The Poem as evocation: Roblin's mill (1975)

[Music] [Applause] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Hey, brother. Hi, Mr. Bissy. [Music] [Applause] [Music] the mill was torn down last year and stones internal gray light gives way to new green. A shading of surface color like the greenest apple of several. [Music] the spate of Marthas and Tabithas, incessant hyums and Josephs is stemmed in the valley graveyard where the censored quarrels of loving and the hatred and by Golly gusto of a good crop of buckwheat and turnips end naturally as an agreement between friends in the sandy soil that would grow nothing but weeds or feed a few gaunt cattle [Music] and the spring rain takes their bodies a little deeper down each year and maybe the earliest settlers some stern Arthur or speechless Joseph perhaps meet and mingle 1,000 ft down. [Music] And the story about the Grismill rented in 1914 to a man named Taylor by the last of the Roblin family who demanded a share in the profits that poured golden through the flume because the new miller knew his business [Music] and the lighting altars. Here [Music] and now changes to then. And you can see how a bald man stood sturdily indignant and spat on the floor and stamped away so hard the flower dust floated out from his clothes like a white ghostly nimbus around the red scorn. [Music] And the mill closed down. [Music] [Music] those old ones. You can hear them on a rural party line sometimes when the copper wires sing before the number is dialed and then your own words stall some distance from the house you said them in. Lost in the fourth concession or dimension of wherever [Music] what happened still happens. A lump in your throat, an Adam's apple half a mile down the road permits their voices to join living voices and float by on the party line sometimes. [Music] And you hang up then. [Applause] [Music] So long now. [Music]