These poems-- these recent poems I've
written have been in those oblique and rather
personal ways increasingly political, in some senses.
And the idea has occurred to me--
I was thinking about it on the plane
today-- it occurs to me why.
I'm at about the age where you're
as old as you can be and not remember having--
I can remember being a teenager when
there wasn't a war in Vietnam, but I can only remember
about a year and a half of it.
And I have the feeling that somehow my childhood was stolen
from me by this damn war.
And so when I go back and write poems about my childhood,
I find, in some odd sense, that they're political to me.
And it's one reason why I've doubtless I've become
so obsessed by my childhood.
Here's a strange poem about that.
It's a poem called "Sweet Dreams."
"So this is defeat.
If I bring it home, mother would say good, marry it.
Father would tell it the good joke.
Defeat is tired.
We talk about how there are too few emotions, how when the news
comes we are full, just as there is always mince and pumpkin
pie at Thanksgiving because it is Thanksgiving.
And then we are hungry.
And it is then I feel as beginning
to relax, as on a vacation Sunday
when it rains and everyone has something to read.
Someone looks up.
It's dusk.
We could send out for food.
Food would come.
I'm asked to propose a toast.
To home, I say.
I'm amazed at myself.
I say it again and again.
Defeat wonders if I'm coming up to bed.
When I think of all those years I didn't love my parents.
I go up.
There is always another floor.
I go up.
I grow happier.
This is the way we go.
To heaven or to bed."