As I hope you're hearing from these poems that I'm reading,
my poetic imagination has been consumed by loss for some time.
And now, with the presence in my household of someone
who's going to be the age I am now in 2050,
which is when scientists predict that the most extreme effects
of the catastrophic climate change that we are part of now
is going to be part of her daily life, right?
And so I feel like my poems now are just
incredibly possessed by this concern about what
this is doing, right?
And so I don't know what that means.
I've always been thinking about the environment
and the climate.
And now there's this other state.
There's this, like, I just don't want to fuck it up,
right, for my daughter, for my students, for this future.
I feel like we are responsible for making something
better and working on it.
I'm getting really mad now because I'm really mad.
"Notes on What Is Always With Us."
This week I threw a birthday party for my mother
and grief came along for the cake.
10 mothers at my mother's birthday dinner, three of them
bereaved of a child.
The dead celebrated right there with the living.
We asked grief to be quiet, but she smiled, smacked her lips,
and tore into her steak.
On land, adult penguins have no natural predators.
The big bad wolf is not, in Antarctica, a problem.
No lions, no tigers, no bears.
Penguin eggs and penguin chicks are always
at the mercy of skua and disaster.
But even from the leopard seal and orca,
the land hauled adult penguin is safe.
I am trying to write about penguins,
about predatorless terrains.
I am trying to write about joy and a kind of cold beauty,
but grief won't stay away.
Grief will ride in on the smallest of bodies,
a tick on a cormorant's wing.
If the winter isn't cold enough to kill it,
that tick will embed itself in a penguin's neck,
the back of her head, anywhere the penguin cannot reach.
And because she has no way to tell anyone,
and because, even if she could convey her agony,
there would be no way for her fellow birds to help,
she will itch for a while, swell for a while, then
abandon her nest for the water's relief.
She will run and slide and dive into danger.
Her eggs will die.
And her chicks will die.
And she may die as well.
I am trying to write about predatorless terrains.
But grief will ride in on the smallest of bodies,
a tick on a cormorant's wing.
I try to write everything down because I
know it would be easier to forget,
and I want to avoid the comforts of suppression.
Scouring journals for my notes about seabird ticks
and their toll on Antarctic penguin populations,
I find a different set of notes.
I'd written, "The only time I really talked to you
was in your Trenton kitchen."
What I meant was that was the only time I ever
saw you genuinely smile.
The baby needed food.
And you, just back from pushing his stroller
on a long walk during which you and he both watched the morning
sun shine on the faded splendor of those Trenton streets,
were boiling a hot dog for your only son and smiling.
"There are things I do not want to say," I said in my journal.
Except the not saying won't return anything you love.
The boy is dead.
The boy's mother is dead.
I'm trying to write about beauty,
but grief won't stay away.
I was trying to write about babies,
and birthdays, and birds.
I was trying to write about joy.