--what follows a whole series of about half a dozen
or so live poems.
And it's like turning around.
I thought, at least when I started,
it was like turning around and trying
to catch myself in the act in some kind of way
and call it so as to stop it.
And found that by the time I'd written even half a dozen
of these poems, that it was going
to be a real snap to catch myself with this,
to catch myself at that.
And I was going to be real little master,
sitting down, writing the poems that caught me at that,
that caught me on this.
And it wasn't really changing that much.
I wasn't doing very much at all, except sort
of indulging the kinds of misery that I was
for sure feeling at the time.
But suddenly, it become a next and it
was just a further expression or generation of that misery.
Had nothing to do with anything else.
So my original theory of, all right, I'm feeling very badly.
So if I just let myself sink, I'll touch bottom and then
kick off again, proved to be totally irrelevant
and came the time when you sort of realize,
OK, you're floundering around in this stuff,
and you'll be there as long as you want to.
So why?
Ain't no bottom.
There's no bother at all.
This poem then was the last of the lie poems.
I think I hear that familiar hum.
The thing of the old wives tale of cats
sucking the breath out of babies,
which, in a number of my poems, I've
been very pleased to find out that the images that I
based the poems around have been fallacious ones.
Earlier, I read a poem about a black widow, for instance.
You remember one of the first poems I read.
The black widow looming by the dry shell of her mate
and so on.
I think that's almost cliche the idea of that particular image
for instance of the female, certainly
of the female black widow that she kills the male spider
after she mates with it.
Well, it may be a very engaging kind of image
for, anyhow, a certain set of mind, male minds,
to think that, I was really delighted to find out
that that's not at all how, in fact, it works,
that there's a very complicated system of signaling things
that a male is supposed to go through once he's been invited
on to the web of a female as she signals him when she's sexually
prepared and so on.
And this is from the Helstrom Chronicles,
by the way, if you know that movie.
There was a part of the movie which was edited out
and which the producer described on one of those talk shows
at night.
And it's a shame they didn't leave it
in because what they did leave in
was the original image of woman as predator and so on.
Whereas what was really true was the male
is required to say to give a set of signals.
He tugs on this in that part of the web.
And he's like programmed.
And he tugs and tugs and all this kind of thing.
And then finally, once he's identified himself
as a black widow, is what it amounts to as a black widow
spider, she invites him to come on, and he comes on.
And then they mate.
And then the tricky part is that he
has to remember to signal again before he leaves the nest.
And apparently, what happens, understandably enough,
is that very often, he'll forget to signal to get off the net.
And when he forgets, she'll eat him--
[LAUGHTER]
--presumably because she thinks he's a fly or something.
But anyhow, he has to give that code leaving as well.
And then I thought, how much more interesting
that is to play around with than the other image after all.
So anyway, this one is on the cats.
And it turns out, of course, not to be true either.
Cats don't suck the breath out of children.
They just lick the milk off their lips.
"My eyes become a good pet, admitted and pampered
by an old lady upstairs in me.
She stirs from her rocking only to refill their bowl with dust
urged from her breast.
Then she'll lace with the crushed glass, the bits of meat
made of the newborn and tossed at midnight to the neighbors,
to the neighbors of beasts.
These, she despises for their ominous good health and size.
Nightly, she reviews the subtle bodies of her own
and admires their perfect grace as her fingers
curl and close in the painful dark that
keeps her as she would be kept.
She pulls the shades.
I close my eyes.
We sleep, giving the house entirely
to things that purr and settle for the warmth
of our still body and our breath."