Microbiome relative abundance data, whether it's human or environmental or wherever, is really difficult to visualize. Why is it difficult to visualize? Well, each individual sample that you're looking at can have a large number of taxa, perhaps dozens of different taxa. Also, those taxa are generally not found in every individual or every replicate from the group that you're looking at. All of these things combine to make it really challenging to analyze and compare microbiome data. In today's episode of Code Club, I think we're gonna get really close to a solution for this challenge that we've been working through in the recent episodes of Code Club. Hey, folks, I'm Pat Schloss. This is just a challenge that I have been struggling with for as long as I've been working in microbiome data, and I know that I am not alone, that nearly everybody that works in microbiome data really has this struggle of how do we best represent relative abundance data? If you've been following along in recent episodes, you know that we've talked about stacked bar charts, we've talked about pie charts, we've talked about heat maps, we've talked about faceting stacked bar charts, we've done so many different things. And I think in the last episode, we got really close to the right answer, and today we're gonna flesh that out further. You'll recall that in the last episode, we made side-by-side bar charts where we grouped the bars by the different taxa, and then for each taxa, we had three different disease status groups, and this made it much better than what we'd been seeing with, say, stacked bar charts because we could put everything on the same basis of comparison. Everything was pegged at a 0% relative abundance at the bottom of the plot. That way, then, we can look within each taxa to see how does that taxa vary across the three different disease status groups. That's just something wasn't possible really with pie charts or stacked bar charts. The problem, though, with those bar plots is that we didn't have a sense of how many subjects or samples were in each of the bars. We also didn't have a sense of the amount of variation in the data. In today's episode, we're gonna go back to an approach that we saw when we were talking about diversity data, and we're gonna build a strip chart or jitter plot depending on how you wanna call it. We'll do some nice stylizing with it, and we'll also put a line across each of our clouds of points to indicate where the median is to make it easier to see where the central tendency is in the data, the variation in the data depicted by that cloud, as well as the number of individuals that go into each cloud by being able to see each individual point. Come along with me into our studio now and we'll see how we can get this done. As always, I strongly encourage you to get the code that I am working with down below in the description. There's a link to a blog post that's associated with this video. You can get the code that I'm starting with. Also, up across the top, I'll put a link to a video that describes where you can get the data, how you can download the data and put it in the right place, how you can get R, set up our studio and just get everything you need so you can follow along. I really, really, really encourage you to follow along because along the way, I'm not gonna be able to get to everything that you might imagine doing. So I'm gonna say, hey, why don't you go work on this? And based on principles that you've learned in other episodes of Code Club, see if you can get it to work with a strip chart, okay? So today we're working through this code. We go ahead and we read in the metadata that tells us the disease status, the OTU data that counts for each OTU, the taxonomy information. We then join this all together and get the relative abundance for each OTU for each subject. We then look at taxon relabund as a data frame we're generating where we're filtering at the phylum level. We're then aggregating together all those OTUs from each subject that belong to each phyla. We get the relative abundance and then we identify those taxa, those phyla that we can pool because their maximum abundance on average across all subjects from one disease status group is less than 3%. We then pool those phyla together by joining that taxon pool data frame with our taxon relabund data frame. And then we throw it all together to make a side by side bar chart. And so again, we see in this figure, we have the average or the mean, which really only makes sense if your data are normally distributed. We have no sense of the variation in the data. I'm just gonna tell you right up that the data are not normally distributed. They're highly skewed oftentimes. And so the mean doesn't make sense. So we'll use the median. We have no sense of the variation in the data. So it didn't make sense to put on like a plus or minus standard error, standard deviation. And again, we don't see an end. So by the end of this episode, we're gonna convert this side by side bar chart into a strip chart where I think we will overcome those problems. But unfortunately, you might identify one or two other problems because, hey, no visual is perfect. So the first thing that we need to do is break apart the data so that we're not aggregating things together by disease status, but that we're keeping things separate at the subject level. We've done this before in a previous episode, but just to remind ourselves, if we look at O2 relabund, that does keep the subject sample ID. Now down here in taxon relabund, we go ahead and we group, we filter at the phylum level to pull out the phylum information. We then group by disease stat, sample ID and taxon. And then we then group things together, group O2 used together that are from the same phylum. And then down here in lines 43 and 44, that's where we aggregated across the disease status groups. So I'm gonna go ahead and remove those two lines, but I'm gonna add back in the 100 times my sum relabund so that I can report my relative abundance as a percentage. Let's go ahead and run taxon relabund, and we see that we have our disease status group, our sample ID, the taxa, the phylum that it's coming from, as well as the relative abundance. In this next code chunk, we're creating a data frame called taxon pool that we will use to tell our which phyla or which taxa in general, we wanna pool together because within all three of the disease status groups, there isn't a disease status where the relative abundance on average is greater than 3%. Now, when we did this before, used this before, taxon relabund was already aggregated at the disease status level. We still have things separated at the subject level, so we need to modify this code a bit. Again, we have taxon relabund down here, where we have the disease status, the sample ID, taxon, and relabund. So I'm gonna group by my taxon. I also wanna group by my disease status, and I am then going to go ahead and get the mean for the disease status and for that taxa. So we'll do summarize, and we'll do mean equals mean relabund. And again, we're not going to plot this mean, we're using this to figure out which phyla to pool. And so again, we now have the mean relative abundance. I'll go ahead and do dot groups equals drop. And I will now pipe this into another group by, where now I'll group by taxon, and I'm gonna summarize to say pool if the max mean value is less than 3%. So again, if the mean for any given phyla across all three disease status groups is less than 3%, we wanna say pool equals true, because we wanna pool it. Also then to sort our phyla in terms of relative abundance, we also need then the mean across all three disease status groups. So this then gives us taxon pool, which we can now see has the taxon name, whether or not to pool it, and the mean relative abundance across all three disease status groups. Next, we're gonna go ahead and bring this into our inner join with taxon relabund. We then mutate taxon so that if pool is true, so if we should pool it, then we're gonna call it other. Otherwise, we're gonna use the taxon name, we'll then group by disease stat and taxon. Actually, we also wanna add in here sample ID because we wanna join together those tax of relative abundances for each person separately. We're also leaving the disease stat in here because then when we finish the summarize, we'll still have the disease status for each of the subjects. And so here then, we're gonna do some on relabund and I will also call this relabund. And then the mean, it will be the smallest value of the mean. Again, this is used for sorting our different phyla. And then we've got all this good stuff for ordering our factor of the taxon, ordering our taxa using factor with FCT reorder using that mean column to determine the order of the data. And we're gonna do a descending sort from most abundant to least abundant. Good. Now, we're getting into the good stuff of making this strip chart. So on the X axis, again, we want our taxa, the Y axis, we want relabund, not mean relabund. And then our fill will put disease stat. I'm gonna switch this to color because with the strip chart or jitter plot, we're gonna use those circular PCH symbols to represent the data. And so that uses color as the color of the symbol. So for geom call instead, I'm gonna do geom jitter. And let's go ahead and use that and see how far this gets us. I'm also gonna use scale color manual. And so that'll be good. And yeah, let's give this a shot and see what we get. Cool. So it's a strip chart. Unfortunately, we have our three clouds of points on top of each other. So we need to pull those apart. And so again, this is very similar to what geom call does on its own. So geom call with no arguments stacks the data on top of each other. Well, we're stacking the data on top of each other here. So do you remember from that episode, the last episode, how we pulled that apart? Well, we use a position argument. So we said position equals position dodge. Here we're gonna use position equals position jitter dodge to pull those clouds apart. So we'll come back up here to geom jitter and we'll do position equals position jitter dodge.  And we see that we now have our three clouds of points for healthy diarrhea, seed of negative and diarrhea, seed of positive in red. That looks good. Before we go too far into talking about position, jitter dodge, one thing I wanna come back to is we notice that some of our points that are at zero, we only kind of see half the circle and those that are up towards a hundred, we only see half the circle. So that is because up here in Scale Y Continuous, we used expand C zero to zero. And again, that was what we used with the bar charts to have the bars start at zero and at a hundred and have the axis come up to the zero point. And now we see we have a little bit of breathing room around zero and a hundred so that we're not truncating the shape of those points. Let's dig into position jitter dodge a little bit. Know that position jitter dodge has two arguments that we generally use. So the first is jitter dot width and we can say 0.2. And then we can also say dodge dot width equals, let's say 0.4. So what jitter width does is it affects the width of the jitter. How much jitter there is from left to right. And so remember that the x-axis jitter is not adding information. It is a random placement of the points on the x-axis. So if we make it a really narrow width, then if we went to like zero, then we'd have a vertical column of points which wouldn't be too helpful. We could make it wider, but then again, the problem that we run into is that our various columns or sets of columns for the different taxa might start to overlap with each other. The dodge width then says how far apart should the different clouds within a grouping be? I'll go ahead and let's see what happens if we expand the jitter width to say 0.4 and let's do dodge width of 0.6. So now we see we have a wider jitter, but also you can kind of see that the points are falling on top of each other between the three different disease status groups. And again, that's because our dodge width wasn't as wide as it we might have liked. So if I put dodge width to be 0.8, now we see that we have a little bit separation and I kind of like this because we have enough separation also between our different disease status groups. And know that I often have to play around with the position jitter dodge arguments to get the right look for what I think looks good. So again, rarely do I come upon a value for jitter width and dodge width that I'm ultimately happy with. So anyway, just know that you have to do a little bit of tweaking on that. You should also be aware that position jitter dodge has a jitter dot height argument and that affects the jitter in the vertical dimension on like the y-axis. So I would strongly discourage using that for a plot like this because you're going to be moving things, basically adding information to the data that's not really there. Finally, one last thing to be aware of is that as we run this multiple times, the points are gonna move around. And so one way that we can cure that problem so to speak is by setting a seed. That position again in the x-axis is random. So up here after my library calls, I like to do set dot seed. And then I'll use 1976, 06, 20. That is my birth date in ISO standard notation, June 20th, 1976. Use one, use your favorite number, use your birth date, whatever. Don't pick a number to give you the results that look the way you want them to look. Our results in general should be robust differences in the value of the seed value. And again, what this is gonna do is every time I run this script, as long as I run that set seed, my points, even though they're in a random position on the x-axis will be at the same random position on the x-axis. And so that helps with reproducibility. So now when I run my entire script, I should get the same appearance of these points run after run. Something that concerns me a little bit about this plot is my legend. It looks fine, right? But one thing that often worries me is that if I'm showing all the data, is there maybe a point behind the legend? I don't know. We should look. Also, it can become a little bit confusing to your viewer if they see points in your legend. And I think, oh, is that an extension of these points somehow? So what I'd like to do is confirm that there's nothing there under the legend. And then I'd like to maybe move the legend kind of more out of the way of the data and put a border around it, put a box around it. So it's clear that the things within this boundary are not data. It's part of the legend. So down in my theme function here, I do have the argument legend.position. This was how I set the position of the legend to be inside the plot rather than in the right margin. Let's go ahead and run this and we'll see if there was anything actually under the legend. And sure enough, there was. There was a diarrhea seed of positive red point there that was no doubt hiding behind the legend. So what I'd like to do is let's go ahead and move that back, but let's lift it up and make sure that wherever we put it, we can see that red point. So again, with legend position, I'll go ahead and the 0.8 is the X position relatively speaking and the 0.6 is the Y position. So let's go ahead and put that up to 0.9 and we now see that that is moved up and out of the way of that red point. Let's go ahead now and put a box around our legend and we can do that also with legend dot background equals element rectangle, rect, and we can then do color equals black and that should give us a black border around our legend. The other thing I can do is fill equals NA and what that will do is that that will give us a transparent legend box. And so there we go. We have that nice black border around our legend. One thing I noticed is that I don't have the top line on my legend. I think that's because for some reason it's leaving a little bit of space in there for the title of the legend. I can fix that by doing legend dot margin equals and then I can say margin and I'll do T equals, I'm actually gonna do say minus 10. I don't know that this will necessarily work but I see from the defaults of margin that the default margin is zero and so let's go ahead and if I set the minus 10 then that should bring it back not up and sure enough that worked pretty well, maybe a little too well. So let's go ahead and add a little bit of margin space and so instead of minus 10, let's do five. That looks pretty good. Now I need some extra space on the right side and the bottom so on the right I'll do three bottom equals three and so that looks pretty good. I'm pretty happy with the spacing of that border around my legend. Let me show you what this fill NA does if we actually put it back down at 0.6 and so there you can see with fill equals NA it makes it transparent. By default the fill is white and so we can see that there's that red point between my healthy and diarrhea there because I've made that transparent. Let's go ahead and put this back up to 0.9. So I like how this looks. I see the points, I see the variation of the data, I see the number of subjects that we have but I don't have an idea of like where the central tendency is in the data. I'd like to put a line segment across my cloud indicating where the median is for the relative abundances of these different filo. To do that, we're gonna come back up and after GM Jitter, I'm gonna use stat.summary. So we talked about stat.summary many episodes ago. I was really excited about this new thing. It had become like my new favorite thing and so we can get segments by doing fun equals median so that's function equals median and then GM equals crossbar which gives you the median line for a box and whisker plot and let's go ahead and add that and let's see where we are after running this. Very cool, we now have our crossbars and they correspond to the three colors of the three disease status groups and like we have seen with that position argument it is stacking them on top of each other. So if we come back up to stat.summary, I can do position equals position dodge like we saw with those bar charts and so now we see that we've got our bars. They're a little bit hard to see because they're the same color as everything else and something I noticed is that the width of my bar is not the same as the width of my cloud and so let's go ahead and see if we can fix that a little bit and so again in position dodge let's go ahead and try width equals 0.4 and so that's bringing those bars in. I think maybe we wanna do something more like 0.8. I'm trying to match my width in position dodge with a value from jitter width dodge width. Maybe I should have just started with dodge width in the first place because that's what that's the value we used with dodge width. So that looks pretty nice. The width is maybe a little bit too wide so let's go ahead and we can then add width as a argument on its own and that will be the width of that segment. So if we do width equals 0.4 I think I made that too small. So again, let's do 0.8. As I said, I generally play with these parameters until I get something close to what I like and so now that segment is the same width as my cloud and it overlaps the cloud nicely. So a challenge with this though is that because the bar is the same color as the point it's kind of hard to see, right? Like this, especially with the gray colors it's hard to see my bar indicating the median. So I'm gonna do a trick. In GG plot, we cannot use the same aesthetic for two types of information. So I can't make the bar black when I'm using color as the plotting symbol color, okay? So what I'm gonna do is up here in geom jitter I'm gonna do pch equals 21. So pch 21 is in that series of plotting symbols where you have a circle for 21 with a border. The border is set by the parameter by the aesthetic color and the color of the circle is set by the parameter fill the aesthetic fill. So what that means then is that if I do fill equals disease stat, then my fill color will be gray, blue, red and my border will be black. My color will be black. And so again, my stat summary that should be black and I'll do scale fill manual instead of color manual. And sure enough, we now see that we have our circles with that border. If you like that black border, awesome. I'm gonna show you what we could do to maybe get rid of that black border while not losing the black bar. What we can do is we can come back up to geom jitter and I'm gonna do stroke equals zero. Stroke is the width of that black border. And now you'll see that we got rid of that border but we still have the black bar for our median. That does make the points appear a little bit smaller. So again, we can come back up. We can do size equals say 1.8 and that gets our points back to being a decent size. So a couple other styling things. I feel like the bar is maybe a little big, a little thick. If I wanna change the thickness of that bar again here in stat summary, we can do size equals 0.25 and that gives a more subtle indicator of the median which I'm pretty happy with. The other thing is that I'm not totally a fan of having the box and the line around my plotting symbols. So what I'll do here is I'll come back and on stat summary, I'll do comma show.legend equals false. And so there we get back to our individual points. And so that all looks good. So I'm pretty happy with the way this looks. This is my preferred way of visualizing relative abundance data from the microbiome. One challenge with this, however, is that we might be on the verge of having way too many points. I think there's 130 healthy points here and something like, I don't know, 100 and 100 of the two diarrhea categories. And so we might be on the verge of having too many points to do this. And so in the next episode, we'll look at other ways of depicting this data but there we're gonna sacrifice then not being able to show all the data. So it's a trade-off, right? The reason I like this again is because I can array everything across the x-axis or if I have a lot of different taxa, I can flip it and put all my taxa on the y-axis with relative abundance going out to the right. Let me know what you think of this representation of relative abundance data. I think this is vastly superior to stacked bar charts or pie charts. And as we go through future episodes, we'll look at other ways of representing data but in the same structure where we're gonna be able to see the variation in the data, again, binned by taxonomic grouping on one axis. Also, as we go along, I know that if we go to the genus level or OTU level, there might be hundreds of different genera or OTUs. We'll start talking about other ways that we can begin to think about filtering our data either by abundance or by significance so that we can only look at those taxa that are most important to us, however we define most important. See if you can take this and flip it 90 degrees so that we have the phyla on the y-axis and a relative abundance on the x-axis. If you're feeling ambitious, go ahead and try that also by using genus rather than phylum. Anyway, I hope you found this interesting. I hope you agree with me that this is a good way, compelling way to visualize relative abundance data. If you have a critique of this, let me know. I would love to work that into a future episode and perhaps we can begin to think about ways to improve this. I don't think it's perfect. I do think there's challenges with this, again, when we have as many points as we do with this. But if you're doing study where you maybe only have 10 samples in each of the groups, I think this would be perfect. Again, there's gonna be little other tweaks that we can do along the way to make it a little bit better. But again, I'm pretty happy with the way this looks. Again, please be sure to engage in those practice exercises that I gave you of different ways to manipulate this or to look at the genus data. I think you'll really hone your skills by doing these practice activities. Please be sure to share this with your PI if they're not watching or if you're not the PI and share it with your colleagues and be sure to kind of discuss these ideas with the people around you. And I would love the feedback again. I'm serious. I am happy to receive constructive criticism on these visuals because nothing is perfect. We can always make things better. So anyway, keep practicing and we'll see you next time for another episode of Code Club.


Well, I thought when we played them last week with senior night, I said we were distracted tonight. We were not distracted we came out hitting 485 and and then four hundredth the next set and I really felt like we serve the ball extremely well The goal was to limit the number of swings that Kristen sibling took last time. She took it to us and had Hit 333 tonight. She hit. Oh, so we were did a great job of limiting her Opportunities to get the ball in a good spot to hit the hit it and I thought we did a great job blocking tonight and then Mariah Mariah's it's playoff time Victoria it's playoff time both of them really stepped up big tonight And of course, we've got the other four hitters that it did a great job tonight Some pleas with the way we play and from what I'm understanding We're gonna play Arcadia that games at two o'clock on Saturday. Yeah tonight. I think thought the intensity had ramped up Blocking a lot of time is desire reading the play knowing the scouting report and understanding it then applying it and tonight, you know Victoria Pro kick only play two sets and she had five five block assists and Hit eight eight fifty-seven. So we were real happy with the number she put up and then Mariah hitting a high three hundreds So that's a pretty as an intimidating block out there Caroline's a good server don't get me wrong But we caught them in a in the perfect rotation their center was front row And they did not have their top outside in the front row So which it was a perfect rotation Carol I knew that and she knew she needed to get the ball in with pace and not give them the point make them earn it And they finally did side us out, but yeah, you just need one run like that and that'll take care of the set It's always the goal and then the goal was to have it here We've kind of made a habit of this I think Arcadia is gonna come in here ready. I know they're gonna be ready I think it's gonna be a great match


Southern Vanguard is an annual exercise, at the operational and tactical levels to increase interoperability between U.S. and Western Hemisphere forces. In this instance, Brazil. Southern Vanguard, 24 inches took place in the cities of Belém, Macapá, and Oipoc from November 1 to November 16, 2023. Southern Vanguard 24 is a U.S. Southern Command-sponsored, U.S. Army South and 101st Airborne Division, Air Assault, conducted. Combined Air Assault Operation meant to demonstrate commitment to partner nations, rapid deployment capabilities, readiness improvement, and combined forces interoperability. Macapá, Brazil, standing under the beaming Brazilian sun, soldiers assigned Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, Air Assault, stood. At close interval information as Brazilian Army General Luciano Guilherme, the Military Command Northern Commander, officially declared the start of Southern Vanguard 24, the morning of November 6, 2023. It is with great joy that I witness this important day and welcome all these important, this vibrant and well-prepared troop assembled before us, Hail Guilherme. The soldiers' standing information represented a fraction of the 1,300 participating in the exercise from both armies. The training audience for this year's iteration of Southern Vanguard includes 300 soldiers assigned from U.S. Army South, 101st Airborne Division, Air Assault, 7th Special Forces Group, 1st Security Forces Assistance Brigade and New York Army National Guard soldiers. For the next two weeks, U.S. Army soldiers will train alongside, Brazilian Army partners, conducting air assault operations, urban operations and weapons familiarization. Southern Vanguard is a Southcombs-sponsored, annual exercise at the operational and tactical levels to increase interoperability between U.S. and Western Hemisphere forces, in this instance, Brazil. Exercising together allows our armies to increase interoperability and demonstrates a shared commitment to rehearsing our rapid deployment capabilities and planning procedures while providing an excellent venue to improve readiness and, prepare to respond to a crisis or contingency, said Brig. General Isabelle Smith, director of Joint Staff for the New York National Guard. This is the second time since its inception in 2021 that the partner nations have come together here in Brazil for Southern Vanguard, which is occurring in conjunction with Brazil's annual Combined Operations Rotational Exercise 23. Four is the result of a cooperation program signed between Brazil and the United States. The first edition took place in Southeast Brazil in 2021, and the second took place at Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, LA, in 2022. In the following days, we will be experiencing the third edition in the Northern Region of Brazil, Guilherme Bellowed. We will be in the heart of Eastern Amazon.


Good afternoon. I'm Tom McCullough, Executive Director of the Keller-Hurbert Library. It's great to have you with us here this afternoon for this poetry celebration from Poland City. And it's great that here we have a nice sunny spring afternoon and we're all indoors to celebrate poetry. I love it. Thank you so much for being here. Today we have two important poets with us. We have Ralph Colvert and Ralph's poetry fiction and criticism have appeared in many magazines and journals. His awards include a creation grant in poetry from the Vermont Arts Council, a nomination for a Pushkart Prize. In 2013 he won the inaugural poetry broadside from Chickadee Chaps and Brods. And he also won the anabiosis, I think it's the right name, anabiosis press chapbook prize for his highly praised collection, Both Distances, which is on the back table, in which afterwards he'll be signing and selling. Ralph is also given many poetry readings and presentations throughout the Northeast. He's produced readings for other writers. He's a former lecturer for the Vermont Humanities Council and he's past literary event coordinator for UVM's Continuing Education Department. Sid Lee was poet laureate of Vermont from 2011 to 2015. In 2013 his collaborative book with um with Flatop Brown, sorry, Growing Old in Poetry, Two Poets, Two Lives was published. Also that same year his book of personal essays on North Country Life, Tales of Widsman, Waters and Wildlife was published. His 12th volume of poetry, no doubt the Nameless just came out last month I think. In his fourth collection of lyrical essays, What's the Story? Short Takes on a Life Grown Long, was recently published by Vermont Green, Vermont Green Writers Press. So Sid, those things sound great like being poet laureate and everything, but at the Keller-Covered Library the most important thing about Sid Lee is every February he's a pronouncer of words and judge for the cabin fever spelling day. So would you please welcome Ralph Culver and Sid Lee. Can you hear me? Can you hear me now? I would like to do a whole reading like that. How you doing? I'm a reader poem by Dylan Thomas. I like to start with reading poetry by someone other than myself. It's a poem by Mark Strand called My Name. Once when the lawn was a golden green and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials in the scented air and the whole countryside pulsed with the chur and murmur of insects. I lay in the grass feeling the great distances open above me and wondered what I would become and where I would find myself. And though I barely existed I felt for an instant that the vast star-clustered sky was mine and I heard my name as if for the first time heard it the way one hears the wind or the rain but faint and far off as though it belonged not to me but to the silence from which it had come and to which it would go. And it will be downhill from there. I want to start with a couple of poems that are either about childhood or based in childhood. This is called Taking Bluegill at Lake Seneca. Lake Seneca is in Ohio. My parents and I and my sister used to vacation there in the summertime. We grew up, we lived in Pittsburgh. Taking Bluegill at Lake Seneca. Under the weight of a few rocks and the unmerciful heat of mid-day they lie. Eight bejeweled beauties aligned on the edge of the dock. The first five utterly still. The two next murmuring at the gills. And the last not quite reduced to commentary but yet in the veil of acts and action. A tremor shutters his length to the tail the coddle fin taught and quaking. And I suddenly feel a memory fall through me of what it meant to consider surrender. Remembering swimming for shore on a dare. Our rowboat out too far. And the sound of thunder nearing. A limitless pain and fear deep in my thighs and calves so pathologically engraved there. I stared down at my bare legs in wonder and laugh. But I am young. And so these fish are young. This water with its battered skin is young. The trees surrounding young. Even my father and mother are young. Soon the eighth captive is left no belief in escape but speaks instead his conviction of infinite release. I will not be the one to flay them naked or scuttle the flawless heads in the minnow bucket for the coons. I will not touch them again except to eat them. So speech is mine. The first words are small and have a taste of hook. The sting of a pearl of wine. Fill up. Laud. He sits. A nothing in the vast back seat amid the drumming of the gasoline. The stuns smell of worn felt and marboros. Two heedless growths perch on their collared stems murmur the day and will not turn. Between them the air bends out above the hood the way a snake sends itself across the surface of a lake. He studies his debased reflection in the chrome plate of an ashtray mounted damaged at the center of his parents seat before him. Gulf. He slowly leans into that face. It swells, narrows and runs down the cracked silver. One voice enlarges saying watch it honey or you're going to be replaced. A laugh. A cough. They are always almost there. Where are they taking him? How could I waiting for whatever was to happen to happen? How could I not see where they were taking him? Boy at the plate. As palms dedicated to my children and to my parents and I'll dedicate it to Diane Swan too whose lovely poem about watching her daughter play softball I always think of when I read this. Boy at the plate. Spread the boy's legs are unsteady as tent poles in a squall. It is useless to tell him I know what this is. Waiting on someone who seems as near as the end of his reach to give him his chance at shame. That he hardly believes it is himself. I heard that voice in my head so many times it became a weapon. The only weapon I had. It is useless to tell him the same voice splits from the throat of the field mouse rearing up to teeth as long as its own four legs. Useless and wrong. For now the boy must believe he stands in the mouth of the first fear birthed in the world. Later in time perhaps while watching his own and shaken by the glory of it that it is he will see for himself the common fear the common love he fell out of now into and watch and love and be thankful. Totem. This poem is based on a true story. It has a little epigraph at the beginning. Totem. One full day Jay a boy of eleven found the decomposing body of a dog. It appeared to have been dead for some time. The boy worked the dog's head off the carcass, shoved a tree branch in at the neck and carried the head down through some woods into an adjacent public playground. Totem. This new spine screwed tight in the under pulp of a skull formerly dog. As an invention of meaning in your hands it makes sense. The park trees beginning to smolder with autumn colors jangle and jag.  Your mouth waters at the lift and bell of young girls on the seesaw but there is this terror of whatever is pushing the black hair outward at your armpits and balls and who understands it at all. Left no choice. You came down out of the oak and locus trees head high leering, spitlish and lousy, obsessively marking your borders.  Everybody hear me okay? Am I reading too fast? Too slow? Good? All right good. This poem is for Thomas Luxe. It's called The Tiny's. The Tiny's. Bless them. Bless them. The Tiny's. Sipping a drop of tea from an acorn cap. Changing a flat on a Lego car the color of daffodils. How I love them. The Tiny's. Always on the lookout for the blind foot. The mouse sozzled and reeling from the meat of a turned apple. This one digs down through her handbag. One pea skin. Do you have the keys Harry? The Tiny's. The Tiny's. Who will care for them? Who will help paint their living rooms with a blueberry? Who can possibly tie their shoes if they hurt their fingers? The Tiny's skipped stones in the birdbath. Set sail across a swimming pool with a week's worth of provisions meticulously catalogued.  Who will protect you? Danger is a storm the size of a hat. Death waits in the black thread of shadow that trails from a needle of grass and yet and yet they know it is a world of joy these Tiny's large as it is large as it is. I have been for reasons that I can't really determine precisely. I've been reading a lot of excellent prose poems in the last year or two and so I've been trying my hand at a few and I'm going to read so these are these are pretty recent I'm going to read a few of these and I want to start also this is not really a prose poem it is it is in lineation but it is it's to the memory of James Tate another wonderful poet it's been a bad few years for some of my favorite poets but this is called another Thursday off to a fine start and those of you who know James Tate's work I hope you will find it cleverly emulative rather than patronizingly imitative. Another Thursday off to a fine start I was feeling glum disgusted with myself to be completely honest sitting at Rachel Decker's car on our way home from the Wednesday night poker game. I've been ahead most of the evening and then stupidly misplayed my last hand when we all gathered up our jackets and scarves to go I was about 15 bucks in the hole Rachel hadn't spoken much since we left Stan's apartment and I'd said almost nothing there was the merest suggestion of light over the hills to the east a thin pale outline marking the contours of the ridge. Rachel slowed the car as we approached the all night supermarket on Doyle and said you mind I just have to get a couple things suddenly I had an urge to buy a box of sultans to munch on in the car the rest of the way sure I said sure why not inside Rachel went off in one direction while I went in another looking for the saltine aisle I rounded a corner and stopped blocking my path was the largest cat I had ever seen outside of a zoo it looked like an ottoman upholstered in spiky orange fur if the ottoman had enormous glittering caribbean blue eyes those eyes were something it was as if two round cut sapphire pendants were jammed in the cat's skull the cat didn't move I didn't move and we stared at each other for a moment when a high raspy voice behind me said that's Steffi I turned my head and saw one of the third shift stock boys smiling at me he was tall lanky sallow one eyebrow cocked speculatively your standard issue third shift stock boy he had a name tag that read hi I'm she won't hurt you the stock boy said Steffi I said yeah Steffi she won't hurt you she's just interested in reading your thoughts the stock boy said really I said yes he said I glanced back at Steffi whose eyes were still fixed on me she'll probably fill me in on them when I'm on my coffee break the stock boy said that's nice I said I have always liked cats but still I went looking for Rachel who was going through the checkout with a few purchases dish washing liquid three boxes of wooden kitchen matches a carton of soy milk some other stuff back in the car I told her about Steffi you never know with cats Rachel said it had continued to grow brighter the hills were beginning to take form a jade green blanket someone had casually tossed onto the horizon my cell phone hummed in my pocket and I looked at my watch 5 a.m. I didn't recognize the calling number hello I said hi a familiar voice said although I couldn't place it what's up I said Steffi told me to tell you you forgot the saltines the caller said I opened my mouth but kept silent Rachel was shooting me a look oh the voice said another thing waiting on a jack to fill a straight when Danny was showing one would that look like he probably had a pair you really should have known better yeah well I said I thought where the hell were you when I needed you where is anybody the voice said Rachel drove on the sun rose eventually I decided we might get home I can't I can't decide on a title for this poem lately I've been calling it lecture but it was published under the title on the ineluctable and strands collected poems so I think that one's maybe even too smart as for me so but anyway you can maybe tell me afterward what you think is the better title lecture or on the ineluctable and strands collected poems I paused in the lake shore and looked out across the ice ice as even and polished as a marble countertop as far as the breakwater long pennants of blowing snow lifted and sped over the gleaming surface winter bidding farewell said the jogger passing at my back from an errant sky tinged the color of moss seagulls convene now landing in silence on the ice as a group standing facing me as a group as though each goal were about to unroll a yoga mat but it's not Tuesday it's Wednesday the gulls wait this would be the time to light a cigarette I thought if only I smoked instead they have taken out their composition books clearing my throat I begin this poem is called camping alone as you lean toward the fire the flames reach out to you and you think of your mother at the kitchen sink holding a rinsed dinner plate up to the light of late afternoon how she sensed you there watching her from the hallway wearing your mantle of dirt and sweat that you wrapped yourself in every summer day at the ball field but now the fire is guttering down and you begin to feel the thin layer of grief that settles on everything almost a fragrance reminding you that memory always memory and nothing else is the only fuel available to you to stoke the embers back into a blaze tableau a boy lies on his stomach on the floor head propped up on his left hand drawing in a sketchbook with his right so far only a line or two just a suggestion of a shape over near the window sitting at his desk a man stares at a sheet of paper rolled into a type writer a few words are there nothing substantial and the third figure in the room whose very form is nascent untroubled by detail nearly transparent really although the man and the boy sense a presence acknowledge it they pay it no mind confident as they are as you are reading this as i am writing it that now is not the time the figure congeals casting a shadow at last and rises to take his measure this is the last pros this is called the problem it's called the problem of poetry which is here in my peeler as part of poem city at a bus stop i don't know what bus stop but um as i hope you'll you'll see it's appropriate the problem of poetry the problem of poetry is not going away and will not go away standing there in the steady rain waiting it would seem for a bus and then there it is the bus the 87 ardmore as it happens leaving a wake behind itself in the seething black water masked at the curb slowing to a halt and the door smoothly opening then closing with a hiss and a sigh and the 87 pulling away to reveal the problem of poetry still standing there drenched smiling perhaps a little too smugly no gloves no overcoat no umbrella in sight there's the r-rated portion of the reading we look like a pretty mature audience here today i don't know what sydney has planned to read but this this poem is full of a lot of it's full of gratuitous sex and violence and sort of apocalyptic mayhem and destruction so of course as you will have guessed it's based on the old testament of the bible um this is a different take on the story of lot now if you know the story of lot most people remember lot story from genesis because his wife turned into a pillar of salt when she turned around and looked back at the cities of the plain and saw them at the mora that were being laid waste by by the lord which as i read in an essay somewhere what a human thing to do you know i mean just why the good lord would punish her for looking back is beyond me but anyway if you know the story at all well it's completely insane it makes absolutely no sense i mean it starts out with abraham dickering with god about whether you know like how many righteous souls would it take for you to save these cities you know like like two guys in a middle eastern market you know like arguing about a bolt of cloth or something like that and abraham starts god at 50 souls i think can get them down to like 10 you know god says you know 10 so okay 10 righteous souls all right we'll we'll spare them anyway it doesn't happen of course and god decides to destroy saddam and gamora lot takes off with his wife and two daughters and god tells lot to get to the mountains where he will be safe and lot replies and there's an epigraph here this is from genesis 19 verses 18 to 20 and lot said behold now this city is near to flee unto and it is a little one oh let me escape thither is it not a little one and my soul shall live and god said okay and that this the town is called zoar which is the name of the poem a little town and you know how it is everyone knows everyone and everybody's business so when the stranger and his two preening tarts arrived we gave them a good look one old old man in rags eyes always on the verge of panic a face the sun had churned a bearded pitch muttering wrapped he wouldn't meet your gaze and i thought this one is going to be a problem still it was the girls no better dressed but young straight backed smug and teasing who gave me the most pause sisters to each other we assumed but their companion that cow derelict could hardly be the father of those two with no one playing wife or mother in their company and so we guessed they were two whores arrived from sodom and slaved to this decrepit pimp the heat and years had bent into a fool later my brother's hips gripped tightly in my sweating hands it came to me to cut the old man's throat and keep the girls myself but blessed lust and drink made sleep of my ambitions all praise for by dusk the shouting had brought us to the roofs to watch the soundless flame and smoke devouring the obliterated distance no one saw them leave the girls and the old man but they were gone no doubt fear or some surmise set them to flight had i followed them to carry out my plans i might have died it was four days before the scouts returned with a word that nothing stood of the cities of the plane only ashes the charred bones of livestock not a shrub or tree across fused and blackened sands is finally polished as a shield no tracks leading to our gates but what the scouts themselves had made zoar alone remains the only sign of man beyond our walls a crumbled stump of salt that some lost traitor left behind that beasts have gnawed away to nearly nothing i'll finish up with uh sip harm i wrote uh in the manner of jack ylbert i'll dedicate this to charm if you know jack ylbert's work i just suggest the same thing that i did about the uh the poem that i read of that was sort of emulating tape resolute after jack ylbert the towering sun screaming whiteness high above the sea the lights dropped waves along long island sound curved blades ranked and relentlessly advancing that whiteness the gesso alex layered across another canvas one she had stretched some nights before how her eyes ground shut and teeth gridded when i moved inside her as if she were dragging a great weight three of us living in rooms barely adequate for one not that the baby and i will be there much longer thinking of my vast hunger set loose by the smell of boiled eggs that slid across the parkway east as i rode beside my father driving into pittsburgh flame tipped stacks of the jnl mills decanting smoke sulfur pouring into the forward through the open windows just 14 famished wondering what would become of us certain i heard the clink of empties jostling in a case of beer in the trunk behind the back seat praying the university might let him keep his job or not if we open ourselves to quintessence rather than particulars we gain in clarity the way a bee does not recall a flower but does its purposeful gavote to point the way to an abundance spinning under the blows of the sun helpless the dazzling white sands ablaze beneath my feet this helplessness that will set me to flight again already beginning to resolve in me as anticipation pleasurable expectancy a kind of contentment and delphin shook with poems called fishing with my father and the craft of poetry and like to thank tom and the library and all of the folks behind poem city in my peculiar for all the work that they do every year here it's really a wonderful celebration fishing with my father and the craft of poetry hours holding the poles over the water hours of catching nothing or not much and throwing back what we did catch what the hell was that about anyway and yet today i have this patience for things that drive some people crazy standing in line at the supermarket waiting for some full blowhard to stop gabbing searching for a coat button in the snow the finely honed conviction that beneath this nothing is a deeper richer nothing consecrating myself to the silence and then to what interrupts the silence self is a really good bullet you might have noticed that i noticed that when i actually judged that chet book competition it just wasn't any there wasn't any competition as it news when it started it how you're doing i my i'm married to an italian american woman wonderful way out of my league and i adore her family but she had one relative uncle tony and he always uh i asked her when she said something about uncle tony is he mobbed up mobbed up he's a he's a member of the massachusetts legislator i said yeah like is he mobbed up and i had this notion that i might take him to poetry readings i read a poem and say i like that poem i uncle tony here he likes it a lot too what do you guys think you know uh but i i never did that and he's gone to his reward uh so i'll never try that trip um this is a this is a great library i mean when when tom was talking about the spelling bee if you haven't been to it it really is just more fun than you can possibly imagine it's hard to explain to people why it's fun but it's just a lot of fun and all the people uh involved in poem city as ralph said are to be much commended um i'll read about eight or nine poems and i'll suppose you can stop me um this one is called a man tells a story it's based on a story that i did here i my late friend bill matthews was once asked after reading it i really enjoy that are those real poems or did you make them up a hard question even to understand at a rate a man tells a story he described at the start how he bribed an older student to buy the wine rose of course some sappy song laid poise for the touch of the high-fi needle he lit four scented candles behind his curtains to cast what he thought would be a romantic glow the flower he snickered the flower as he snickered where roses needless to say oh i was full of originality he almost believed the september breeze was panting along with him as he crossed the quad to the bus soon enough sandy or sally the name doesn't matter got out they embraced and headed back to the dorm meanwhile disaster the breeze had blown the curtains against those candles steam leaked out of his window the fireman had already spooled their hoses and dawn not much of a blaze he intoned but it was flame that doused our flame he pretended to tear his hair then needlessly called his wrought up paradox so much poetic bullshit and then he ended these many septembers later i made for the porch looked across the fields to the star pock river and heaved the sigh as real as my laughter had been like everyone there i knew from the start they were done for but hadn't we all suffered broken hearts when young and of course recovered so this melancholy i felt wasn't a matter of a couple's love gone wrong it was how in time we mock our very own dreams whatever they are our best laid plans as the poet so famously called them often go down in flames so often that we may think we've grown wise from watching them die that now we're seasoned enough for irony such adult dispassion however is hard to distinguish from resignation our little blazes spread to places we never predicted and when what's left of all we long for reduces itself to ash we shake our heads we shake our heads and laugh i don't know how we're often i should mention that uh my successor charred deniodas in the back the current poet warrior uh those kids probably don't call him poet low rate as my youngest one but uh so i won't speak for him or any other poet but i know myself sometimes i i have this feeling that to be a poet i'm praying on other people's unhappiness and it makes me feel mildly guilty uh and this is a poem i think is premised on that uh it's called how to sort them that woman's husband works a graveyard shift in a warehouse someplace he's a big man sleeps all day i bet he drinks what do i know dark clouds are stealing in well no they aren't that's poetry and bad at that she's a headstone color gray hair gray face her hooded sweatshirts dull like a sleet of old a sheet of old tin this is though she doesn't look forward to much but passing away her eyes are gray too though it's too easy to call them empty their tears might so easily flow oh no i'm fussing around for eloquence here and coming up short the woman and i just nodded each other as we wait by the post office window though i'm a rather old man now i go on looking towards some sort of future i'm a big man too which may be why that woman shrinks or i think she does we all like the postmistress who's older self but spry and despite her losses still cheerful and bright her hairdos knew i recall her husband who was a person people that are always called big mic some old folks claim the man could lift a barrel brim full of hard cider right over his head i'd like to imagine some tribute to mic i'd write it if that were feasible a character mic he drove a truck that he'd brush painted pink he lived with his wife and children and a bunch of critters and mixed breed hunting dogs far back in the woods in time the kids grew up and moved from here but the family we remember seemed always so decent each other with one another the postmistress wears that shirt she loves it's a pretty shirt now what shall i name it purple fuchsia puth and how might i sort them good and evil how portray them let the clouds above the goddamn clouds steal in no let them hurtle kansas this is based on some nighty which in the king james version has a line that's always appealed to me we've spent our years as a tale that is told you will have remarked that i'm interested in stories anyway kansas joey and i sit in the prairie junction he scans the menu in order the prairie burg he's never been here before but it looks worth trying a man his friends called marty just walked in marty pulls up a chair next to lauren and rod they resemble a comrade comradely flock of ancient birds i decided i'm going to order the chicken sandwich i haven't had it before but it looks good too i mostly want to know that there's god the men have on the clothes they wore to church right after service their wives must have gone back home bill jokes about the football team at k u lauren and marty laugh as though they mean it shelly the waitress is a bit too loud but nice she's very young but she's laughing right along there aren't that many here but they all seem nice i call up a passage about the eye of god i want it truly to be on the sparrow of the eye i privately study the faces around the table anybody would tell you that lauren is handsome there's a certain rugged hawk-like look to rod though he isn't handsome he appears to tell a good tale there's something in marty's expression that strikes me as sad it looks to me as though something bad has happened maybe it has but i have no way to tell his friends are being especially nice to marty they may know the man has something painful to stand i'm not i don't know a soul of the prairie junction but one we're not having much luck hunting out here but no matter it's good just to be with such a dear buddy as joey we swap our own little narratives back and forth the men are of an age and so are we i don't want them really cut down like that grass that withers they've all been inside their church this morning i bet that each has made it a habit to pray these men i'm watching believe there's god i believe that's for me i really want there to be i have a connection to a part of me that goes back some generations and it's in a remote place and by virtue of having been born quite a while ago i was able to know a a lot of men and women who lived in that part of the world there are only 70 people in town so i knew and know everybody and they worked there prior to the to the use of power tools they all worked in the woods the men and the women whom it would be ludicrous to describe as housewives work like dogs to keep the home fires burning and because they had no exterior means of entertainment they were all fabulous raconteurs and there was one in particular that i was very very fond of whose name was Earl bonus who moved to that town from the runswick side of the river when he was three and was there for for the rest of his life referred to as an outsider but he was you know how it is in new england a wonderful guy and he was a river driver back in the era when people drove logs by water and he would he couldn't swim a stroke but he would ride the logs downstream 39 day drive from third machiaeus lake down the machiaeus river to wittyville on the coast of Maine and uh it was hard he is just a wonderful narrator and just a fabulous voice i would have liked to rent that voice but he he had more pain in his life in his life than one can imagine and unhappily toward the end of his life he took the 94 year old life mind you uh he took to drink pretty badly that was rough on him and and those of his relatives including his spouse who survived and this is called when the lake fails so little was left to my aged friend that autumn the shadow showed all chiseled in the door yard against the lake when the moon was more than half and the chop the water surf broke like a mammoth track device and the sharp edge slivers the lights supposed to save us i tipped the shade to see his backlit outline his daughter had been dead for ages who would think that a heart could fall fail in a girl of 16 and that so much pain would follow his son big mickey came home from vietnam he said it's crazy he's gotten how to make a man now this no reason anymore to thank that god or hate any claim he'd sit all night out there in the wind which usually calms come dark but didn't that fall the next son bow was long dead too for all his valor fighting the muscular dystrophy working each day till he fell a bit rising that at last not rising my window framed him near motionless as the pines behind him which paraded in their standstill file along the seawall he built a pick and prize bar his only tools but hands whenever he stirred it was slow as he ever moved in his blinds for the ducks of october it looked as if he parodied the gestures of some other person he fell in the pocket of his wound pants for his bottle and pulled it out his arm inching up his head back tilting and he did all that in reverse i was so damn helpless i wasn't magic no one blamed his wife for raising hell when she came on those pints always empty or almost empty though he tried his best to stash them out of anyone's sight this latest death he swore where the load that broke the critter's spirit no matter it didn't break hers a woman who knew the identical grief that booze is sure a beast he admitted but seems the ladies do better when life bears down i know it does bear down no i don't really know thank god and now that crazy little mick had shot himself my friend said his grandson's gun would often expected a whole town did expect it but my neighbor said no bad accident meth we knew wasn't that in the morning he'd swear he'd shake like a wormy puppy it ate up my heart still does he was always so full of life he's gone and i i keep coming back to the light prettily winking and watered behind him having paired him the silhouettes she recalls a book of saying for some reason she's moved by the chili withdrawal to search for a fitting proverb why this one stay from among wild foul if you fear the wagging of feathers he jostled the china from her old wedding shower if he made his bumpious way through the crepitant hearth she whispers fire won't be hidden in flax her bouquet when she flung it was caught by an old maid aunt who tweeted after a wedding beware a corpse a joke a taunt but she still feels her own foreboding their wedding trip lulled her at first to imagine proverbial wedded bliss she's never known birds or sand so dazzling nor yet known as restlessness as they strayed on that luminous beach arm in arm the passes by must have witnessed what looked like young love become full dark the palms and their sudden stillness like milliner's plumes a nerving sensation flooded into her heart she could never quite find the right words to name them not quite complain that they hurt at trips end it shocked her the talk turned to anger which at home soon became automatic they were scarcely civil to one another though they rarely grew astrionic after this late quarrel hunched vulture in his strains to exude self-control through a living room window she sighs as she sees their small twin girls who roll and flail in new snow making side-by-side angels then watching a raven drop from a leafless blue beach at a murderous angle she gives the window a wrap she longs somehow to set the world back to what it once seemed right now pale dawn for instance pertains pretends something black and the commas of skies unquiet truth shows best naked she thinks a mirror grows dark on the chiffonier in this glass a vague image which rapidly alters first feathered then shrouded then bare this one is called autumn and just a passing landscape in the Olay just a glimpse of a landscape I live in the last town south of the kingdom south of caledonia county and I was just driving up there for what it doesn't matter and I just saw a scene which which produces foam somehow called autumn why not write something for those who scratch out improbable livings here someone has managed to sew this broken field with stones that appears so someone's scratching it still although that japanese knotweed has edged the tilts two wasps in the chill attempt to catch sun on the rail of the bridge the old local doctor has passed it are almost a full decade past 90 he never seemed depressed 70 now is barely it's an older poem 70 now is barely I consider the field again someone will drag those rocks away but they'll be back the air smells like rain which is fine the summer has been much too dry nothing is left of the barn but some rusty steel straps and some nasty red ozure the stone fence still looks sound but even there the knotweed steps over hadn't I pledged the elegy to the old ones who worked here who didn't claim they thrived exactly but maybe they likewise sent a good wind full of rain lifted eyes above this old orchard to the cloud darkened hills and found their support somehow somewhere no matter they kept going until they could go no more the trees puckered apples have gathered a flock of birds and as they alight they're full of unseasonable chatter as if to say that all will be right the old ones I promised a poem must have said it too it'll be all right I never knew them they're gone I say it out loud it'll be all right I'm actually lots of fun in real life when I made the selection I didn't realize quite how gloomy it was that's the healer monster on rendered by my very talented niece I think that's a wonderful illustration so new Jordan Lee is every chance to buy an ever artwork I suggest you get in on the ground floor quick silver spring how can the red wing blackbirds come back so quickly to croak from wetland cattails and the dishes run so soon with snow from hillside submit that odd leather odor beside the freshest and all of these take me to late april morning some 40 years gone when I dropped the only child we had then back at school who ran out and whistled and whirled on the merry-go-round in that muddy yard working up his fragrant sweat while raspy he ravens overhead whirled and fought amongst themselves for she ravens perched in the leafing woods as skunks began to roam again like the one I saw on this much later morning poor sad creature clipped by a car dazed mid-road with blood in its mouth and something I swear that could have been tears in its eyes which swept back and forth as those searching for what could have happened so quickly and how not close with this poem called my wife's back which also has a small erotic component which is one of the reasons she decided to stay home today it's certainly it's certainly certainly not it's a long way from x-rated but back longer ago then it's hard and it's easy for me to imagine when I when I was about 60 59 or 60 I used to jog I would never say run a real runner would laugh at what I did but I used to run through the woods to try and stay in some kind of condition and then my knees just wouldn't take it anymore so in a fit of what that same daughter that called me the poet low rates referred to as geezer madness I I took up the I took up the sport of competitive flat water kayaking which is great for me because I live virtually on the Connecticut River and there's no impact and it's just just something very zen as there used to be for jogging for me so I I do that but on those days when I'm acting in a somewhat more sane way I will often go with my life on the river and hope we can go and go much more casually and kind of drift down river and back up and see what we can see so this is called my wife's back all naked but for a strap it traps my gaze as we paddle the deer familiar nubs of spine bone punctuating that sunwarm swath the slender muscles that trouble the same sweet surface we've watched and smiled as green herrings flushed and hopped ahead at every turn and we've looked up at a red tail tracing open script on a sky so clear and deep we might believe it's autumn no matter its august still another fall will be on us before we know it of course we adore that commotion of color but it seems to come again as soon as it's gone away they all do my love for you over 40 years extends in all directions but it's now to your back as we drift and paddle down the tranquil Connecticut River we've seen a make stretch fleas on a mud flat we've seen an osprey start to die but seeing us think better of it two seabees wagged on an ash limb your torso is long I can't see your legs but they're longer I know seabee osprey herring hawk marvels under black mountain but I'm fixed on your back indifferent to other wonders bright minnows that flared in the shallows the gleam off that poor minks coat even the fleas and its fur the various birds the lust of creatures justice of life but I watch your back never have I wished more not to die thank you often said we'll be in the back if you have any questions and also we invited them to bring books in case you wanted to buy any books in heaven sign thank you so much for participating in poem c there are also programs in the back if you don't already have a great afternoon thanks everybody thank you


If you are to contribute sufficiently to the debates that are formulating policy now, we have to have empirical data to inform. So unless scientists come on board, unless we, the people understand some of these things come on board, come and inform these policies, then we shall be making policies out of the blue. The policy research gap has been in existence for quite a long time. If you speak to researchers, they will tell you, I don't know how to package my research results in a language that any person, including policymaker, can understand. And if you speak to policymakers, they will tell you, most of the time, the research output we get from researchers, it's so particular in terms of methodology and the language that they use that most often we just don't know what to do with the results. One of the reasons that researchers are being blamed for not bringing development to the country is their research is just done and then filed at the university. I came feeling so green, not knowing anything and thinking, okay, just research, I need to do my research. And then after that, publish it and hopefully somebody somewhere will get it and change it into policy. But from this I have realized that I have to be more proactive than that. I have to think how do the policy makers think? What do they have in mind when they're making policy? What are the gaps that I can jump into and make my research matter? Our economy is agricultural based and our people look at livestock as a source of livelihood. We are looking at it as meat, milk. The environmentalists are looking at it at how much methane is coming out of it. So we have to strike a balance. From these calls, I've learned the stakeholders that are very essential in policy development. I've also learned issues like trying to improve the farmers. When I'm coming up with research topics, I have to engage the farmers because those are the ones who know the problems on the ground. That is the end user. As a researcher, the first step for us to make an impact or a contribution to the continent is for us to develop scientifically sound research. But it doesn't end there. We need to share our results. We need to inform policy makers what we have found. Getting into this workshop and seeing how we can come up with a language that anybody can understand, to me that is very important and that is one way we can bridge the gap between policy and research. If we bridge the research policy gap, it means that the policy is going to respond to the needs of the people and that is how development can be attained. Thanks for the interview. I appreciate it. This is an opportunity for us.