Coastal

I left Mark at the Dodge Festival, and I'm back at the Inn at Panther Valley, which has the blasted, pleasant aura of a retirement community. (Think Rossmoor Leisure World.) Our room is on the first floor, in the back, with good views of a green slope, fall foliage, and the Panther Valley feeder road. There's bright blue water in the toilet bowl. Our building fronts an artificial pond occupied by a few dozen Canadian geese. They all look pleased to be a part of their Rossmoor. Before it rains, I'm going to go outside and get a cellphone shot.

Earlier, we pulled into the parking lot of the festival, with all of ten minutes before Mark was scheduled to go on. Then there he was on the stage, beneath the big tent, before hundreds of high school students and their teachers--and who would have known that we were caught in construction zone traffic, in the eastbound lanes of I-80 just minutes before? He read "Brian, Age 7," "Coastal," "Charlie Howard's Descent," and "Heaven for Paul," talked, and answered questions from the crowd. I was especially moved by "Coastal," though I've known that poem for at least 13 years. Maybe I heard it away from my own connections to the material for the first time. I'm talking Provincetown, Mark, the girl at the center of the poem. This time it struck me as a metaphor for the fraught relationship between the human and animal worlds. Then I thought about dead doe we'd seen along the road a bit earlier. And the cheerfully oblivious wild turkey stepping across the lanes of I-80. Did he make it? We couldn't tell.

Thursday might be my favorite day of the Dodge Festival as the bulk of the proceedings are directed to high school students. I like the high school students in that they seem to be especially focussed and serious. They look to the poet and think, I want to do that. How do I make something out of the weirdness inside my head? And that energy's sweet and pleasing to be around.

Above are a few cellphone shots from the morning. I wish they were crisper, but I honestly I like the hazy atmospherics of them. And since my eyesight's so lousy, they seem true to how I see.