Gene McCarthy died in his sleep last night, CNN reports, and it is snowing in New Hampshire, all the birds hushed by four decades of winter. I was biting into a chicken bone while hearing about four more troopers blown up on a roadside in Baghdad. When asked what he had thought of this war, he simply said, "It's wrong." And I recalled that first day I saw him, tall and gleaming as though alone reading into the mikes like rifle barrels, We will take our corrugated steel out of the land of thatched huts. We will take our tanks out of the land of the water buffalo. But it would take more strewn bodies and flag draped coffins to make something happen. And it would not be this poet's "Vietnam Message" that would take our helicopters out of the land of colored birds and butterflies. But that day, too, I wrote my first poem and have been gnawing on things ever since, still trying to make something happen until the birds come out of their trees again. 12/11/05