but i said yes and then i was paralyzed for weeks become not been able to do it or not been able to do anything but simoleons i cleared things away so that in january  i got to it and it worked and it turned out to be a real healing process i think water itself and thinking about water and even doing the research that idea had it was very helpful in many many ways and and and that i think for diana and getting to know diana's work and of course patricia's work that what i was doing fit right in and we all owe a great deal to diane who has done much to encourage many of us in this  community and to see that there's almost so much art so much of all kinds that one is hard put to keep up with now and to go to all the things that especially in spring time we're privileged to have going on around us i want to read a couple well i'll just read one poll him from a book that came out last year and i'm doing that because the figure in the  poem finds his place in the last poem of this sequence and another person gave me a gift that appears in the first po sequence there are there's an poem and then there is a closing poem and those poems are not specifically about diane's specific works of art the way all of the other poems are but they provide a kind of context maybe even a kind of receptacle or container for the other poems but i felt the need to write an opening poem and then to have a closing point and valerie graham of shelburne told me about something and an evening we spent together at a little from my childhood something i had seen mass father a farmer a north carolina farmer do on more than one occasion the title of this book tapping the center of things comes from the poem i'm going to read it's not the title was the poem but it is is in the point that phrase is in the the old place my father tells of that april his parents moved four long miles from the old place into town while he cried in the wagon all the way to cameron sobbing that saturdays would no longer be their day for going to the store for sugar flour coffee and a bag of penny candies to share with jack and flora during the week to come in passing years the old place has long exposed its crooked shutters and blistered clabbered to all the cars along the road out front cars filled with no one who can recall th ferguson place where generations lived on that muster ground for revolution in north carolina's gently rolling sand hills and later early learned to read their arms and faces in tattered strips of rags and stockings against the noonday sun well they hoed and harvested small patches of corn turnips and collard greens until the day their men returned from far away battlefields to pla did stores of cotton see now from town we make our own return once or twice a year to walk down the slope our father stoops to scrape aside glistening layers of the composing leaves then cups his hands for us to drink water as cold and clear as if this spring tet into the very center of old mother gives birth out of the cradle endlessly rocking to riddling life always taking shape into being with the arab and flow flowing up strain downstream bearing sustenance combining air and water arterial like intervenes of leaves grasses induced sap wood of branches limbs and trunks the blood flowing the great heart pumping the language of water tells our stories our human tales of exploration endless possibilities of reinvention and rebirth mark twain's mississippi where the face of water in time became a wonderful book with its interplay of light and shadow the reflected images of life on land in mirrored surfaces of springs bubbling into streams ponds the great lakes and mighty rivers that spill tiny layer of crustacean shells hold them in your fingers these messages of the watery birth of the land we know ancient floating grasses on preston pine camouflage what lies beneath the glistening surface with its reflections of red maple and stone outcroppings water merging into shorelines outlining a glacial depression in vermont's green mountains water moving through autumn's right steady rain into the first line of spring rush from thawing snow ice and the seasons steady rains to create the spring rush wow while the waterfall while the waterfall at how low broke spills into a bubbling froth a miniature falls to tip the brooks overflow downward through the foothills of camel's hump into the huntington river powering its torrential way through the gorges stony passages worn from ancient layered she just forming cascades and plunge pool was before joining the the onion river of the first people that had the natty wending its way through ever shifting river banks dividing richmond town from itself glacier water glacier water the crystalline blue of waters melting from a glacier almost appears to be a canvas created from evolving elements of earth and water where alpine vegetation flourishes and flowers into a spectrum of delicate greens pale yellow and burn shades of oak or painted by and master artist into a composition in which every mounted plant occupies its natural space  union each one in perfect harmony with the other flowing into lake michigan to become one with that which brought it to life trapped jericho's millbrook in case is another fallen pine and its icy grip the branches casting intricate blue green patterns against the snow both tree and ice caught on a canvas of light and shadow that will dissolve into the inevitable motion of spring's renewal from the sun's gradual warmth and that music of water stirring with all winter has brought its way i'm not used to being on that kind of stage and this point is call a morning cat on a michigan creek and its waters emerge from a dark wood to greet the early sun and move slowly through beach grasses with the creeks sinew a surface is taking on th skies deep summer blue on its drowsy way to lake michigan to nine zero one  where we have to place that when the creek widens its channel beyond the waving spiky fronds of low lying vegetation winding like a blue ribbon through pale saying toward lake michigan way is breaking in the distance three nine zero two the final stretch of creek opens its reveal its outward to create a water scape of curves and lines drawn by currents moving through finger likes bits of be sure yet at this moment almost without motion as if the same andy show us move forward by water were painted by feathers once held by the hand of a fifteenth century japanese a feather in the same hand of white feather lies along the shore as if suspended game time instead of being held in place that tiny sand particles shadows into blue and purple patterns down and across mill brooks frozen back a delicate wash of color on white handmade paper it's interested composition one with the sun the snow the brooks eventual journey toward the wooden a ski and into lake champla surface mirrors that rosy burst of brilliance at the sun's final setting to bring together a pink sky reflected on water framed flood gates controlling waters steady meandering passage into lake michigan peephole in the snow along irish settlement road opens and i in two springs transforming power to carve from powered up roadside bodies of water flow from springs and reveal it seeping into streams and creeks throughout the length and breadth of vermont's landscape mapping stories of habitation plant and fabian insect and mammal from a watery system a veins and arteries pines lakes and rivers that branch outward toward the great lakes northward then lengthen the st lawrence southward to the atlantic joining and spanning a continent bodies of water are stirred into meandering migration bad beaver as they now are sa fell them into powers then drag them into nearby a pond and low lying wetlands buildings no underwater houses engineer for ski meant from a god but early settlers and explorers love more oil champlain then those named the bad migrating families the places they claimed as the levy and brown rivers joe's passant shelburne pond and lake will be this mapping of human habitation in the naming of watery places a meandering migration into recorded history bodies of water live deep underneath the earth and aquifers like the ogallala that giant storage tank created millions of years ago from ancient vanished rivers channels by stony pieces of glacial upheaval with water percolating from saturated gravel underground bodies of water stretching for thousands of miles in finite supply yet life blood of all that lives on the surface following a long dry spell and late july when the rain finally comes a farmer removes his hat steps off the bat poor ch