WEBVTT

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Among the things that
I love about poetry

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are its compression
and its economy.

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Among the things that are
extremely frustrating,

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I think, in the making of
poems are its compression

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and economy.

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[LAUGHTER]

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And very often, there's
something that happens--

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I don't know.

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It's like throwing
pots or something.

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The way that the
form of it emerges.

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And it is what it's going to be.

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And you can make
little small changes.

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But unless you just want to
hose it all down and start over,

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it is what it's going to be.

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Or if any of you
make bread, you know

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it's like when you're
kneading in the flour.

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And you get to the place where
it just won't take anymore

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and kind of sheets off from
the dough that you have.

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So a lot sort of ends up on the
cutting room floor as it were--

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it's what would not
fit into the palm.

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I discovered very late in life.

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Particularly, if you're a
person who writes quite slowly

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and if you're a person who
has a dread of the blank piece

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of paper for the next poem,
is take the finished poem

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and put up there next
to the title number one.

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And then take a new piece
of paper and put number two.

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And start with whatever it
was that you left on the floor

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or whatever it was that wouldn't
fit into that particular poem

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but probably is something
that you need to look at,

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you need to think about again.

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And that's how you
start a sequence.

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The seven pieces of this
particular sequence,

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they're not any more
in chronological order,

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except for the first two.

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And the first two are.

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So this is the "Art
of Distance 2."

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"My father was an earth son
and a stoic and eldest child,

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a steward who took dominion
over the given world,

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at least it seemed
his 100 acres of it.

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Pets we ate, rabbits
minced and the combined.

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Inchling molds, torched
in the crunch of the tree

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to save the peaches.

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Scorned excess and complaint.

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In poor tune, it said no,
not, can't, never will.

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What didn't fit
was seeing him cry.

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He'd stand alone in the
field, like a rogue pine

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that had escaped the side.

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As he would stand beside
the family graves,

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a short important
distance from the car,

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where we were hushed until the
white flag had been unpocketed.

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And he dangled his
keys and got back in,

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not ever looking
at us, not looking

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at the brisk instructive
face my mother used

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on clerks, on amputees.

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This all happened
long before my mother,

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in charge of cheerfulness
and world morale,

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had lost a body
part and given up.

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So it was never in response
to her the way he wept

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or equally the way he
moved through life.

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One hoof after another, a
sentimental man is singular.

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Still the boy whose
mother's gone away.

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The last full day of
our last ritual visit,

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he'd taken a turn
already into the field.

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What set him off was
hearing the neighbor's gun.

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She merely wanted the
turtle out of her beans.

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He hauled the carcass
home, two-feet wide,

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a rock from the creek.

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And also, elderly,
if the shell's whirls

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correspond to xylem
and phloem, rings we

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count on the trunk of a tree.

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Tastes like chicken,
he actually said.

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Gathering the saw them all,
chiseled pliers, hatchet.

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He'd need to unhouse
the body and chop it up.

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No one wanted to
help or even watch

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that set the child intent
on the raw of knives.

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And the child changing her mind
with a webbed foot wave, dinner

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was not quite dead.

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But shudders and tears were
weakness and wouldn't work.

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Jokes wouldn't work on
temper alchemized from noun

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into verb, as my father pried
the armored plates apart,

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pale and sweating and silent.

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And never did he,
sun long gone down,

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once quit the bloody porch.

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The bowl of the upper shell and
shards, the entrails bejeweled

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with flies, the beat
head, feet, and tail

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cast off into wet grass.

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Until at the screen,
holding a platter of meat,

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he might have been the
Queen's woodsman bringing back

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the heart.

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I heated the oil
until it spit at me.

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Dredged the pieces in
flour, as I would chicken.

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Flung them chunk by
chunk into the pan.

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When chewed, undefeated
lumps ringed even his dish.

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He said, I'd done the best I
knew, not naming the skill,

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deflecting sorrow and terror
into a steady fierceness

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and aiming that."

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