And now I will read you one very new poem that's not in the book
And.
A few from the last section of the book.
This is called During a Son's Dangerous Illness.
And it's sort of in a way if it had
been written in time to go in the book,
it probably would have gone in that section with those broken
ghazals.
Some of those poems that I read from the earliest section
of this book, Oblique Prayers.
During a Son's Dangerous Illness.
You could die before me.
I've always known it, the dreaded worst.
Unnatural but possible in the play of matter, matter
and growth and fate.
My sister Philippa died 12 years before I was born.
The perfect laughing firstborn, a gift
to be cherished as my orphaned mother had not been cherished.
Suddenly, death, a baby cold and still.
Parent, child, death ignores protocol.
A sweep of its cape brushes this one or that one into the dust
at random.
What becomes of the past if the future snaps off brittle,
the present left as a jagged edge opening on nothing?
Grief for the menaced world, lost rivers, poisoned lakes,
all creatures perhaps to be fire blasted off the whirling cinder
we loved but not enough.
The grief I know if I looked into your unthinkable death
there's a splinter of that self-same grief.
Infinitely smaller but the same in kind.
One stretching the mind's fibers to touch eternal nothingness.
The other tasting in fear the desolation of survival.