It's a new book, so I got to remember where everything is.
And then I got to see if I can read the print.
I got really into like poets do.
I got really into Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet."
And it was-- it was a time when--
or I have a tendency in my poem to think
about systems and control.
So I started writing these really intimate letters
to officials in a previous presidential administration.
I actually sent them off.
And never got any responses.
"Dear Mr. Chairman of Ethics, Leadership and Personnel Policy
in the U.S. Army's Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff
for Personnel."
First, let me explain.
My mother forbade me to walk fence rails with the Maleski
boy.
She barred me from taking off my shirt to dig flowerbeds
with the Holloway girl.
I kicked an overturned coffee can
in the middle of the cul-de-sac.
Storm after storm blew past the screen door.
Standing under the plum tree's pale pink blossoms
was putting on a veil.
In the hard soil of childhood, God
was everywhere, in pitted sycamores, a vibrating clothes
line, in fireflies hung still as lanterns from a Japanese maple.
One day I carved a whole landscape in the windowsill.
Sun, willow, car, lady.
Perhaps there were rabbits.
My mother grabbed my wrist; rains broke, livewires writhe
like eels through our streets.
How much loneliness must we inherit?
So, Sir, I grew earthbound and cursed,
a quarry, a construction site.
God lagged behind in the pale light of swimming pools
and pines.
I took lovers and planes.
In the desert east of Palm Springs,
I drove past windmills flapping like angels
trying to redirect traffic.
Yes, that was me kneeling down
to take a birth control pill
by baggage claim area three.
Of course, Sir, I can see it clearly now.
Where once there was a thicket, I recognized three trees.
A complicated song, a cardinal's call, a mother's voice,
a wedding march.
I want to undo it.
Wind brings one bush to
thrash in panic, while another remains still as porcelain.
Promiscuity, like a season, has its limits.
Inevitably, rain weaves a sort of loose net on the window
screen.
Any woman of a certain age will recognize it as cheap lace.