Seeing Carl Sandburg

It was dark when we found it. White, just somebody's house, that night my parents drove crooked roads to sit in a room with one overhead light and hear the visitor, a shirtsleeved, green-visored poet who played a guitar. We were West Virginia. He was Chicago, his hair cream-bright, my first guitar, my first poet. He spoke words plain as whole notes and later down the mountain we carried them.