I should read the poem to my grandmother too.
I didn't like my grandmother.
[LAUGHTER]
She was a wrestling fan.
[LAUGHTER]
She wanted to be an American so badly.
And she didn't know they could tell.
[LAUGHTER]
No way you could miss it.
Yeah.
She became a Christian Scientist.
She moved to Los Angeles--
[LAUGHTER]
--took up wrestling.
[LAUGHTER]
I saw photographs of her as a young-- my mother told me
that she was very beautiful when she was a young woman
and that her family was appalled that she
married beneath her because her father was a butcher.
[LAUGHTER]
A chicken butcher, to be exact.
Now, how do you marry beneath that?
You marry my grandfather.
That's how.
[LAUGHTER]
And she tried to be so proper.
And the poem is called "Grandmother in Heaven."
And heaven is where we live without us because we
were what made it hell.
[LAUGHTER]
If we'd just all gone off one day and left her there alone,
she'd have been so happy.
"Grandmother in Heaven," which I do not think is where she is.
Darkness gathering in the branches of the elm,
the car lights going home, someone's
beautiful Polish daughter with a worn basket of spotted eggs,
an elbow of cabbage, carrots, leaves,
chicken claws scratching the air.
She comes up the cracked walk to the stairway of shadows
and lost dolls and lost breath.
Beautiful Polish daughter, with hands as round
and white as buns, daughter of no lights in the kitchen.
No one sits on the sofa.
No one dreams in the tub.
She, in her empty room in heaven,
unpacking the basket piece by piece
on the silent enamel table, with a little word for each,
a curse for the bad back and the black radish
and three quick spits for the pot.