Maybe I'll just read--
actually, what I have next?
Oh, I have some short poems.
So I also wrote at some point little tankas in here,
and they were all at the end of the book.
And my friend said, you should scatter them throughout.
And so I did because I actually started
thinking how he said they were all like written
toward to children, or my children.
But also, I think the kind of obsessive personality
that I have was that, there are so many of these obituaries,
and they're so heavy and they even
look kind of clunky in their shape,
that these little tankas, which are 5, 7, 5, 7, 7, I think,
gave me, as a reader, a little bit of break.
So I put them in pairs.
And so I'll just read these two.
"Sometimes all I have are words, and to write them
means they are no longer prayers, but are now animals.
Other people can hunt them.
You don't need a thing from me, you already
have everything you need.
The moon, a wound on the lake, our footprints to not follow."
And in retrospect, I think these poems,
the poems in The Trees Witness Everything,
which are miniature poems, really
extended from these other tanka.
So I started-- I think I started back here,
but I didn't know it at the time.