These are the new poems.
I'm going to read a few of the new poems from this book.
And title poem of the book, "The God of Loneliness."
I'm sure you'll remember how hard it was to get a Wii
Game when they first came out.
And my boys-- I have two sons-- wanted them very much.
And I would go from one place to another.
And always be one or two bodies short of the store
closing or running out, and coming home,
and disappointing my kids.
And so I finally was determined and there
was a Toys "R" Us where I live in East Hampton,
the tip of Long Island.
And I was the first one on a Sunday morning at 6 o'clock,
and these other men came.
And I knew there was a poem in it
but I was two years away from understanding what it was
or what it was about.
This was the height of the Iraq war too.
"It's a cold Sunday, February morning,
and I'm one of eight men waiting for the doors of Toys "R" US
to open in a mall on the Eastern tip of Long Island.
We've come for the Japanese electronic game
that's so hard to find.
Last week I waited three hours for a store in Manhattan
to disappoint me.
The first today, bundled in six layers
I stood shivering in the dawn light reading the New Aeneid
translation, which I hid when the others came.
Stamping boots and rubbing I recognized
that I have to be one of them.
Stamping boots and rubbing glove-less hands,
joking about sacrifice--
joking about sacrifice-- OK.
Which I hid when the others came snapping boots and rubbing
glove-less hands, joking about sacrificing
sleep for ungrateful sons.
My boy broke two front teeth playing hockey,
a man wearing shorts laughed.
This is his reward.
My sons will leap into my arms remembering this morning
all their lives.
The game is for my oldest boy just back from Iraq,
a man in overall says from the back of the line.
He'll play these games in his room all day.
I'm not worried.
He'll snap out of it.
He's earned his rest.
These men fix leaks, lay foundations for other men's
dreams without complaint.
They've been waiting in the cold since Aeneas founded Rome
on rivers of blood.
Virgil understood that death begins and never ends.
That it's the God loneliness.
Through the window a clerk shouts we have only five.
The other seem not to know what to do with their hands,
tuck them under their arms or let
them hang naked and useless.
Is it because our hands remember what they held,
the promises they made.
I know exactly when my boys will be old enough for war,
soon three of us will wait across the street at Target,
because it's what men do for their sons."