I was talking about dictionaries today in this class I visited
and this poem is called "My Grandmother's Dictionary."
[CHUCKLES] I'll tell you the truth about this poem,
which is that I was reading--
I don't like to spend time on social media,
I'm going to confess.
It's not my favorite thing.
I know.
But I was looking on Twitter and there was some editor who--
a poetry editor who posted this thing that says,
I'm so sick of poems about people's grandmothers
and where they look up the Latin and Greek meanings of things
in dictionaries.
And I was like, [CLICKS] I shall write that poem.
And so this is that poem deliberately designed.
It's called "My Grandmother's Dictionary."
It must have arrived in the hands of a salesman
Whose name shall remain unrecorded.
Let's call him the handsome stranger.
She saw him through the little window next to the door
and knew,
Although she did not believe she believed in such things,
She had loved him in a former life.
She gave him a glass of her legendary tea and let him go.
My grandfather was upstairs in the immaculate attic,
Where after they died,
I found this typewriter sleeping among old blueprints.
During the war he diagrammed routes
So trucks of soldiers could arrive precisely in time
to wait for their orders.
Or he worked in parts,
I don't remember.
I can only picture that afternoon,
He told me exactly who he had been.
I hear the resigned tone but not what he said.
I was, as is my nature, staring out the kitchen window,
Thinking some great hypothesis that could easily be disproved.
That day now lost in the book
No one can ever turn around and read.
This was in a little town that was a harbor.
Its restaurant, a windmill replica turning in no wind.
We never asked her why she always
stood in the darkest part of any room.
Once she looked up from her eternal soup long enough
to say to me,
You really must remove that terrible beard.
What is the name of that sort of love?
I want to look it up.
I think it comes from the Latin for not knowing the Greek.
For the particular quiet of that afternoon,
I finally gave in and picked up the forbidden ceramic lion
from the shelf.
It slipped from my hands that already trembled
As they do today,
And hit the very thick carpet with a silent thud,
Exploding into so many tiny pieces.
Out of the kitchen she came with a broom,
And we both pretended it was never there.
What is that sort of love?
The dictionary knows.
I opened it and found dust.
I remember it had a solitary gold
stripe across blue-gray fabric,
Like a dress you wear only once by the sea.