WEBVTT

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And now I will read you one very
new poem that's not in the book

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And.

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A few from the last
section of the book.

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This is called During a
Son's Dangerous Illness.

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And it's sort of
in a way if it had

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been written in time
to go in the book,

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it probably would have gone in
that section with those broken

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ghazals.

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Some of those poems that I
read from the earliest section

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of this book, Oblique Prayers.

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During a Son's
Dangerous Illness.

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You could die before me.

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I've always known it,
the dreaded worst.

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Unnatural but possible in
the play of matter, matter

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and growth and fate.

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My sister Philippa died 12
years before I was born.

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The perfect laughing
firstborn, a gift

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to be cherished as my orphaned
mother had not been cherished.

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Suddenly, death, a
baby cold and still.

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Parent, child, death
ignores protocol.

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A sweep of its cape brushes this
one or that one into the dust

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at random.

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What becomes of the past if
the future snaps off brittle,

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the present left as a jagged
edge opening on nothing?

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Grief for the menaced world,
lost rivers, poisoned lakes,

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all creatures perhaps to be fire
blasted off the whirling cinder

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we loved but not enough.

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The grief I know if I looked
into your unthinkable death

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there's a splinter of
that self-same grief.

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Infinitely smaller
but the same in kind.

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One stretching the mind's fibers
to touch eternal nothingness.

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The other tasting in fear
the desolation of survival.

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