Improv: Larry Levis "The Poet at Seventeen"

My youth? I smell it in boiled okra and shelled peas, five gallon
buckets of husks where the invisible bugs crawled. On a
baseball field midspring where I would heave
asthmatically and work on my knuckler. The trees breathed
and sang lost songs that I would forget during recess, with
groups of laughing tractor boys. The widows, bored of poems,
noticed the birds that flew in front of me then.
They inflected and bore me their okra and vittles
and, I admit it, I was happy.