Right, not too much more.
I have a section in this book called Miniatures
and they're all really short poems.
What they are actually is, two stanzas
of three lines each, two stanzas but they're really
rhymed quatrains and they're just disguised
as two stanza tercets.
But I think of them as a little verse snapshots
so I'm going to read you a sequence.
It's called from the family album.
And I think of them as like little photos
of different family members just trying to capture a Polaroid
moment really.
From the Family Album.
Grandpa F. Here's what I know about chicken.
The sweetest meat is on the back,
they say he'd say, back in the peckish 30s and 40s and prize
for the family the rest away.
Uncle B says, everybody's coming out of doors everywhere.
Anyone who do that would have to be stupid.
90% of those people are dead.
Time's a torn ticket.
We're watching home movies.
Aunt E. One Percocet, one beer, and she's
my dear old girl again.
Never mind the eye that's blind, rod up her spine,
kaput gizmo implants supposed to stem the pain.
I fold and unfold her walker for her take her to market.
Cry we, we all the way home.
Grandpa S, I told on in 1983 with his spiderweb kitchen
and funhouse house.
What I didn't know, I couldn't say.
Alone and dying, what would you do?
What he did was raise the roof of his mouth with a 38.
Uncle X, just kept getting smaller and smaller.
Moved from house, to apartment, to trailer,
slipped into the magic hat of himself.
Disappeared, took years to get to this mirror this morning.
And presto, change o, welcome, home uncle X I'd say
were I here.
Aunt M, collected dolls instead of babies.
Mothered her motherless brothers,
was crazy for the little swatch of garden
she scratched from her yard.
Nursed seeds to shoots, buds to blossoms, irises
and black eyed Susans watched her rockabye her empty arms.
Child I never knew, daughter maybe.
There were two of you torn like worn filigree
from the hem of a party dress.
No one now, she'll wear.
In the ballroom a young woman has turned an ankle.
And what am I supposed to say, now, now honey, there, there.