This is a section from the title poem, "The Accidental."
It's a long prose poem or a whole series of prose poems
if you believe in prose poetry.
I know of someone in the room who doesn't, [LAUGHS]
and it's really OK by me.
I'm reading this one in conjunction
with the final poem in the book.
There's some resonance between them, so,
and this is one of the ones that Joshua is working with.
Our father brought home stone and words
for stone, blue azurite, yellow agate, green malachite,
pink granite, iron pyrite, gray flint.
I'm sorry, I just lost my place.
He brought home history in stone,
fool's gold, slag, pottery shards, geodes, turquoise beads,
windowpanes made from mica, arrowheads carved from obsidian,
and fossils of inscrutable shape left behind in old sea.
He brought home truckloads of earth
to run through his sluice box, he panned for gold flakes
that he stored in distilled water in a clear glass vial.
He made magnets to sort iron filings from the sawdust
on his workshop floor.
He melted iron and gold into ring-shaped molds
he chiseled from river stone.
He tumbled rocks smooth to polish
tiger's eye for his pocket.
He brought home graphite pencils numbered in gradations
of hardness and darkness, and he kept
his pencils sharpened to the quick
and ordered in a wooden drawer.
He made paints from ground minerals and linseed oil.
He fired riverbank clay with grass to make brick.
He brought home watercolors, and brushes, and gum erasers,
and tracing paper with tiny grids,
and at night he penciled tiny decimals into his gridded books
while gazing through his scope at the moon.
He photographed star trails, and orbiting planets,
and he practiced mirror writing with his sinister hand.
He measured rain, and acid levels in rain, in dirt.
He walked the radius of the mine, diviner of pipelines,
and ore lines, and shaft lines from the palimpsests
of the maw's previous lives.
He made maps of basins and elevations.
He made maps of weather and night skies.
He made dove calls to summon doves,
and fish lures to summon fish.
To summon the right words, fair words, white words,
bright words, he made a box.