And 17 years later, the poem that Sean will read.
I want to say a few words about Steve first.
He was the first professor that I met at graduate school,
and we went out, we sat down on a little stoop
out here, on one of Steve's famous 45 minute smoke breaks,
in the middle of class.
And we got to talking about where my folks are from.
It turns out that my mom grew up about a block and a half
away from him in Holyoke.
And he asked for a lot of stories.
How was it like?
What was it like?
And my parents have always been quiet about that sort of thing.
From what I could gather, it was a rough place to grow up.
And so he decides to tell his entire childhood story to me
instead.
And I remember thinking at one point,
I understand my parents' silence.
This is "A Poet's Job" and it's from A Thousand Threads, 2009.
"No one dead headed her roses this fall.
Her chickens are missing from the backyard trees.
I don't get to hear her irritating smoker's cough--
crack crack, through the oleander hedge
between our houses late at night.
I woke up last night with Donne's words on my mind,
every death diminishes me.
Adelia here, she said, one night, calling me to the curb.
Midnight, moonlight, stars.
Two coyotes, a male and female, trotted
like self-aggrandized dogs toward us
down the middle of the street toward the park at the end,
where the prey are plentiful and small.
Urbanized, not looking at us.
I hate that big city haughty indifference.
At night when a tiny death squeal wrecks
the silence like a toy siren, the neighborhood diminishes,
and I am left looking at the moon, which as someone must
have said exposes everything, but sheds no light of its own.
To go out and look at the moon has been a poet's job,
at least since the first Sumerian poet compared
the color of grazing cows to the risen moon,
and their multitude to the stars.
To look at the stars and ponder the countless human verities,
sometimes one is enough.
After one Adelia, there are no more.