Evenings, I'd find you bent
over the dining room table,
like a surgeon over
a disembodied angel.
Under five yellow
lights, you would
rearrange the wispy
wings, pin them
to the floral cotton,
the blue corduroy,
the common material
our bodies might fit.
I think an
appreciation for story,
grew in me through being with
my mother and her sisters,
especially, my aunts.
They were big storytellers, so
they weren't writers, you know.
And also as a kid,
I would just go down
to the drugstore,
Vernon Drug, and I
would read, greeting cards or a
kind of corny Hallmark cards.
But it was like my
first real experience
of seeing people 
putting together
what we would 
call a poem, right?
A line would come to me.
I'd get up in the middle of
the night and write it down.
Or it was almost like the
music of the poem would come,
and I just felt like I was being
called, to write these poems.
This book took about
20 years in the making.
I kept, you know--
I had certain themes that I
was revisiting over and over,
mortality, desire,
memory, loss, grief.
So I hope I never stop
growing, you know.
I hope I keep learning
things because,
to me, that is success.
And, you know, the
poem, Lucky Enough,
learning the names of flowers,
even though, late in life, right?
There's always
something to learn.
It's an amazing world
and life that we're in.
Look at the prairie.
There's so much-- so much going
on that we miss, you know.
It's taken me many years to
know even the littlest things.
That this is a
pansy for instance.
This yellow clover butterfly,
flying only on a stem.
It's easy not to notice
almost everything in life.
I catch myself
tallying, taking stock,
and I feel things slipping
through my fingers,
like the cocoa beans my
friend spread as ground cover.
They smell sweet and
have this unexpected use.
I tell myself, maybe everything
has an unexpected use.
Even the old griefs, the
almost birds in hand.
Or maybe it's like
the moon flower,
which blooms only 
after sundown
and closes by 
noon next day.
A delirious bloom,
midsummer to first frost, 
and that's its life.
It does what it does.
And whoever was lucky
enough to have been there,
was lucky enough.
Our lives will never be long
enough to learn everything and to,
just to be in the moment.
I almost feel like maybe,
maybe the key is, as we get older,
to slow it down more and more
and to just recognize,
all we have is the moment, you know.
