The title of this runs into the poem.
"The pornographic but serious history"--
of myself, begging your pardon, as a young man,
quick to draw arms, quick to take offense
for daggers toward my heart, quick to shoot from the hip,
fast to let fly in all directions.
As if to injure fatally the unsettled.
Just recognized in myself, which is why, in the end,
I take myself for example.
But what the new critic says isn't proof.
And a thin line is shifting, again,
between comic and tragic, body and spirit,
and the wife doesn't know her husband.
Not to fill up with history but no ideas.
Not to merely see life and think it images.
Not to think morality a bad medicine,
does the husband offer his boyhood to his wife's mouth.
The words are a white balm.
The self heated to the temper of its time.
Come on in.
[LAUGHS]
I haven't much to say between the poems.
So if someone enters, that affords a wonderful occasion
for pausing.
So I owe him a debt.
That's good.