I know your tears, where they used to sleep & perhaps I'm no more glum than a child yet born, unconscious yet tethered & trailing its ship set to sail. The oceans surrender our test results &, after that, bottles bring messages cavernous, memorized, thirsty. I'm no more my self-winding fist, no doubt drifting where strings of a gorgeous hat go when the wave dissolves everything, erasing even queens speedy on their feet but not sped enough. One must feed to flourish, not the husband ebbed high into the limbs after a week of floods, now days of humidity. The oceans say I've a daughter behind me, flowers directly & blind. The oceans say you see me wading grass, danger to myself, etcetera. I wanted adoration, famous & hung to the wall. Instead I'm wads of gum, spent & stuck, become one with she who stuck it there. Of heaven & betrayal, let's replay too often being left for that other for good. Mornings when you hear the many dying feet leap across my head, strange infancy curls as though in a stove. I have that wherewithal still, I've my few friends & still I have you. I take to the streets, to rainfall, to the pools. They are oceans & I dream we're improving.
Written in the months preceding our daughter’s birth, this poem explores anticipation and transience. Several moments, for instance, evoke (obliquely) the sudden and deadly flood that swept through an Arkansas campsite in 2010. Rereading this poem, now just a few months after the early and unexpected death of my wife, I reconsider the speaker’s address to the “you” and how these words—how everything in my life—has been reframed.
"The book took shape over the six years after my mother’s passing. Many of the poems came both from internal memories and the intensity of being shocked that the world would keep going, and has always, in spite of a personal loss. The poems were written out of my most primal need to remember the past and to stay very attuned to the present."
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“'The Meteor' starts in the far past, with a blackout: 'tutto annerò.' Annerò—that’s the past remote, a tense that doesn't exist in English. It indicates a past so far past that the present can’t touch it. But Pascoli means to infiltrate, undermine it—which is part of what compels me about the poem. It’s what compels me about translation, too: this vibrant failure of equivalence that brings the past into the present and present into the past."
