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So for many years, I wrote
poems concerned with my family,

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and I think lots of
young poets do this.

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The first couple of books,
I was thinking about what

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are the forces that shaped me.

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How did I become the
more or less adult

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I am writing these poems?

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And at a certain
point, I stopped.

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I'd had enough of talking
about my own history.

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I stopped for, in
fact, about 20 years.

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I banished my family
from my poems.

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And in the composition
of this book,

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they started to
creep back in again.

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So here's a little suite of
poems in which they appear--

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my mother and father appear--

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sometimes indirectly.

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This first one began when I saw
a photograph of a baby mammoth

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on the cover of a National
Geographic magazine.

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You may have seen this.

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It was the best
preserved specimen

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of a mammoth ever found.

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It was in a mud bank in
Siberia that thawed out,

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and here was this
little creature.

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I tried to write about it, but
when I described the mammoth,

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my poem just seemed
lifeless and inert

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until I realized that the
mammoth needed to speak.

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"Little Mammoth."

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Mother's milk in my belly
and a little of her shit,

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too, so that I might eat
of the sour green steppes

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that open endlessly before me.

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Though not long after I slid
into sunlight and the grass

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world, I slid again into
the mud hole and screamed,

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and screaming sucked
clay into my trunk 'til I

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lay on the bottom.

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My milk tusks not even sprouted,
a sweet undercurrent of fat

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ready for my first
winter, and I am still

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one-month-old and 40,000
years without my mother.

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I didn't-- I honestly didn't
know when I set out to write

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that poem that I felt 40,000
years without my mother,

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but that's exactly how I felt.