WEBVTT

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And I thought I was actually
done with writing death poems.

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I've been actually
writing some illness work,

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I've been writing
relationship poems,

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but sometimes things re-emerge.

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And I have a dear Aunt--

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she's the last one in
that generation alive,

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and she lives a long
way down the coast.

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And the cemetery where my
parents, and our family,

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is buried is like
halfway between us.

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So, the best way that I can
conjure to see her is-- we've

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just started about a month
ago meeting at the cemetery,

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and then going for breakfast.

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And so I've thought
of it as just my way

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of actually renewing my
relationship with the living,

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but visiting--

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I'm not a grave visitor--

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But visiting my mother's grave
has had a powerful impact

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on me, and I realized it
was the kind of impact

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that I needed to be smart
and let write itself.

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Just like I had to be smart and
let my dad enter those poems.

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And so I've learned--

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I'm 54 and 1/2--

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to kind of listen when
things are pushing on me.

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And so I was trying
to find the form,

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and it struck me that somehow
the necessity and invention

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form would be the vehicle
for these cemetery poems.

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And then, it struck
me-- actually,

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I wrote the first necessity poem
that I'm going to read to you

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tonight, and then
it hit me that--

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if you know that old
phrase, do you know it?

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Necessity is the
mother of invention.

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And so my mother's been
hiding inside this form

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now for a few years.

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So you know, that's all
I can say about that,

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other than it gives
me a shiver to say it.

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So I had to share that.

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So just two more,
"Necessities" and "Inventions".

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"Necessities"

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The grass on her grave
is a lens for emptying

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my sight of the seeing in it.

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Rain on the grass is neither
the sound of "abandon"

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nor "abundance".

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But to listen is to resist
interpreting either.

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The future isn't a
lens, just a surface--

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mind washes with
memory's weather.

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Grass, in the pause
between thought,

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thick now on my mother's grave.

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In the mirror of the grass,
which is only fallen rain,

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I am meaningless and
hollow as a vowel--

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which is a lens, if taken from
the body of a word lifted out.

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A tuft of wet vowels--

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this is my mother's grave.

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Who wouldn't want to walk there?

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