I think my voice will hold out for a few new ones,
if that's OK with you all.
OK.
So these I pulled from the manuscript
that Tyler said I was arranging on my bed.
Today I came with 130 poems, which I realized
there's a lot more than a book.
I didn't know how much I had until I printed it all.
And I was like, Oh OK, apparently I've got it.
But I winnowed it down to 75 today, which is good.
I feel bad for that stack on my bed.
Oh, again.
Next book.
Yeah, maybe they'll-- maybe they won't get left behind after
all.
You never know.
I actually have a poem in my first-- two
poems in my first book and a poem in my second book
that came out three years ago that I
wrote in 1998 as an undergrad.
And I saved it and it just fit with the fairy tale poems I
was writing for my second book.
So there-- there is a poem that 20-year-old
me wrote that went into that second book,
and it just was waiting for its time.
OK.
So these, I think, will make the cut.
Although I don't know if they're done yet, so bear with me.
Wife For Scale.
This is a tender age.
And in geologic time, hardly an age at all.
But a golden band of rock pressed paper
thin will stand for these years, a kind of scientific shorthand.
Once I had a professor whose wife was in every photo
he took of rock formations.
He'd click through slide after slide saying,
my wife for scale.
Isn't there always a woman in the picture and isn't she
always small in comparison?
Forgive me, that was my grief talking.
Tell me, how do I teach myself to be alone?
The strata for this age will not be the first
to reveal what salt does to stone
as if a sea had been here and not sadness only.
Tell me, with God a question where
is solace but in the Earth?
The soil I'm standing on in this moment,
even as it shifts beneath my feet as it gives and cannot
hold me, will be rock.