The simple pleasures of a long close marriage on a perfect fall day leaves dropping from the trees eating an egg salad sandwich after her long

morning walk playing Scrabble she talks about who and what she saw on her hike and I the writer am silent and thought

having played the word irony I R-O-N-Y which triggers the memory of a day long ago in Saginaw, Michigan. I'd gone there to give a speech. I don't remember the

occasion only that afterward a man in a shiny blue suit said to me it's so hard to get good speakers to come to

Saginaw. And it wasn't clear if this was a compliment or an insult.

I went to Saginaw because my hero,

the poet Theodore Rethky, was from there, Who wrote the poem,

I knew a woman,

Lovely in her bones,

When small birds sighed,

She would sigh back at them.

Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one.

And his poem Rooted cellar,

and nothing would sleep in that cellar.

Dank is a ditch, bulbs broke out of boxes, shoots dangled and drooped, and what

a Congress of stinks, roots, ripe as old bait, pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, leaf mold, manure.

Nothing would give up life.

Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

Rethke was bipolar, suffered repeated breakdowns, died at 55, and one of his students was my teacher,

the poet James Wright, who, when I knew him him was going through a miserable time hung over when the

class met at 8 a.m. chain smoking his way through the hour and yet I remember him for his

lines just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota twilight bound softly forth in the grass, and the eyes of those

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