I like to think that this is like--
Marlowe wrote "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"
and Raleigh wrote "The Nymph's Reply."
I'm not sure that Robert Duncan and I are really
Marlowe and Raleigh but it's a nice fantasy to have.
Dreams of glory.
Here's a rather different family poem.
It's really quite simple.
I was coming--
I came on to a beach one not entirely hot day
in San Francisco one time, rather
deserted beach, Land's End, with lots of bushes around.
And I suddenly came across this naked family.
Father, a mother, and a small son as I describe.
I wrote the poem and one time I had the rather fanciful notion
of calling it the Holy Family but this
would have introduced complications
I did not entirely intend.
So I called it "Three" really just because-- it's really
a very cowardly title.
I can't stand poems called poem.
But this is really just as bad.
"Three."
All three are bare.
The father towels himself by two gray boulders.
Long body, then long hair, matted like rainy bracken
to his shoulders.
The pull and risk of the Pacific's touch
is yet with him.
He kicked and felt it brisk, it's
cold live sinews tugging at each limb.
It haunts him still.
Drying his loins, he grins to notice how struck helpless
with the chill, his cock hangs tiny and withdrawn there now.
Near, eyes half-closed, the mother
lies back on the hot round stones, her weight to theirs
opposed and pressing them as if they were earth's bones.
Hard bone, firm skin, she holds her breasts and belly up,
now dry, striped white where clothes have been, to the heat
that sponsors all heat, from the sky.
Only their son is brown all over.
Rapt in endless play, in which all games make one.
His three-year nakedness is every day.
Swims as dogs swim.
Rushes his father, wiggles from his hold.
His body which is him, sturdy and volatile,
runs off the cold.
Runs up to me.
Hi there, hi there, he shrills, yet will not stop,
for though continually accepting everything his play turns up,
he still leaves it and comes back
to that pebble-warmed recess in which the parents sit
at watch, who had to learn their nakedness.