Written directly before or after this,
I'm not sure, was a poem called "The Pervert."
And I had written a poem when I was in graduate school called
"Life Without Abie," which was about a neighborhood
pervert, when I was a little kid, who never really bothered
anybody.
He was mostly foul mouthed and very old
and I think probably retarded and certainly very strange.
And I was young enough not to understand his allusions
to sex.
Then he was gone from the neighborhood.
And my mother told me that they took him
to the funny farm, which they called it in my hometown.
And since then, although I didn't feel it at the time,
I felt a kind of nostalgia for his going because in a way
he was a hearty little sex symbol for the neighborhood.
And so a few years after, I wrote that first poem.
I wrote another one called "The Pervert."
And this is another nostalgic poem
and it comes out of a curiosity as to what
happens to a pervert when he gets very old and too
old for sex to be any longer the focal point of his life.
And in this particular character was a more than simply
a molester.
It's apparent in the poem that he
might have killed some children or something like that.
And it takes place in the Midwest
because I had spent some time there
or went to the city of Rock Island,
Illinois is mentioned in the beginning of the poem.
And it's just a very seedy city.
So it fit in pretty well with the poem.
The Pervert.
The police searched for him in bars and old bookstores
in Rock Island, Illinois, but he was everywhere,
like the evening hours.
It was a cellar that held him in the dust.
And with the warm terror of fingers groping
and the darkness of a glove, he escaped.
Now running, now walking carefully in daylight
as a salesman or a widow's lover,
he is too old for such disguise.
Now the depth of water attracts.
There is the pleasure of release.
He is floating down river at last with an impeccable sense
of nostalgia.
Neighbors, parents, the bald Sheriff's deputy,
occasional articles of violence, photographs
appear to him not without pain of leafy parks on the Iowa
shore, schoolyards buzzing with girls in long dresses.
Now they grow old on the riverbank
and have forgotten him, the man who walked among them.
The other children died.
He sets down.
The raft shrinks.
He believes in loneliness.
He knows he is to blame.
His fingers worry deep in his pockets.