Maybe another little poem in that same vein
so I can get them out of my system.
This is called "Trader."
I read it on the radio the other night
and I know the disk jockey looked at me a couple of times,
because there was a big sign, which I noticed later,
up above the window, saying obscene utterances over
the radio are finable to the extent of $10,000
and imprisonment not less than five years, and so I--
but that's a poet's paranoia.
Anyway "Trader" is about a--
maybe it's happened to you-- you've
seen a girl that you cared very much for about 10, or 11,
or 12 years later.
And this is what happened, I saw this girl on the street.
And in high school, she was the cheerleader,
and I was the linebacker, and all that kind of stuff.
And her life was going miserably,
and I was sort of pleased--
[LAUGHTER]
Only to the extent that I wanted to marry her,
but she wanted to marry the day after graduation,
and I wanted to go to college and get off
the farm and stuff like that.
Anyway, so she married somebody else who became a machinist
at an Oldsmobile factory--
[LAUGHTER]
and then a milkman.
So anyway, this is called "Trader."
"I traded a girl two apples for an orange.
I hate citrus, but she was beautiful.
As lovers, we were rotten.
This was before the sexual revolution
and we only necked and pawed.
Don't write below the lines, but now she's
traded that child's red mitten I only
touched for a stovepipe hat, four children, and a milkman
husband.
Soon I learned there will be no milkman
and she'll want to trade again.
Stop, I won't take a giant Mariana's Trench
for two red apples.
You've had your orange, now lie in it."
Of course, since she's scarcely literate,
she won't realize that I've gotten even with her.
I always think the enormous strain
that goes into becoming a poet in America,
or any kind of artist.
And I don't think it gets any easier as the years go by.
But there's this sense of--
A friend of mine was writing a manic musical, rock comedy.
And we're trying to create this situation where
a ranch boy in North Dakota was going
to tell his Republican father that he was going
to become a ballet dancer.
[LAUGHTER]
And it's still something I think akin to that.
But as Louis Simpson once said in a poem,
be true to your own strange kind.