Maybe read one or two more in this round,
and come back to these poems later.
Leave the mythological poems until near the end.
I don't know.
Remember in "Strangelove," they kept calling it a "pre-vert"
all the time.
I hope you don't think I'm a "pre-vert"
for talking about death all the time.
But it's kind of a quality of life
that we're getting in shape for, which is a horrible thing.
But it's kind of sad and one of the further ironies of life--
The more you study, the more you try to write,
the more you try to create, all the time the clock is ticking.
And the closer you're getting to death,
which instead of preparing you for something actually
is, to me, the end.
So I concentrate on this not because I'm
particularly morbid, but because these things actually
do happen.
They have to be dealt with.
Sometimes the mind balks at it, not knowing how to handle it.
How do you handle the Charles Whitman, the Speck, the Sirhan
Sirhan.
Are we all potentially this way?
Is humanity potentially depraved?
Are we so frustrated that is the only way
that we can express ourselves?
Can we understand these people, as well
as having sympathy for the people that are shot?
These are the tremendous questions,
I think, that alongside the political issues of choosing
the lesser of two evils as president,
or how we can successfully get out of a war
without having more of our people killed.
This quality of individual death to me
is the other three parts of the death problem.
The other part of the death problem
is it's a horrible atrocity.
It wasn't the atrocious part of the elderly battlefield nurse
that she was going to die.
It was very quiet.
She's dying inside of her.
Wally Brown was instantaneous.
That is the horror of dying by a heart attack
with no history of heart attacks in your family,
and dying at 34 in seemingly perfect health.
The other one, of course, is the bodily brutality,
which came out a bit in "Teufelsdreck."
This type of brutality, and the ability
to laugh about it, that only man can be perverse.
Let us try another poem called "Mrs. Godkin's Son."
This is based on a true happening from Wisconsin.
Fantastic crime annals of Wisconsin,
which I'm cataloging slowly over the years.
[LAUGHTER]
I used to think Boston.
We just have gangland slain there,
with the Italians and some of the Irish
that are brought in to help them out when they run out.
When the Italians and Sicilians get all killed off,
they either have Anglos or they have
Irish people help them out.
And that doesn't touch us really.
The good middle class people aren't touched by this.
But here is a different kind of horror.
The horror of a young man who is from a rural Wisconsin
area, and the mother tells him that all women are whores
and that he should stay away.
That he should stay home, take care of her until she dies.
That he should dedicate his life to his mother.
Well this sadly enough did work.
He really believed her, she poisoned his mind
for a few years.
I've changed the name to Godkin as an obvious, terrible pun.
That she is after all, supposedly, God's kin, as we
all are.
But these atrocities do happen.
The son, after the death of the mother, couldn't face society.
And he used to go out at night, and dig up coffins,
and bring home women.
And try to play the masseur and revive them,
so that he could place mother in this room-- which he kept all
the time in perfect condition.
The rest of the house was like a pigsty,
but her room was almost like a shrine.
And it does have just slight religious overtones as far
as trying to preserve the alleged purity of his mother,
when all the time she'd been poisoning him
against the flesh.
Which to me is one of the greatest imaginable sins
too, this type of perversion.
So also he decapitated some of the people
and shrank the heads, and gave them to the children
and said that they came from the Philippines.
It did stand up, society believed it
because this was around the time of the Second World War
when another American atrocity.
Bringing heads back, and pots and remains of Viet Cong.
Or in the old days, it used to be the Indians.
I remember reading newspaper articles
about a little old ladies from Boston--
not far from where I live--
used to send away and get Indian bones.
From out here, I suppose.
And used to make buttons for their dresses out of them.
So this idea of collecting parts, and digging up
people's graves, and putting them in museums
is nothing new to our society.
And if they dug up our graves, what would happen?
But this is all the atrocities.
Not to make you sick, exactly, but--
[LAUGHTER]
He took some of the skin off many of his people
and made lampshades out of them too, which were greatly
admired by his neighbors.
All right, I'll get into the poem.
"Mrs. Godkin's Son."
"Oshkosh, Wisconsin 1968.
His mind, disposed to her rantings,
echoed the taunt that all women are whores.
He kept the kettle whistling 10 years,
and dared not sweep the dust beneath the braided rug
of Death's bedroom.
Nights amid obituaries, he studied like Rasputin
the occult and mystical.
For he had a special way with women.
Moonlit, his shovel clinked against a treasure house
of female coffins.
He sacks the overripe bodies home,
but they failed to breathe beyond the sink
where his masseur hands, fondled in love,
to restore one mother amid her heirlooms.
Dishes were piled, green scum thick.
The garbage of years grew like a dump.
Only her room with a virginal shrine to the memory
that she alone with his.
Masked and blind to see that need fails to carry flesh
beyond the grave.
Heads that refused to murmur to his touch,
or shrunk and doled to neighbor kids.
Who lied to parents about the Philippines.
They smiled and said at least they weren't American heads.
Poor, harmless, old man.
But empty graves aroused him.
They call to find a wall of bodies dressed out like deer.
Hung gentle as lovers, and no mother
stirred to rail against lust."
[DISTANT AIRPLANE]
You can sleep tight tonight, our National Guard is awake.