And now, let me read a few new poems.
Or maybe I'm being premature to call them new poems.
Perhaps, they are unfinished poems.
These here are just a few stanzas from a longish poem
called "Sheffield Pastorals."
"The biting insects don't like blood that
tastes of the fear of dying.
They like the blood of people who can imagine themselves
entering other lifeforms.
These are the ones the mosquitoes sing to in the dark,
and the deer flies like to circle,
studying with yellow eyes.
In the other animals, the desire to die
comes when existing wears out existence.
In us, this desire sometimes comes too early,
causing us to kill ourselves.
And sometimes, it never comes, and we have
to be dragged away screaming.
No one knows how to die well, not even Jesus
going back to his father.
And yet, dying gets done.
And we see the owl, throwing up both arms
as she alights on a ridgepole.
And we know someone is accepted back
into the family of mortals."