It's great to be here.
Thank you so much, Alison and the Poetry Center,
for inviting me.
And I've gotten to meet some wonderful people,
and an old friend came to have dinner with us tonight.
So I just came in.
Thought I'd come in.
Who made me these earrings.
[CHUCKLES]
So Jane Miller and Alison Deming put me at ease by saying,
read what you love, and that people here
are a very relaxed audience.
You're laughing about that.
[CHUCKLES] It's not true.
[LAUGHS] They're killers.
[LAUGHS]
OK.
I have to talk about maybe the process
I've embarked on at this period in my life at 50 years old.
And it's probably a process that has
been, oh, well with me for a long time,
but I'm conscious of it now.
The Empress of the Death House, I
was just talking to a group of students
I worked with this morning about the book.
My grandmother is the empress of the death house.
My grandmother and grandfather owned a funeral home
in Detroit, Michigan, and it was a real growing up experience.
I was very friendly with the dead bodies.
I mean, only a poet may be, I don't know.
And I asked my mother years later,
why did you let me go down and be with the dead bodies
all the time?
And she said, well, we were just so glad that you
weren't afraid of dead bodies.
And of course, little did she know,
but that isn't exactly what was going on inside of me.
I used to pray for them, and I used
to touch the hands and the arms.
As early as three, four, or five years old,
death became a very encompassing subject for me.
So the book The Empress of the Death House--
one of the things it's about is my grandmother
is one of the figures in this book, who seems larger
than death on the one hand.
She died when I was seven years old, however.
Just as I was talking to a class this morning,
I wondered if somehow I'm looking
to call forth images of strong women
to sort of be my protector and to say, write your work,
do your work, as I felt she was this strong presence
in my life.
So this poem is called "The Empress of the Death House".
And I'm going to read from all three
of my books and some new poems.
This is my first book.
"My grandmother haunted the halls above Webster's Funeral
Home like a red-gowned ghost.
Till dawn, I'd see her spectral form, hena hair blown back,
green eyes tameless.
She was proud.
Like God, I swore I'd love her.
At night, we whispered how we hated mother and wished
that I could live with her.
In the morning while she slept, I'd
pluck costume diamonds from a heart-shaped chest,
try her tortoise combs and hairpins in my hair.
She'd wake and take me to her bed.
Maroon quilted eiderdowned, I drowned,
rocking on her wasted breast.
She'd tell me how she nursed my father
till he was old enough to ask.
Then she'd draw me to her, ask me if she still had milk.
Yes, I said, yes.
Feeding on the sapless lie, even now, the taste of emptiness
waits my mouth."