I suppose it's slightly perverse on my part
to want to follow that with this poem, which was in 1972,
I thought--
I supposed to be a kind of anti-war poem.
I was at that time teaching in a Catholic college
for very well-raised young girls, young ladies.
And one of them said to me after I
had read this poem to that audience,
and she said it very genuinely with tears
in her eyes, poor God.
Everybody puts everything onto him.
And which I suppose they do.
This is called "Heaven as Anus."
"In the Defense Department there is
a shop where scientists so the eyelids of rabbits
open lest they blink in the scorch of a nuclear drop
and elsewhere dolphins are being taught to defuse bombs
in the mock-up of a harbor and monkeys
learned to perform the simple tasks of draftees.
It is done with electric shocks.
Some mice who have failed their time tests in the maze
now go to the wire unbidden for their jolts.
Implanting electrodes yields rich results.
Alley cats turn from predators into prey.
Show them a sparrow and they cower while the whitewall labs
fill up with the feces of fear where calves whose hearts
have been done away with walk and bleat on plastic pumps.
And what is any of this to the godhead, these squeals, whines,
writhings, unexpected jumps, whose children burn alive,
booby-trap the dead, lop ears and testicles,
core and disembowel?
It all ends at the hole.
No words may enter the house of excrement.
We will meet there as the sphincter of the good Lord
opens wide and He takes us all inside."