This feels so formal, but I don't know what to do about it
so we'll just be formal, I guess.
The next poem has an epigraph that's
a rough translation of a very famous quotation from Freud
which goes, "women, women, what do they want?"
And that's what he said.
He really did.
[LAUGHTER]
And the title of the poem is "The Wide and Varied World."
Women, women, what do they want?
Oh, let me warn you about this one, too.
I think it's hard to listen to and not have it in front of you
unless you know that there are a whole lot of characters in it.
There are a lot of figures in the poem
and that's because it takes place in a gynecologist office.
And if you've ever been in a gynecologist office
you can never go in there without seeing a lot of people.
"The Wide and Varied World."
The first ones in the door of the plant-filled office
were the twins fresh from the upper grades, their matched
coats dangling open, and then their more compliant brother
leading the dear, stuffed, tottering creature, amazing
that she could lift her leg high enough
to cross the threshold to the waiting room.
Then the woman, the patient, carrying
the baby in an infant seat, his every inch of flesh
swaddled against the vicious weather.
Once inside, how skillfully the mother
unwound the many layers and now so quickly must restore them.
News from the lab has passed through the nurse's
sliding window.
The youngest, strapped again into his shell,
fusses for the breast, the twins tease their sister,
the eight-year-old looks almost wise
as his mother struggles into her coat with one hand
and with the other pinches his sweaty neck,
her hissed threats swarming his face like flies.
Now she's gone.
The women remaining don't need to speak.
Outside, snow falls in the streets and quiet hills
and seems in the window, framed by the room's
continuous greenery, to obliterate
the wide and varied world.
We half smile, half nod to one another.
One returns to her magazine.
One shifts gently to the right arm, her sleeping newborn
unfurls the bud of its hand.
One of us takes her turn in the inner office
where she submits to the steel table and removes from her body
its stubborn wish.
We want what you want, only we have to want it more.
[APPLAUSE]
Been to that office, huh?
[LAUGHTER]