We'll go back to the book and read you the first poem.
Oh, it's not the first poem.
I want to read you coming home.
This is a poem I wrote for my mother.
My sister said, that she has just now understood this poem.
She just went away to college this year.
She said she never understood the ending of the poem
until this year when she had to leave home.
My father was a longshoreman.
I probably should mention that.
As usual, I was desperate.
I went through your house as if I owned it.
I said, I need this and this.
But contrary to all I know of you, you did not answer.
Only looked after me.
I've never seen the house so empty, mother.
Even the rugs felt it how little they covered.
And what have you done with the plants?
How thankfully we thought they're green replaced us.
You were keeping something like a light.
I had seen it before, a place you'd never been
or never came back from.
It was a special way your eyes looked out over the water.
Whitecaps lifted the bay.
And you said, he should be here by now.
Oh, he always came back.
The drinking, the fishing at night, all the ruthless ships
he unloaded.
That was the miracle of our lives.
Even now, he won't stay out of what I have to say to you.
But they worry me.
Those boxes of clothes I left in your basement,
sometimes I think of home as a storehouse.
The more we leave behind, the less you say.
The last time I couldn't take anything.
So I'm always coming back like tonight in a temper
brushing the azaleas on the doorstep what
did you mean by it?
This tenderness that is a whip a longing.
I think I was feeling in there.
How impossible it is to pay anything back to your parents.
I forgot that one notebook.