I'd like to read one more poem which
has the same role of redeeming the despised.
And this poem is formally unusual
because it has a footnote, which itself is in verse.
And it's called "Holy Shit."
And it goes as follows.
"I know we like to think we're immortal.
And if the gods don't shit, why should we?
And it sounds, somehow, healthy to stop
shitting, to sever the chain of linked turds mooring us
to some cesspool, such as the one Martin Luther, after six
days of clogged bowels, was squatting over
when the doctrine of justification by faith
came to him, or the dungeon of excrement
that Dante glommed onto.
Right now, a horse bun is turning light golden
in a field in Ohio, in the October sun.
And in a Vermont pasture, a wrinkled cow flap
blooms pinkish.
Last night, you took what you liked from a carrot.
Today, you give back the rest.
Of course, there could be a stink,
like the updrafts that made Vergil
gag while pushing and pulling Dante down
through the bowels of hell, or that smote Strephon, when
he discovered his beloved's chamber pot,
and slowly realized Celia--
Celia-- Celia shits.
But think, but think, the matter you press out of your anus,
your mother and father were glad enough once
to wipe from your little tidy buttocks.
And this Sunday, in stadiums all over the country,
many thousands will congregate to watch re-enactments
of the Lutheran epiphany, when the liberating angel plucks
turd after turd out of the upturned rear end of the cast
of Martin Luther and drops back and hurls each Protestant lump
far down field in the maneuver known as Schwarzkopf's Hail
Mary.
The child Genet would roost for hours each day in the silken
peace of the outhouse, thinking of it as a confessional
where we bear our most intimate parts, steeping his imagination
in its odor and darkness.
Though I myself have never sat reading poetry in outhouses
or composed it while drinking in the family
perfumes on the birch log laid across the open shitting
pit in Freedom, New Hampshire, nevertheless, it
seems to me that I confuse the knob of transfigured Earth
that the alimentary canal shapes as it squeezes it
out its bottom opening with the poem which it shapes out
of its top.
For I can never get near the 3500 stacks in libraries
or the poetry shelf in bookstores
without having to shit."
I got to work on that passage there.
"When the white-tailed deer pauses and drops her quarter
notes the size and color of Nicoise olives onto the snow.
She doesn't need to sing them, being free,
whereas the canary who, with her gizzards, sands off the husk
and sleets it to the cage floor, must
chill trill the entire kernel of each seed into song.
My father gave a grunt.
I heard him on the horseshoe of the toilet seat.
I thought one of the great stallions of the night
had just kicked him in the rear end,
knocking a turd out of him into the still water under him,
causing its surface, thin as a sheet of brow skin,
to worry all over.
35,000 feet up there somewhere, a fountain pen
turistas into a shirt pocket, a purplish black gush that
now will never become a great elemental word such as fire,
night, wind, or shit."
Asterisk on shit and a footnote.
"Shit has the asterisk attached to identify it as an indecent
word, which the newspapers that drooled over the smart weapons
of the Gulf War that killed so far away you never see
a corpse, as if you could take a shit without seeing
and smelling anything, won't print,
even though it has an ancient lineage in the Indo-European
skate--
to split, to separate, to drop, and remains
one of our most common words, outranking in frequency of use
all the expletives, even the divine three, God, Christ,
and fuck."
Back to the text.
"Coming home, she said, yes, there's
the bag and the fuss and the mess.
But you know what I hate most?
It's that I'll never sit down ever again and take
a good shit.
After five years in captivity, the ex-hostage
said they don't say it.
But one of the great joys of being free
is you can go to the bathroom when you want.
On the kitchen shelf, a mouse puts turd seeds
at the foot of a box of rolled oats.
A black bear who swats down the apples of the lower
branches of three trees almost immediately
begins producing long, thick cylinders of barely altered
apple chompings.
A little apple nectar removed, a little bear nectar added,
as if you could serve them up in the great restaurants of Paris
and Lyon as compote des pommes des Dieux.
We eat shit anyway, one way or another.
What did you think the shapes of Baby Ruth's and Mounds bars
meant?
And consider the andouille and the boudins noirs.
And as for bouef, those castrated creatures
whom we have stripped of all purpose
except to separate grass and do shit and flesh that soon will
be shit, don't those unmoving lumps dumped
around in the field almost look themselves
like the shit of some big something?
Of course, as Olaf said, there is
some shit I will not eat, such as--" sorry.
"There is some S-period I will not
eat, such as the S-period of getting
a bunch of rich countries to gang up and bomb the shit out
of a small country, possibly to some good end,
but probably, mostly for the thrill of belonging
to a people who don't die, who come out of the sky like gods
and shit not shit but bombs on people who shit.
A man in a lifeboat lived for seven days
by sucking the anus of a cuttlefish, which
he fed with seawater, and which he did not eat until he
had spotted Cape Hatteras.
We don't have any idea what life is,
but we know all who live die, and in the meantime,
work, sleep, mate, eat, and shit.
So let others kneel and pray for whatever
they call victory, in whatever war they have going.
For us, let us sit, bent forward slightly,
and be opened a moment as the Earth passes through us."
[APPLAUSE]