Hi, everybody.
Thank you for coming out on this chilly desert night.
It's really a thrill and an honor
to be here to read with Alison, to be
the guest of the Poetry Center.
And I'm just very, very happy to be here.
The first poem that I'm going to read is called "I Just Checked,
We Live 2676 Miles Apart."
I checked as we were talking, two sisters,
one busy caller from the car.
Signal strength always rising and falling as if heavy weather
or buffering.
Or maybe just like breath, like intimacy itself, smack
in the middle of a story, or a medical report,
or Lyme statistics, or falling aunts on ancient porches.
Her voice vanishes and I check for disconnection,
but see our unspooling seconds, the silence just a glitch.
Then there she is further into the story, the aunt revived,
the dog safe from toxic grapes.
The tally of seconds still racks up someone.
Something is counting.
Keeping track.
Not me so much wastrel of days.
Not even sure if I tuned out or lost her.
Wastrel of our bond sometimes.
Forgive me, I never mean to lose the thread.
A hidden series of ones and zeros measures off our time
together, and sometimes I watch it roll while I also do listen.
I am listening, my mind torn between how fast it's gone,
mesmerizing hourglass of bits and what she's telling me
about a man whose mind is actually dying faster
and faster, her new husband.
Too soon, too young.
I am feeling their helplessness and grief and my sister's
lonely, heavy lift.
And also thinking how my son calls me the sieve,
since I come up short when he asks
if I remember what a movie scene,
a crucial college tete a tete.
I can't right now recall an actual example of something
he has sought from his mother, made of mesh.
I'm still picturing my sister's car
on some twisty forest road, numbly
aware of all that's passing through me,
insufficiently absorbed.
My son also sent some stats about how much time a mom
and son can reasonably expect to spend together
if they meet, say, three times a year,
holidays and visits, and how many books
we each have left if we-- slow readers-- both read 10 or 12
per year.
I want to just collapse my attention onto the story coming
from that many miles away.
Even though I'm afraid of it, I want more than my likely
200-ish, if we're lucky days with her,
my remaining 35 weeks face to face with my own kids dotted
here and there across the actuarial table.
Should the Irish Thriller in the bedroom really
be one of my last 300 books?
How many letters will I write?
How many almond cakes, intracoastal waterways,
how many (if any) grandkid hours?
Her voice wavers, naming what today is more
lost than even yesterday.
Her sweetheart's face riven by knowing what he's losing,
her headlong presence in the fight for him.
His best last days or years uncountable unkeepable.
Her keeping watch, keeping up well past when he can tell.
Her voice is dis- and reassembled by the grid.
Or no: the electromagnetic field.
And it comes here so almost exactly like it would
if she were sitting on the couch right next to me.
I press my cheek into her ether cheek,
though of course she doesn't feel what even is it.
Glass caress.