Hugh Fox		WHAT What are pine-maple-oak riverbend algae goose three hundred year hill houses and the endless weeds saying,  “Come back, le roi, vous êtes un payson parfait, jamais avec faim/ the king, you are a perfect peasant, never hungry,” and then a deer/pheasant hunter shot goes off and I run back to the car.		COLLECTING It began with my mother, grandmother, the nuns in grammar school, my M.D. father’s collection of medical everythings, and his violin, “From Budapest, 1842, here look inside here...,”our house in Chicago the subject of my  mother’s discourses from the                     minute anyone came to visit for their first visit,                     “This rug is originally from Prague, and all that                     pottery on the stand over there is Czech too... nothing to do with Slovakia, although that tablecloth on the dining room table from Surrey is from Bratislava...,” and then I marry a Peruvian archaeologist and start visiting Machu Picchu and Tiawanaku, move into the Amazon, start going to village market sales, fill my house with arrows and spear-heads, a thousand pieces of ancient pottery,then get into the NY, LA ,Frisco and                          Chicago poetry scenes, begin to get signed poems from Bukowski, Robert Peters, Lifshin, Winans, a kind of poetry who’s who....then local garage sales in Michigan, always another Viennese flower pot, an antique Japanese chest of drawers, drawings from Alexandra, my artist daughter, paintings from my second (Brazilian painter) wife, until....a newcomer comes in and isn’t interested in dinner or coffee or a little Cabernet Sauvignon, but wants a tour, tour, tour.....and emeritus me, alone at home most of the day, stop a hundred times a day and look, read, identify....as if my only sanity is the WAS and not the NOW.