By Button Poetry
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Michael Lee, performing at Button Poetry Live, May 2019.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:01
I suppose it simply comes down to this
00:06
once a through grass seed beside a river
00:10
I visited the plot each morning before
00:13
stumbling half away to the barn while I
00:15
would milk the cows for hours dodging
00:17
their hard mud Kate tales
00:19
soon after the small green homes
00:22
beginning to tremble in the breeze a
00:25
little more each morning as fog hid
00:27
everything else even my desire to leave
00:31
which carries me I think I visited so
00:35
often the farmers named that small
00:37
stretch of river Michaels plus or
00:41
Michaels place if nothing else there’s a
00:44
small patch of grass along a river in
00:47
Norway where children swim in the summer
00:49
with the water still carries winter and
00:51
it’s melting starlight and the Swedes
00:53
come across the border to fish in their
00:56
waist-high boots and not speak to each
00:58
other as they flip their poles back and
01:01
forth as if casting the spell I have
01:04
tried this trick before over water and
01:07
nothing over a body still by time and
01:10
still nothing years before me there were
01:14
others before the Vikings and even
01:16
before the Sami and one of their stone
01:18
tools lies in the wooden chests in the
01:21
farmers dining room like a secret heart
01:23
tilt up one spring years ago this stone
01:27
with its ancient line carved around the
01:29
middle or the hilt of the tool would
01:30
have bill and tethers makes its way into
01:33
conversation over boiled fish and
01:35
potatoes I know you don’t need to know
01:39
any of this but I have to tell you just
01:42
the same because I left that place I
01:45
left this place here to get there and
01:47
I’ll leave it again and every summer is
01:49
hot with my obsession to go and I wake
01:52
early and tend to my Gardens and watch
01:54
nothing change until it does
01:56
time flicks back and forth effortlessly
01:59
and stretches out unspooled the clock is
02:03
a more complicated machine than the gun
02:05
and certainly the knife but they all
02:08
have the same final trick there will one
02:11
day be another war and another
02:14
the theory of everything comes down to
02:16
grass in a simply grass which grows long
02:20
and green and endlessly there are 100
02:23
ways to destroy it and there are 100
02:25
ways it will find its way back out of
02:27
the dirt
02:31
[Applause]
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This post was previously published on YouTube and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video