OK, so last poem.
This is called "The World as Will and Representation."
"When I was a child, my father, every morning--
some mornings, for a time, when I was 10 or so,
my father gave my mother a drug called antabuse.
It makes you sick if you drink alcohol.
They were little yellow pills.
He ground them in a glass, dissolved them in water,
handed her the glass, and watched her closely
while she drank.
It was the late 1940s, a time, a social world,
in which the men got up and went to work, leaving
the women with the children.
His wink at me was a 1940s wink.
He watched her closely so she couldn't pull a fast one
or put anything over on a pair as shrewd as the two of us.
I hear those phrases in old movies
and my mind begins to drift.
The reason he ground the medication fine
was that pills could be hidden under the tongue
and spit out later.
The reason that this ritual occurred so early
in the morning, I was told and knew it to be true,
was that she could, if she wanted,
induce herself to vomit, so she had
to be watched until her system had absorbed the drug.
Hard to render in these lines the rhythm of the act.
He ground two of them to powder in a glass,
filled it with water, held it to her, and watched her drink.
In my memory, he's wearing a suit, gray herringbone,
a white shirt she had ironed.
Some mornings, as in the comic strips
we read where Dagwood went off to placate Mr. Dithers,
leaving Blondie with crusts of toast
and yellow rivulets of egg yolk to be cleared before she went
shopping, before she went on what the comic called
a shopping spree with Trixie the next door neighbor,
my father, like Dagwood, would have
to leave early and give the task of vigilance to me.
Keep an eye on mama, partner.
You know, in the passage in the Aeneid, the man who
leaves the burning city with his father on his shoulders,
holding his young son's hand, means
to do well among the flaming arras and the falling columns,
while the blind prophet, arms upraised,
howls from the inner chamber, "Great Troy is fallen.
Great Troy is no more."
Slumped in a bathrobe, penitent and biddable,
my mother at the kitchen table gagged and drank, drank
and gagged.
We get our first moral idea about the world
of justice, power, gender, about what we have to take,
from somewhere.
This was mine."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]