In honor of National Poetry Month, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, Newtown Poet Laureate Lisa Schwartz is sharing some of her favorite works by local poets.Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey won the National Book award for Poetry in 1996.Forty-Five

This week's selection is "Forty-Five," written by Hayden Carruth (1921-2008), poet, essayist and literary critic. His book

Hayden Carruth grew up in Woodbury. He explored the world "with a keen and occasionally skeptical eye that was ever lyrical and always authentic," says Ms Schwartz.

When I was forty-five I lay for hours

beside a pool, the green hazy

springtime water, and watched

the salamanders coupling, how they drifted lazily,

their little hands floating before them,

aimlessly in and out of the shadows, fifteen

or twenty of them, and suddenly two

would dart together and clasp

one another belly to belly

the way we do, tender and vigorous, and then

would let go and drift away

at peace, lazily,

in the green pool that was their world

and for a while was mine.

-Hayden Carruth