Don't know how my time is going.
I'm going to skip a poem in this thematic group
and drop the theme.
Read a poem that I like to read at universities because, well,
you'll see why.
I went on a binge once are reading
biographies and autobiographies of famous literary men.
And I think because they were modern biographies
and autobiographies.
And therefore tried to strip away the myth from the man
and make him human.
It turned out that everyone I read
led me to believe that these famous literary men had
made the lives of their own children perfectly miserable.
And at the same time, that all these books brought this to me.
I remembered, of course, that these very same literary men
had served perfectly as parents to thousands of other people's
children through their books.
That is these young people had tested themselves
against these men's books as they
do against the ideal parent, had learned from them,
had used them in writing their papers
and so on, used them up indeed.
So out of this little paradox, I wrote this short poem
called Relationships.
The legal children of a literary man
remember his ugly words to their mother.
He made them keep quiet and kiss them later.
He made them stop fighting and finish their supper.
His stink in the bathroom sickened their noses.
He left them with sitters and lonesome houses.
He mounted their mother and made them wear braces.
He fattened on fame and raised them thin.
But the secret sons of the same man spring
up like weeds from the seed of his word.
They eat from his hand and it is not hard.
They unravel his sweater and swing from his beard.
They smell in their sleep his ferns and roses.
They hunt the Fox on his giant horses.
They slapped their mother repeating his phrases and swell
in his sight and suck him thin.