I think the next poem I want to do is a poem about my mom.
My father passed away.
He was a farmer, and he passed away on the farm in an accident
when I was 25.
And so I spent a lot of my poetry career writing about him,
like eulogizing him.
And I feel like writing has kind of become
the way that I talk to him.
And so between my two parents, it's
a very lopsided pile of poems between my mom and my dad.
My mom has always been a steady presence
in my life, happy, healthy, working.
And so I think I might take her for granted a little bit
in terms of writing about her.
So when I was going to write this book,
I thought, OK, I have to have a poem for my mom.
A farm wife has some--
you get pressed into service into some ways
because farming has no health insurance.
And so the wife usually has to have some job that
has health insurance.
And also it kind of comes along with doing whatever the husband
farmer can't, won't do.
And so a lot of times I think housewives become accountants,
like they keep the books for the farm, amongst other things.
And if a truck driver calls in sick,
sometimes you got to drive the truck.
And so this is a poem about the ways
that my mom filled in the gaps that had
to be filled in my childhood.
This is necessity as the mother.
Instead of a knob on the grain truck's
gearshift, a wad of paper towel.
Instead of a house key, a credit card.
My mother kept the books.
There was always a bird trapped in the chimney.
She and I lifted dead kittens born in an abandoned
boat, fallen into its keel.
There was always some killing to do.
My mother made herself into the Picasso of health insurance.
Who else?
Our fields were full of futures and we hauled them in.
Her father was not the only welder.
She cut the tip of her finger off and held us.
The house almost burned.
I gave away our good sheets to stop bleeding at a wreck on 45.
At church we looked like other families.
No one could tell the vastness we
tried to explain ourselves to.
She arranged our silences, filed them alphabetically.
Her husband died.
Later that day, her father did too.
She balanced the books, remarried, succeeded the losses,
invented a life yet untitled.
What else?
She surely asked the water softener, the Hicks gas propane
tank.
Nothing else answered the zeros in her ledger,
Each stitch's X.
Nothing else.