Next again a short poem.
This sounds, I think, like what is rather a fashionable
surrealism, but actually it isn't.
It's a kind of social and political statement.
And it's called "Causes."
And obviously, we go through life
depending to a tremendous degree on our sense of cause
and effect.
If I do this, then that will be the result, or if he does that,
then that will be the result. And so on.
But sometimes in the modern world
our sense of causal relationship breaks down all around us,
and then we feel the world has become surrealistic.
And I'm going to use a very dated example, which
dates from about the time of the poem.
If I go to a voting booth, and pull down
a voting lever to vote for a president,
or if I refuse to go to the voting booth
and don't vote for a president, and I know
I live in a democracy and I know I'm partially
responsible for what my government does,
if as the result of that my government conducts the Vietnam
War, just as an example, I lose my sense of the cause
and effect relationship.
What did I do?
What caused that?
It's gone.
The world is crazy.
And I think in the modern world this breaks down around us
to a tremendous degree.
And so I wrote this little poem called Causes,
and it has an epigraph which I found in a daily newspaper.
And the epigraph is, "Questioned about why
she had beaten her spastic child to death,
the mother told police, I hit him
because he kept falling off his crutches."
Because one's husband is different from oneself,
the pilot's last words were, "Help.
My God, I'm shot."
Because the tip growth on a pine looks like Christmas tree
candles, cracks appear in the plaster of old houses.
And because the man next door likes to play golf,
a war started up in some countries where it is hot.
And whenever a maid waits at the bus stop with her bundles,
the fear of death comes over us in vacant places.
It is all foreseen in the glassy eye on the shelf, woven
in the web of notes that sprays from a trumpet,
announced by a salvo of crackles when the fire kindles,
printed on the nature of things when a skin bruises.
And there's never enough surprise
at the killer in the self nor enough difference
between the shooter and the shot,
nor enough melting down of stubs to make
new candles as the earth rolls over inverting
billions of houses.