I'm going to read a poem here that is in my experience
a kind of litmus test for where you've come from.
It's like the New York Times dialect quiz but for poetry.
And I'm going to give you a quiz at the end of this poem
to ask you whether you think that it ends on a good note
or on a bad note, OK?
This is called "Familial," and it
is the first autobiographical poem I ever wrote.
Familial, automatic, plan lists, my father startled
from his roadside piss, kicks gun
to shoulder cranks shell to chamber knocks the buck down.
His jeans bag at his ankle.
My orange plastic vest crackles in the wind.
I am 10.
We are 10 miles out from camp, dirt bike half
slung off the mud-rutted road.
While at our feet, the unintended four-point sinks
into the readily melting snow, masterly
our butchery, quick jugulation, bloodless
sliced down the center line as I hold the hind legs
wide, the tugs that empty throat and heart, guts
and sex onto the ground for coyotes,
like lords, I think, our progress back to camp.
The carcass upright on the motorcycle seat.
Hooves roped to pedal and handlebar, head
half-severed, lolling antlers back onto my father's shoulder,
while I snuggle into its vertical gash throttled down
the mountain.
I am red-handed, wind raw, and triumphal.
I am my father's son.
OK, who says it's a happy poem?
And who says it's not a happy poem?
The people who think it's not happy, are you from a coast?
[LAUGHTER]
That is what I have found.
I gave the-- I read this poem a few years ago in New York,
and a woman came up to me afterward,
and she said, "I'm so sorry about the abuse you suffered
as a child."
And I said, "What are you talking about?"
And she said your father and the deer, I'm like,
"That was the best thing of my life,
what are you talking about?"