This is my most recent poem and perhaps
one of the most personal efforts I've ever made.
And again, I believe it's somewhat distanced
because I didn't know how else to try at least.
It was another poem that started with the luck of happening
to open a book and see something written down that
was interesting.
So I'll read you the epigraph first
which was a Delmore Schwartz poem that
was read at his funeral, that's just a few lines from that.
And the pears were useless and soft like used hopes
under the starlight small knowledge.
The Pears.
At noon, the wasps clink and whir
under the pear tree like bits of brown and yellow fruit
rising sharply back into the leaves.
They dive again where the soft pears flatten in the grass.
It's late September and the whole garden
is giving up to a gray collapse while I
cut the last green tomatoes with their rust spots.
They join the garlic, celery, and dill in clear jars
I fill with vinegar.
Our father is dead, having sickened faster
than the small plot of vegetables
I raised in this gritty New England soil,
a sudden wing drooped from his body while the three of you
stood by believing in his death as your private shadow.
He never told you he married a girl from Boston
at 19 who he didn't see again after she had given birth to me
one winter morning.
But I grew up knowing of you, your faces nearly Asian
like your mother and wondering if just one of our features
were the same, perhaps his unmistakable eyebrows.
I can smell the fallen pears from the window even stronger
in the evening now, damp and sweet like a fresh cake.
The wasps are sleeping in the eaves.
It's cooler.
And in just weeks, those clouds of gross beaks
will start descending morning and night
to feed in the yard in the broken sticks of the garden.
The pears will have melted by the roots of the tree
like they never existed even in the memory
of chilly wasps fat and dying in their gray paper nests.
You have buried our father out where
it's always summer near a garden of keoki,
pink lotus, and Jasmine--
perhaps you finally learned of me.
The facts of death not included in his life.
He might think of me then as a blonde working in a dress
store, as impossible as halves of a pear
left out to be shared fairly by an odd number
of difficult children.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]