Read a couple of moments from this book,
your book coming out next year called Horoscopes for the Dead,
and the first poem is called "Grave."
"Grave."
What do you think of my new glasses,
I asked, as I stood under a shade tree,
before the joint grave of my parents.
And what followed was a long silence
that descended on the rows of the dead, and on the fields,
and the woods of woods beyond.
One of the one hundred kinds of silence
according to the Chinese belief, each one
distinct from the others, but the differences
being so faint that only a few special monks were
able to tell them all apart.
They make you look very scholarly, I heard
my mother say, once I lay down on the ground
and pressed an ear into the soft grass.
Then I rolled over and pressed my other ear
to the ground, the ear my father likes to speak into,
but he would say nothing.
And I could not find a silence among the one hundred
Chinese silences that would fit the one that he created, even
though I was the one who had just
made up the business of the one hundred Chinese silences--
the Silence of the Night Boat, and the Silence of the Lotus,
cousin to the Silence of the Temple Bell,
only deeper and softer, like petals, at its farthest edges.
[APPLAUSE]