I want to read you an unhappy poem
because I was asked to write a book of poems,
I'd been asked to publish a book of poems
and the person I had been in love with for 11 years had died
and I said no.
Then I said, well, it'd make a nice last gift.
So they made a lovely little book.
I said, the real reason I did it was you
have to put some of her poems in the book
because she'd never published in English.
They thought that was crazy but they agreed to do it.
And this is one of them.
But the point I want to make is I didn't want to write,
didn't want to make a funereal book.
I didn't want to make a book saying, oh,
how much I hurt, how much I miss her, how terrible it is,
what bad luck.
I cried for three and 1/2 years.
It wasn't a small thing for me, but I
didn't want to write a book saying pity me,
pity me, pity me.
I wanted to write about what marriage is like and what
the death of that marriage is like and what's left over from
that marriage, to celebrate what is and what was,
not what isn't.
This poem, though, is in a way maybe more sad than that.
Michiko was Japanese, which you have
to know to understand something that happens
in the book in the poem.
It's called Married.
I came back from the funeral and crawled around the apartment,
crying hard, searching for my wife's hair.
For two months I got them from the drain, the vacuum cleaner,
under the refrigerator, and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were hers, and I stopped.
A year later, repotting Michiko's avocado,
I find this long, black hair tangled in the dirt.