And what I would like to do is what every poet wants to do--
and they usually indulge themselves--
and that is read new stuff.
And I was telling Alison that the best quotation I've read,
and I always forget who said the thing, but was a writer
was asked, which of your works is your favorite?
And he says the next one.
[LAUGHTER]
You know, and so there is one thing I want to tell you.
I put a new book of poems together recently.
They are poems that I've written in the last five years or so,
and I used the storytellers technique of writing in scenes,
not always in chronological order.
But as I was putting my book together,
I found these patterns, and that means you're getting old--
when your work starts having patterns.
And so one of the patterns I found
was my father retired from the Navy,
and two years later he died in a car accident,
which made no sense to anyone.
It never does, but my mother spent 25 years waiting for him
to come home and then he died.
And he's been a strange influence in my life
as I'm sure everyone can say the same, but he was absent so much
and was such an authority figure when
he was there, that I have just these conflicting feelings.
I both adored him and resented the hell out of him.
He instilled the need for an education in us,
and yet he reminded me every day that I was a woman
and had to watch out every minute.
So I have to go through life carefully.
So I have to explore but never exceed the bounds
and stay on the straight and narrow road,
and that's really confusing for a girl to come up with.
And so I wrote all these poems about him
that I hope express both my love and my resentment.
Some things I never got to discuss with him,
and my poetry is sort of a resolution
of this communication that never happened.
Anyway, I will start by telling you
that the three poems I will read you now for some reason
have to do with war and conflict.
My father joined the army when he got married--
when he married my mother.
Left her four months pregnant with me.
I did not know him for the first two years of my life,
and then when he came back, he took me out of my mother's bed,
and what he brought with him was a crib that he put me in.
So I didn't like him for about two weeks,
and so this first poem is about my father coming
home from Panama and being the life of the party
at my birthday party--
my second birthday party, and it's
called "Lessons of the Past."
I was born the year my father learned
to march in step with other men, to hit bull's eyes,
to pose for sepia photos in dress uniform
outside Panamanian nightspots--
pictures he would send home to his pregnant teenage bride
inscribed, "To my best girl."
My birth made her a Madonna, a husbandless young woman
with a legitimate child envied by all the tired women
of the pueblo as she strolled my carriage down dirt roads
both of us dressed in fine clothes bought
with army checks.
When he came home, he bore gifts--
silk pajamas from the Orient for her, a pink iron crib for me.
People filled our house to welcome him.
He played Elvis loud and sang along in his new English.
She sat on his lap and laughed at everything.
They roasted a suckling pig out on the patio.
Later, no one could explain how I had climbed over the iron
bars and into the fire.
Hands lifted me up quickly but not
before the tongues had licked my curls.
There is a picture of me taken soon
after, my hair clipped close to my head, my eyes enormous,
about to overflow with fear.
I look like a miniature of one of those women in Paris
after World War II--
hair shorn, being paraded down the streets in shame
for having loved the enemy.
But then things changed and some nights he didn't come home.
I remember hearing her cry in the kitchen.
I sat on the rocking chair waiting for my cocoa,
learning how to count--
uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco--
on my toes so that when he came in smelling
strong and sweet the sugar cane syrup,
I could surprise my papacito--
who liked his girl smart.
Who didn't like crybabies--
with a new lesson learned well.