WEBVTT

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As I hope you're hearing from
these poems that I'm reading,

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my poetic imagination has been
consumed by loss for some time.

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And now, with the presence
in my household of someone

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who's going to be the
age I am now in 2050,

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which is when scientists predict
that the most extreme effects

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of the catastrophic climate
change that we are part of now

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is going to be part of
her daily life, right?

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And so I feel like
my poems now are just

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incredibly possessed by
this concern about what

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this is doing, right?

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And so I don't know
what that means.

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I've always been thinking
about the environment

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and the climate.

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And now there's
this other state.

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There's this, like, I just
don't want to fuck it up,

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right, for my daughter, for
my students, for this future.

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I feel like we are responsible
for making something

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better and working on it.

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I'm getting really mad now
because I'm really mad.

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"Notes on What Is
Always With Us."

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This week I threw a
birthday party for my mother

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and grief came
along for the cake.

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10 mothers at my mother's
birthday dinner, three of them

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bereaved of a child.

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The dead celebrated right
there with the living.

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We asked grief to be quiet, but
she smiled, smacked her lips,

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and tore into her steak.

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On land, adult penguins
have no natural predators.

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The big bad wolf is not,
in Antarctica, a problem.

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No lions, no tigers, no bears.

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Penguin eggs and penguin
chicks are always

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at the mercy of
skua and disaster.

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But even from the
leopard seal and orca,

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the land hauled adult
penguin is safe.

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I am trying to write
about penguins,

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about predatorless terrains.

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I am trying to write about
joy and a kind of cold beauty,

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but grief won't stay away.

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Grief will ride in on
the smallest of bodies,

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a tick on a cormorant's wing.

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If the winter isn't
cold enough to kill it,

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that tick will embed
itself in a penguin's neck,

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the back of her head, anywhere
the penguin cannot reach.

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And because she has
no way to tell anyone,

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and because, even if she
could convey her agony,

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there would be no way for
her fellow birds to help,

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she will itch for a while,
swell for a while, then

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abandon her nest for
the water's relief.

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She will run and slide
and dive into danger.

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Her eggs will die.

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And her chicks will die.

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And she may die as well.

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I am trying to write about
predatorless terrains.

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But grief will ride in on
the smallest of bodies,

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a tick on a cormorant's wing.

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I try to write
everything down because I

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know it would be
easier to forget,

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and I want to avoid the
comforts of suppression.

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Scouring journals for my
notes about seabird ticks

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and their toll on Antarctic
penguin populations,

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I find a different set of notes.

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I'd written, "The only
time I really talked to you

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was in your Trenton kitchen."

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What I meant was that
was the only time I ever

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saw you genuinely smile.

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The baby needed food.

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And you, just back from
pushing his stroller

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on a long walk during which you
and he both watched the morning

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sun shine on the faded splendor
of those Trenton streets,

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were boiling a hot dog for
your only son and smiling.

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"There are things I do not want
to say," I said in my journal.

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Except the not saying won't
return anything you love.

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The boy is dead.

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The boy's mother is dead.

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I'm trying to
write about beauty,

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but grief won't stay away.

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I was trying to
write about babies,

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and birthdays, and birds.

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I was trying to write about joy.

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