So my little grandson who lives in Pittsburgh, his dad
texted me this morning or last night
and said, "Do you want some copies of the pictures?
Tomorrow's picture day."
And so I remembered me having picture day
in Tucson public schools.
How we would have to--
not only anxiety about your very existence and how you looked,
but how that existence would be translated back
when the pictures came back two months later.
And whether you had ordered enough pictures
for all the aunties.
And so this is about that existential crisis called
Picture Day and about reading.
A lot of the poems in this book are
about reading and like a mystical relationship
to letters.
The letters themselves.
"Some Kinds of Reading in Childhood."
"Do you remember picture day?
Then, when the packets came back--
in each child's eyes incomprehensible fire--
you were ordinary in the sense of the endangered West.
Your mother wiped the windshield with a shredded Kleenex.
That's why you deserved your oily treats.
Inside the school, reading made sparks, peril, peril, peril,
and awe.
Outside the school, acres of signs in cellophane noon
where under the school termites take the tasty
beams into their bodies, Incisitermes
minor, delicate, hairless arms.
Save the volcanoes for later, flame folder.
You did such a good job with the maps.
The world has created a sickness but the sickness
is being reversed.
Consonants can be reasoned with but vowels start fires.
Now-- breathing twice--
now here come the bandit occupiers--
silence and meaning."