There's another work later that I'll share that's also sung.
The rest of these, I'll read.
This next one is called "Behind Every Good Soldier."
And the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
do thread through a number of these poems.
My dad was in the service.
He was in Vietnam in the Navy.
And I know there are some service people in the room
as well.
I feel very connected to families
who have family members who are serving in the current wars.
I don't think I need to tell you anything more about this
when it's called "Behind Every Good Soldier."
"It sounds too scripted, unbelievable now,
but he really did ask, what would you think of me
if I killed someone?
When this childhood sweetheart joined the Marines
a decade ago, I was back from college
and leaping at him for a week or so,
smoking at his kitchen window, drinking
in the ridiculous brilliance of a typical Berkeley garden,
azaleas and tropical whatnot.
How sure of greenness it all seemed,
how shocking the mob of growing things
that surged against his little yellow house.
The answer I gave evaporates.
But the question roosts in the mind's cave, elaborates
rubbery wings each time I meet a returning veteran.
Old lover, neighbors, boys marching drills
on the college quad, what do I think of you when
I think of you killing?
I see an old ghost, fatigued as storm-blown sand
standing behind you.
And it's nothing but fangs and finger bones,
disguised as a girl with a sweet little honey pot country
you've got to defend.
She's got her dirty little hands all over your weapons."
I realized, I feel like I'm always
learning about poetry by trying things out and by failing.
And every now and then, the dart hits the mark.
So I feel like I'm always learning about poetry.
So I think, when I wrote this book,
I learned about two ends of the spectrum.
I learned that I could really mine things that felt
very deeply personal to me.
I think my first book leaves out a certain dimension
of the personal, and in this book,
I just decided to go in and dig for that kind of thing, which
can be difficult and painful.
And then on the other end of the spectrum--
this is going to sound dumb.
But on the other end of the spectrum,
I also learned that you can try things out just for fun.
That it's OK to try things out just for the joy of it,
which, when you're an aspiring writer,
meaning before my first book was out
and I didn't have that validation of the first book
in hand, it all seemed very serious
and all seemed very serious and very urgent.
And then once I had that first book out and was putting
the second one together, I realized,
you know, it's OK to just be having fun some of the time.
So I'm doing that here.
And I'm doing something that poets
have done elsewhere as well, which
is play with this idea of naming groups,
like flock of seagulls, a murder of crows, that kind of thing.
So just playing with the idea of naming groups,
and the poem is called "Ars Poetica,"
which means the art of poetry.
And it's subtitled "Autumn Packing List."
"A flock of meetings, a threat of oranges, a moon of matings,
a crate of bells.
A gyp of whisky, a drop of talent, a plate of pyrite,
a fae of mist.
A hit of blood, a whiff of summer, a lisp of theory,
a tuft of sea.
A weight of weasels, a pain of peacocks, a roll of bat wings,
a bomb of leaves."