So, a lot of this book is about grief
and the loss of my brother and mother.
I'm not going to read a lot of those poems
tonight because we're talking about another kind of grief.
But I do want to read one of these poems,
and this is a poem for my brother written, I think,
about the day after he died.
It's set in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
"Someone is making love this afternoon.
Why not, when the sun has broken through the low pressure that
had everyone in a lustless sulk for weeks, and now
that electric blue sun--
blue sky, buzzes in the brain and makes the heat rise.
Even those who are not making love
are thinking of someone who called
them my darling or my plum, as I do,
remembering how he would harden against my back in the morning
and I would turn to him.
Someone is being tortured this afternoon by his own body,
as disease flares into encampments
along the river of his spine.
He feels their fires burning and prays,
as a soldier does the night before battle.
He is growing porous from the fight, his eyes becoming
wide and guileless.
A strange and gentle kindness has come over him,
as if he is wandering in a mysterious place
and wants to be especially polite to the locals,
feeling he is a foreigner there.
someone is out on the streets this afternoon.
Town beach packed with bikinis and volleyball and a dog
wearing a sun hat who rides in a convertible.
Someone is everyone out for the pleasures of a town with a disk
jockey pumping up the beach crowd into salutes to the sun
and living in the body, and the day
all suffused with the finest gold pollen that
keeps falling and falling onto our glasses
and iPhones and windshields and into our lungs,
matter made spirit, meaning the breath and what's
deepest in us."