Thank you, Aisha.
Well, I do have tremendous gratitude.
I have gratitude for the chance to work with Aisha,
and I think that her writing influenced my writing probably
more even than mine influenced hers.
I mean, I just think that it was wonderful to work with Aisha.
And there are several other people here in the audience
that I would like to thank, and that's
Susan Roberts who's been a really good friend of mine
for years and a good reader.
And Karen Brennan and Barbara Cully above all
who was the person who told me that this collection
of "Little Fragments" might actually be a book.
If it hadn't been for Barbara, I don't
think I would have known that.
I was just writing these little things.
So thank you all, and thank you to the Poetry Center
for having me read.
This is a really wonderful honor to be
able to read in this space that I love so much.
"Anthropologies" is really about memory.
And when I started writing it, I was taking care of my mother.
And I realized that she--
Whenever one thing was happening in the room,
several other things were happening in her mind.
In other words, there were all these different layers
of time in that one room.
And so when I started writing it, that was kind of my goal,
was just to capture moments that had all these different layers
of time so.
I'm going to read a little bit from that first section.
One--
"My mother and I are sitting in the small dining
room of her townhouse.
We are sitting at the table she's had since I was a girl,
but I am nearly 50.
The table is warm in the sunlight.
The wood, a dark green.
She'd found it in an old junk shop
and asked the man to refinish it.
The same junk shop where she found her baby grand piano,
also in pieces, also in need of repair and refinishing.
Now, the piano sits in the living room
beneath a large triangular windows,
that if you were ever to open the curtains,
look out on the tea of a golf course.
She no longer plays golf, she no longer plays the piano,
she no longer paints Chinese watercolors
or plays bridge with her friends.
Most weeks, I am the only one who visits.
Most nights, the only one who calls.
She must be lonely, I think.
But she says she isn't.
With her halo of white hair, she is still beautiful.
It's her brown eyes maybe, her bone structure.
The classical symmetry of her features.
The oxygen machine hums in the background.
The small interior courtyard behind her
is full of light and green plants, most of them soak.
She picks up crumbs of toast from the table with her finger,
and dusts them onto her plate.
She wants to tell me her stories,
and every time I come to bring her groceries or make her soup
or take her to see a doctor, she revises them.
She has to get them just right.
She wants me-- she wants someone,
it doesn't have to be me.
She wants someone to know her before she dies,
this is my theory.
When we were young, she never told these stories.
Even 10 years ago, she wasn't ready.
My brother would ask when he visited
to hear about his father.
'Oh.' She'd say getting up from the table.
'What is there to tell?
We were married for so short a time, only five years.'
On Wednesdays and Sundays, I type her stories
into my laptop.
It takes her a while sometimes to get started,
I have to prompt her.
'Tell me the one about the dinner party,
when Scotty pretended he was a waiter and gave your bill
to the navy guys.'
She laughs, remembering maybe the dress
she was wearing that night.
Cream colored with fuchsia and dark green designs, shoulder
pads, the silky fabric knotted between her breasts.
She shakes her head.
When she tried to flick her cigarette butt out
over the balcony, it hit Scotty's commanding officer
in the forehead.
What a faux pas.
But she is amused by this younger self, I can tell.
The oxygen machine makes little puffing sounds,
I change it to the other setting.
Her color is not so good today, she seems out of breath.
And so I read to her something she dictated the time before.
'Oh!' She says.
'Just say my sister.
Don't put her name, don't put Dorothy.
Or-- Oh!
We can't say the officer's name, it might be a military secret!'
'His name?' 'You know, that he was there on Saipan before
Korea.'
When I give her the drafts for her approval,
she draws thick black lines through certain phrases
and details.
Her life looks like a communique from the front or from prison."