Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kerr.

Today's poem is from another new collection. Yesterday I read to you from Rail Splitter by Morris

Manning, a 2019 collection. And the poem that I'm about to read to you is also from a new collection.

It's from Scott Cairns' collection, Anaphora. He's a professor of

English and the director of the low residency MFA program at Seattle Pacific University.

His poetry has been published in many places, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006

of the Denise Levertoll Award in 2014. The poem that I'm going to read today, and pardon my

allergies are a little bit nuts today. This is called Which Tribe, Which River, from Anaphyra,

goes like this. So where do you go when memory proves mostly worthless?

When after three generations of willful neglect, you find the road home nearly impassable.

At my father's funeral, an ancient, dark-eyed woman, showed up just long enough to say two things.

Hello? Goodbye. I was busy staying dumb, so never took the

chance to find out who she was. In Washington State, every river gets a tribe. Big rivers often get two,

one clan for each muddy gravel bank. You already know about the rain, so you might guess about the rivers.

Hundreds draw their waters from the glacial blue snow melt, the nearly endless seasons of rain.

Turns out the woman was my father's kin.

Turns out my great-grandmother may have been Nisqually,

which presumably makes me something I never exactly knew, but had overheard a piece of maybe once or twice at my own grandmother's

house, when one or another uncle had drunk his fill, when the family reunion had suddenly

become more colorful.

I recall certain liquor-blunted faces, a slew of slurred obscenities,

and that my parents stuffed me in my coat as we headed for the car. Well, like I said,

...