And this next poem is a repentance
of all the harsh things I ever said about my parents.
[LAUGHTER]
It's called "Phone Call."
"Maybe I overdid it when I called my father
an enemy of humanity.
That might have been a little strongly put,
a slight overexaggeration, an immoderate description
of that person who at that moment, 2,000 miles away,
holding the receiver six inches from his ear,
must have regretted paying for my therapy.
[LAUGHTER]
What I meant was that my father was an enemy of my humanity,
and what I meant behind that was that my father was split
into two people, one of them living deep inside me
like a bad king or an incurable disease, blighting my crops,
striking down my herds, poisoning my wells--
the other standing in another time zone,
in a kitchen in Wyoming with bad knees
and white hair sprouting from his ears.
I don't want to scream forever, I
don't want to live without proportion
like some kind of infection from the past,
so I have to remember the second father, the one whose TV dinner
is getting cold while he holds the phone in his left hand
and stares blankly out the window where just now
the sun is going down and the last fingertips of sunlight
are withdrawing from the hills they once
touched like a child."