So for many years, I wrote poems concerned with my family,
and I think lots of young poets do this.
The first couple of books, I was thinking about what
are the forces that shaped me.
How did I become the more or less adult
I am writing these poems?
And at a certain point, I stopped.
I'd had enough of talking about my own history.
I stopped for, in fact, about 20 years.
I banished my family from my poems.
And in the composition of this book,
they started to creep back in again.
So here's a little suite of poems in which they appear--
my mother and father appear--
sometimes indirectly.
This first one began when I saw a photograph of a baby mammoth
on the cover of a National Geographic magazine.
You may have seen this.
It was the best preserved specimen
of a mammoth ever found.
It was in a mud bank in Siberia that thawed out,
and here was this little creature.
I tried to write about it, but when I described the mammoth,
my poem just seemed lifeless and inert
until I realized that the mammoth needed to speak.
"Little Mammoth."
Mother's milk in my belly and a little of her shit,
too, so that I might eat of the sour green steppes
that open endlessly before me.
Though not long after I slid into sunlight and the grass
world, I slid again into the mud hole and screamed,
and screaming sucked clay into my trunk 'til I
lay on the bottom.
My milk tusks not even sprouted, a sweet undercurrent of fat
ready for my first winter, and I am still
one-month-old and 40,000 years without my mother.
I didn't-- I honestly didn't know when I set out to write
that poem that I felt 40,000 years without my mother,
but that's exactly how I felt.