Traveling Sprinkler Read Online Free PDF

You’re up late.”
    â€œI like looking at the sky,” I said.
    â€œMe, too.” Then she reconsidered. “Actually, there is something you could do that would be very helpful.”
    â€œSure, what?”
    She said that Raymond had been working like a fiend on some songs and he seemed happy about them and he’d been writing the lyrics in a little notebook, but he didn’t want to play them for her because they were inappropriate. “I guess they’re hip-hop or something,” she said. “He likes the fact that you’re a poet, and I think he’d like you to hear them. Or I’d like you to hear them.”
    I said sure, I’d love to hear his songs. “I’m no expert on Biggie Smalls, but I just got a guitar and it would be fun to hear what he’s been up to.” Then suddenly I had a thought. “Why don’t you and Raymond come over sometime and we can have dinner and then he can play me his songs and you can put your fingers in your ears. I could get takeout sushi.”
    â€œThat’s a nice idea,” she said. “Raymond loves California roll.”
    â€œGreat,” I said. So Nan and Raymond are coming to dinner. Fortunately the downstairs bathroom’s still clean from the video couple’s visit. I’ve got to get some songs together to play for them. Casually available for singing, if it comes to that. I’ve got to be able to hold my head up.
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    I ’M OUT IN MY K IA R IO with the door open at eleven in the morning, the day after the barking deer episode. Get back on the horse. Today there is only one agitated bird. A nice thing happened to me last night—Nan asked me for help. I feel honored. I wish there was something I could do to help her, or her mother. All politics is local. I wish I could write Nan a song. I gave it a try, using some of the chords I’ve learned, an A minor chord and a D minor chord and a seventh chord. The chorus was: “I wish there was something I could do for you.”
    My fingertips are profoundly numb from too much guitar. They feel like little white islands.
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    H EY HEY HEY. Let me try to get it together. Deep breath now. Hide the things that you’re most embarrassed by. Nobody’s going to care, but hide them anyway. I have so much in my head that’s screaming to get out. Politely requesting passage. Sometimes knowing things and knowing that you’ll never unknow them, unless you say them, is really unbearable.
    Here’s my Traveling Sprinkler file. It’s fat with patent records that I’ve printed out from the patent office. Some people call them walking sprinklers. I talked to a man in North Platte, Nebraska, named Ed Saulsbury, who restored traveling sprinklers. Back before I got distracted by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I was going to write a poem about Ed, and I bought two very interesting vintage sprinklers on eBay. I wrote part of the poem and then I put it away, and then a few months ago, I thought I’d call Ed and see how he was doing, and it turned out that he’d died in 2007. He’d been a utility pole climber, servicing power lines.
    In
New and Selected Poems, Volume Two
, Mary Oliver has a prose poem about a black jet flying over a hummingbird. “All narrative is metaphor,” she says. Or is it “All metaphor is narrative”?
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    I GOT OUT OF THE SHOWER this morning and didn’t want to go to Planet Fitness, so I put a pillow under my bottom and hooked my feet under the bed and did some sit-ups while reading a poem by Léonie Adams. There’s a scene in one of John Wayne’s last movies, where he’s puffy-faced and sick from cancer, which he got either from playing Genghis Khan in a radioactive valley downwind of the Yucca Flat nuclear test site, or from smoking four packs of