Page 39 - WTP Vol. XIII #3

ing Jerseys here, flamboyant autumn foliage there, rosy-visaged kids on toboggans here, and of course a sugar house there, sweet sap boiling within and a wisp of smoke streaming from the metal chimney. I also get a kick out of the menu, its dishes rendered into some vaguely French-like language to accom- modate the Québecois haulers who cross our border some forty miles north, the plural of the French for egg, oeuf, for instance, unaccountably pluralized as yeux—eyes.
After buying the pie, I left the building together with an overweight guy. He was an identifiable type here, and in boondocks like ours all over: probably a person whose family’s farm had been an increasingly losing enterprise but who has not replaced it with
a culture as intact as the farmers once knew. I won- dered what sort of work he did. The man had a pack of Pall Malls crammed into the pocket of his tight tee shirt, some takeout order already forming a grease spot on its paper sack. We’d parked our cars side-by- side, so I also noted a sweating twelve-pack on the passenger seat of his trail-worn Chevy, car of many colors.
Hasn’t anyone told him of the dangers...., I inwardly began. Then I checked myself. I’d smugly and reflex- ively begun to compose a biography of this fellow, though if truth be known– because he’s of and in “Nature” too—his history is surely as desultory and irreducible as the natural objects I’d encountered on my early walk.
No, I won’t shut up. I don’t mean that. I’m a talker, a writer. But just about everything I’ve seen today makes me reckon that as an author I should govern my rushes to judgment. But shouldn’t everyone?
A former Pulitzer finalist, Lea served as founding editor of New Eng- land Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. In 2021, he was presented with his home state’s Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published twenty-four books: a novel, five volumes of personal and three of critical essays, and sixteen po- etry collections, most recently What Shines (Four Way Books, NYC, 2023). His sixth book of personal essays, Such Dancing as We Can, was published in 2023, and his second novel, Now Look, in 2024.
“I’ve had self-delusory moments, especially in
truly wild landscapes, when I surmised that I shared in the wholeness and harmony of the natural world.”
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