I want to end with maybe two poems from the past few months.
The first of them is a one poem from a series
that have to do with my father's death some years ago.
This poem is called Strawberries.
When my father died, I saw a narrow valley.
It looked as though it began across the river
from the landing, where he was born.
But there was no river.
I was holding the sand of a small vegetable
plot for my mother in deepening twilight
and looked up in time to see a farm wagon dry and gray horse
already hidden, and no driver going into the valley carrying
a casket.
And another wagon coming out of the valley
behind the gray horse, with a boy driving,
and a high load of two kinds of berries one of them
strawberries.
That night when I slept, I dreamed
of things wrong in the house.
All of them signs.
The water of the shower running brackish,
and an insect of a kind I had seen him
kill climbing around the walls of this bathroom.
Up in the morning, I stopped on the stairs.
My mother was awake already and asked me
if I wanted a shower before breakfast.
And for breakfast, she said, we have strawberries.