I'll just read three or four more poems.
This is a poem of mine that I feel closest to,
and it is-- it's a very difficult poem
to understand aloud.
But I think if you bear with it, you
can pick up statements or phrases
within it, which have meaning.
It starts fairly abstractly, but again, it pretty much
clarifies as it goes along.
It's called "Of Government."
And the poem is drawing a comparison
between the nature of government and the nature of marriage,
the two being alike in certain ways.
And in the end talking about, again,
the sense of freeing oneself from these things-
my wife shouldn't take that too seriously.
[LAUGHS]
"Of Government."
Of necessity, the women lie down like maps,
the men are beautiful, divisible numbers.
Tragic and insubstantial, he moves on her landscape.
Her particular sequence, we will call believable.
So now we are adult. Each of us is a little mother
rediscovering seriousness, how around a table,
the arrangement of dolls frowned without breasts into their tea
one day and refuse to speak.
In bed, we are as political as children.
It reaches that far, the idea of government,
controlled movement of traffic and arms.
Then we have masses of emotion needing direction
to be trusted.
[AIRPLANE PASSING OVERHEAD]
The marriage directive is adjust.
The movement of men over women is friendly
and for a moment light, then stalls, and then slides away
like a land mass into the sea.
The directive of government is diplomacy.
Like courtship, it fears and displays the erotic.
Like marriage, it cultivates the bored--
the boredom, the single indignity worth repetition.
Summing differences take care of us.
But eventually, each is an angry father.
The art of scorn for his audience,
the hatred of the child for the parent who
by love permits no escape.
Failing at love, we find it was not important.
Better to be honest than to be human.
Though both are contained in a pure relentless anger,
hatred of opposites, of sex, of directives,
hatred of ourselves, and boredom without hate.
So we move toward heaven, man, and wife, and nation,
not hoping to find it, but by some violences
done to ourselves by marriage, by government
to reveal ourselves.
Lacking belief, we are the dolls we once kept.
One day they would not be arranged,
but stared into our government, which was, we then believed,
of love, were undeceived, and trusted at last the richness
of the world.