In the book called Opening the Hand,
there are a number of poems at the beginning of the book that
have to do with families.
This too had occurred to me before, some years before.
But these poems are different from the earlier ones.
First, I'll read one about an aunt of mine,
a sister of my father's.
My father, as I said, was a Presbyterian minister.
And his mother was a very convinced Methodist.
And, in fact, she was worried about his immortal soul
because he became a Presbyterian, this one.
She'd also-- which was very peculiar,
because she always voted Republican, I believe--
she'd allowed John L. Lewis to have some of his first meetings
in her basement.
And it was a very strange background.
But enough about that.
This was my father's elder sister.
And her name, they called her always, Bertie.
It's addressed to her.
"You don't think anything that I know of.
But, as for me, when I think of you,
I don't know how many of you there are.
And I suppose you thought there was just the one.
How many times you may have been born,
as my father's other sisters would say, in your body.
Nobody is interested in things like that in the family.
Somebody wrote down, though, that you
was born one time on April 20, 1874,
so that my grandmother, at that occasion, was 13.
And the hardest thing to believe in that account,
as I think of it, is that she was ever 13 years old,
the way we grew up to hide things from each other.
So she had a little baby at that age.
And that was you, Bertie.
That was one of you.
Did you know?
It presents a different picture of my grandmother
from the one I was brought up to.
That was the you she had when she
was 13, which goes a long way to explain her Puritanism,
and your gypsy earrings, and all the withered children who
came after, and their scorn of your bright colors
and your loud heart.
And maybe even your son, who was delicate and an artist,
and painted heads of Jesus on church walls,
where they crumbled and could not be moved,
and you're having a good time and dying in Arizona.
Except that, as everybody knew, that you was nothing
but a mistake in the writing.
And the real Bertie came along when Grandma was into her 20s
and she had her firstborn, a little baby girl,
which explains nothing.
Puritanism, earrings, the children
who came after, your son the frail artist, the crumbling
heads of Jesus, the having a good time and dying in Arizona,
that was the you I met one morning in summer whom nobody
could explain, for you was different.
Inviting all them so unexpected and not
heard of for so long, your own mother, younger brother,
younger sisters, new nephew, to breakfast,
laughing and waving your hands with all the rings,
and them not listening.
Saying they was in a hurry to drive farther and see
the family.
And you going on, telling them everything there was to eat."