I want to begin a reading of my own work
with the opening poem of my second book,
partially to set the tone for the reading,
but also because this poem is particularly important to me.
It represented a real breakthrough in my work.
When I looked at my first book, the book
seemed to me to be written by a young person who
lived in the present without a sense of how
his own history had formed him, the "him" being me.
And this particular poem is the beginning
of an exploration of a sense of a self's
relation to my own history and my relation to others.
Poem is called "The Ancestors and What They Left."
Can everyone hear me all right, by the way?
Good.
"On the earth's thin crust, there's
a thread, a residue, some of the dead rising
to the surface, my great uncle and my aunt,
grandfather putting on his shoe.
There's the hull of the boat that brought
him here, now a fist of coal.
Grandmother left her scent on the doorknob, a voice print
in the air.
What we used to call debris now helps us breathe.
This tree's leaves contain my father's veins, its steam
a reminiscence of his breath.
This loneliness will pass, this feeling off-center.
In a moment, we'll leave the room of this world
and not return.
What doors have not been opened?
What more could we ask for?
On my hand, there's a line which extends beyond my life.
It's love and fame.
It's a chain that ties me to my past.
I'm on the dock, waving to the Jews, our an--
disguised as bureaucrats with secretaries
I love, bureaucrats I can't stand.
Before that, on the farm, the vodka and potatoes--
I carry their sprout and smell in the pastoral sense
of the salt lick, the tremor, cows kneeling on a hill.
Underneath, in the damp graveyard that
extends from the earth's surface to its core,
someone's father is whispering, I'm pushing through the dirt
that I've become.
And in my head, I hear his longing and his call.
We're like two figures touching in a mirror, a trick
to find out which is us.
And if I light a candle, pass my palm
above the flame, the smudge that's left--
that dark streak, that film--
becomes my sign, the hillside of my own terrain."