So after my father died about a year and a half later,
my mother died.
And it was a much slower and more in some ways difficult
process because my relationship with her was very fraught.
And so I found myself again writing about death
but I needed to find a very different form
and this book came together in a way
that I sort of beyond my even understanding.
But the second work had to be different.
And so I was attempting to actually push the sentence as
long as possible and try to find a way
to surprise myself to enter something
I didn't understand that maybe the language could draw to me.
And so-- and I was very lucky to have this book picked up
by Tupelo, it won the Dorset prize and so I just want
to read to the poems from that just as kind of a--
guess to bring my mom here because if dad gets 10 minutes,
mom should get a couple of minutes.
So you know.
And dad got his book and so mom got hers so.
So these poems are called After Urgency and they're either one
sentence, all one sentence or two sentences --
this is one sentence.
After Urgency.
How to draw the constantly shifting
selves together around an object of scrutiny.
And let this simply be the way it's raining again outside.
So lightly, hardly more than fog.
So that I leave behind my umbrella.
I open the door and then decide to just stand
at the very edge of the front porch
neither immersed in nor protected
from the suffusion in the air of a nearly
imperceptible rainfall.