I am delighted to have two poems in Harvard Review this month, one in their gorgeous new print issue and the other online. I am so grateful to the editors at HR for including me alongside so many authors I admire and for taking such care with all of our work. I hope you will purchase a copy!
I wrote my poem in the print issue, “Every Cut Has a Kerf,” in memory of my brother-in-law Will’s father, Bill, who was a wonderful person and a great conservationist. Just before Bill died, I sent him Christine Byl’s memoir, Dirt Work, which I absolutely adored and thought he would enjoy as well because of all the time he spent in Montana. The memoir chronicles Christine’s time working on the Glacier National Park trail crew maintaining mountain trails for all of us who walk them. Bill and I had spoken a lot about his conservation projects in Montana, and I admired his passion for the environment. He called me to thank me for the book, and I unfortunately was in a busy moment and didn’t call him back right away. I will always regret that I let a hectic schedule keep me from returning the message, as he died unexpectedly from complications of cancer before we had the chance to speak again.
I wrote “Every Cut Has a Kerf” about this experience, about Christine’s book, and about mortality itself. The title is a line borrowed from Dirt Work, one of my favorite lines in Byl’s book. She taught me the word kerf. I immediately found the concept metaphoric and profound. I am grateful to her for all that she taught me, and I hope you will read her book and learn from it someday too.
The poem represents a kerf of sorts in my life, as it is also the last work of my own that I read to my mother the day before she died. She read everything I published always, and this marks the last lines she will “read” by me. They are, in a way, the lines that disappear between us as we are cut apart. My mother wasn’t able to speak that afternoon, but I believe in my heart that she heard me and that these words had meaning to her too.
My poem that is online, “Daiquiri, Up,” is completely different in style and origin story. It is a more playful poem that was born from the open houses my husband and I used to throw every Friday night before having kids. We never knew who would show up, and friends would often bring their friends. We met the most fantastic array of characters in this way. Charles, as many of you know, is obsessed with the art of the cocktail. So he would concoct the most beautiful drinks for whomever happened to show up to our apartment on any given Friday. My only job was to assemble the cheese plate and to chat with our guests. One conversation in particular, over a Hemingway Daiquiri, has stuck with me for years. So I finally wrote a poem about it. On a deeper level, the poem is about the theories we humans also concoct to make sense and beauty out of the world. We state these theories with so much authority. Sometimes, we even publish them in newspapers of note. But all our theories are perhaps a little silly and easily proved wrong. And despite this, they will sit in our minds for years and we will turn them over and over, pondering their meaning like great truths.
I hope somewhere my mom and Bill and my father-in-law are pondering great truths and enjoying Hemingway Daiquiris and long mountain trails.
