Milk, Eggs, Bread
(from The Book of Failures)
I keep thinking of John Sullivan,
not the famous John L. Sullivan
in Sullivan’s Travels, who
made film’s first tragic
comedy, nor the famous
boxer, John L. Sullivan, the world’s
first heavyweight champion,
nor the scarcely less famous
John L. Sullivan, the boxing
elephant with Barnum & Bailey.
No, I keep thinking of
John Sullivan, the small-
town selectman, who, when
our group suggested new
signage at the edge of the village
to advertise our strengths—
education, arts, industry—
he said, in jest, I suppose, Why
not ‘milk, eggs, bread’?
to which I was mightily
offended, having sat up nights
penning that very phrase—
education, arts, industry—
though, I admit, I couldn’t
think of ‘industry,’ at the time,
there being nothing
but long-gone mills,
and, somehow, just
two proud nouns—
‘education, arts’
(for the state college
and the arts colony
in the rural backwater)—
just wouldn’t do,
so I fudged the third,
‘industry,’ with a back-
ward glance to our founding
past, which led, I guess,
to John Sullivan’s famous
wisecrack, famous,
at least, for me.
And yet, why not
‘milk, eggs, bread,’ those staples
that sustain us in a small town
and keep us from each other’s
throats and larders, as after
the heated meeting, John
invited me home to break
bread together of an evening
meal, and we made the small
talk by which we live and
suffer and endure, and next
Saturday morning, I called
across the fence for him
to come over and share
scrambled eggs, toast, and
a cold glass of milk.
“I called across the fence for him…” Photo © Liz Thompson
Neil Shepard is an award-winning poet who has published nine books of poetry, most recently, The Book of Failures. His previous books include How It Is: Selected Poems and Vermont Poets and Their Craft. He has published essays, book reviews, interviews, and poems in such magazines as the Harvard Review, New England Review, Paris Review, and Southern Review. He taught in the BFA writing program at Johnson State College in Vermont and in the MFA program at Wilkes University (Pennsylvania). He founded and directed for eight years the writing program at the Vermont Studio Center and edited for a quarter-century the literary magazine Green Mountains Review. Recently, he founded the online magazine Plant-Human Quarterly and serves as its editor-in-chief. These days, he splits his time between Vermont and New York City, where he teaches at Poets House.