And I thought I was actually done with writing death poems.
I've been actually writing some illness work,
I've been writing relationship poems,
but sometimes things re-emerge.
And I have a dear Aunt--
she's the last one in that generation alive,
and she lives a long way down the coast.
And the cemetery where my parents, and our family,
is buried is like halfway between us.
So, the best way that I can conjure to see her is-- we've
just started about a month ago meeting at the cemetery,
and then going for breakfast.
And so I've thought of it as just my way
of actually renewing my relationship with the living,
but visiting--
I'm not a grave visitor--
But visiting my mother's grave has had a powerful impact
on me, and I realized it was the kind of impact
that I needed to be smart and let write itself.
Just like I had to be smart and let my dad enter those poems.
And so I've learned--
I'm 54 and 1/2--
to kind of listen when things are pushing on me.
And so I was trying to find the form,
and it struck me that somehow the necessity and invention
form would be the vehicle for these cemetery poems.
And then, it struck me-- actually,
I wrote the first necessity poem that I'm going to read to you
tonight, and then it hit me that--
if you know that old phrase, do you know it?
Necessity is the mother of invention.
And so my mother's been hiding inside this form
now for a few years.
So you know, that's all I can say about that,
other than it gives me a shiver to say it.
So I had to share that.
So just two more, "Necessities" and "Inventions".
"Necessities"
The grass on her grave is a lens for emptying
my sight of the seeing in it.
Rain on the grass is neither the sound of "abandon"
nor "abundance".
But to listen is to resist interpreting either.
The future isn't a lens, just a surface--
mind washes with memory's weather.
Grass, in the pause between thought,
thick now on my mother's grave.
In the mirror of the grass, which is only fallen rain,
I am meaningless and hollow as a vowel--
which is a lens, if taken from the body of a word lifted out.
A tuft of wet vowels--
this is my mother's grave.
Who wouldn't want to walk there?