I was about to promise I'm going to get happier,
but I don't know that I am.
[LAUGHTER]
Because the next poem I'm going to read--
so today is the 11th anniversary of my mother's death.
And she's here.
I kind of felt her with me today.
And there is a much longer sequence
in the book called The Messengers that talks
about my mother and that time.
But this is a poem called "Striding, Tracing,"
and it's just about loss.
"To open the body is to turn like Orpheus
and lose everything.
When working with a 35-millimeter camera,
You trust the film advance, feel the long gap between moment
and document felt almost nowhere else now.
A child learns the calendar on a spool of paper,
With pictures to mark the day she swims or eats pizza.
But only the body registers how the season withdraws
from her, leaf after leaf.
This tinned out autumn light refuses us
like mountains at certain elevations
or an economic system.
An old woman sits at a table, with a white sheet
draped over her head.
In the dream I know she is dead.
And I wake to the sound of a street cleaner.
In workshop I tell my students to let the seams show
We talk about limits and failure, productive confusion.
In life, I'm afraid.
Today the physicists say we might
be living in a brain around the event
horizon of a collapsed hyperdimensional star.
The physicists say higher reality,
Say soon after the beginning of time.
Every house cradles its dead.
In ours, men pull up carpet and asbestos.
Fine fibers spindle in the lungs,
a persistent melody, a poetics of Monsanto
that commodifies the seed.
How do we feed our deaths, enough to live proximate?
A mirror above the head, a water stridor against some surface,
tension of breath.
To lose the body is to sail like Odysseus,
Is to wait like Edward Snowden for a country."