Dean Parkin

Thomas Lux changed me as a poet and a person. I first met him when I was working for the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival (in the UK) in 2000. He went down a storm and he found time during that Festival weekend to do a one-to-one about my poems. It was then he encouraged me to come along to the Sarah Lawrence College Summer Conference and said he could get me a bursary. It took me a while to pluck up courage to go—I'd never even been on a plane before—but in 2003 I went for Tom and ended up loving the experience so much that I returned for the next four summers. I met other poets there who became my best friends. I was lucky enough to see Tom every few years since, in the UK, in Ireland, in America, and each time I'd tell him of visits to/from Ron, Virgil or Vivek—pals from the Sarah Lawrence conferences—and I remember him saying he loved bringing people together, forging those links that last a lifetime. I'll always thank him for that. I have come to think of poetry as a magic carpet and Tom helped me fly.

It's the little towns I like,
with their little mills making ratchets
and stanchions, elastic web,
spindles, you
name it. I like them in New England,
America, particularly - providing
bad jobs good enough to live on, to live in
families even: kindergarden,
church suppers, beach umbrellas... The towns
are real, so fragile in their loneliness
a flood could come along
(and floods have) and cut them in two,
in half. There is no mayor,
the town council's not prepared
for this, three of the four policemen
are stranded on their roofs... and it doesn't stop
raining. The mountain
is so thick with water, parts of it just slide
down on the hiefers - soggy, suicidal -
in the pastures below. It rains, it rains
in these towns and, because
there's no other way, your father gets in a rowboat
so he can go to work.