I'm going to follow this with one more about that's
on the subject of birth control, which,
for me, used to be two words, which is the title of the poem.
Don't worry.
And I always think about this deal because I talk a lot-- now,
I have a lot of friends who are counselors
and they talk about, well, why can't young people just do
it right?
And I think, why?
You should hope that you wouldn't have that choice.
But at any rate, people really don't like to talk about it.
And I don't think they like to think about it much.
I mean, I'm just going through certain kinds of thoughts
about birth control.
Don't worry.
"Most of us are compositions that begin in error
and curl like telephones in the umbilical swamp.
And break into the light, rending the living portal.
And after a long waddling, staggered to our feet.
And after a long goo-gaaing, stuttered into our voices.
Some would rather hear of Methuselah or Noah's Ark.
A great many would prefer to meditate
on springs that slipped right up from darkness, unaware,
and arrive after much idyllic meandering at the sea.
Then imagine their fathers and mothers
lost to that act that often yields such indecorous
mixtures of pain and pleasure.
We profane to call it love.
"The priest [INAUDIBLE] the talk that
is only talk goes on talking its talk.
The priest talks to the pretty maid pregnant by a soldier.
She worries because there is war or because soon the war
will be over and there will not be enough work in the fields.
The priest comforts her, saying this too will pass,
saying what priests say, in the name of the Father, and son,
and Holy Spirit, as if each baby was born with a loaf of bread
under its arm.
The professional grandmother counsels her granddaughter.
Get on with it.
Get it over.
Just don't marry a fool.
When my cousin went on the pill, my aunt
inscribed letters to Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale.
Young and risking car sex without a condom
because the least trespass of sheepskin or latex
against the gland seemed sacrilege against Eros.
When I arrived at that stage where the seminal vesicles begin
to secrete their first milky pearls and the girl
there with me had at last vanished
into the riptide of her own unstoppable motions,
I would think of mangled bodies at accident scenes
or old men in Bermuda shorts with tar on their legs
in order to hold back the spasm of nearly intolerable pleasure
that was just my own spring, music itself
from beyond volition like a violin and a cavalry charge.
Passing the clinic with a friend,
I see a woman bow out of a taxi and move
through the chanting gauntlet of fanatics
raising their pickled fetuses, photographs, and bloody flags.
When one with a greasy beard and a ring in his ear darts
from the crowd and spits the word murderer right in her face,
my friend shouts back at them from across the street--
something stupid and forgettable--
to defend her, who already has gone in
to wade among the glossy plants and magazines
as though her own guilt had assumed palpable form
and attached itself deep.
She sits there.
It must feel almost as bad as being born.
What does a man know of love?
His secret deliverance, his blind spring
joining the human river.
It flows darkly at last as long as it lets him.
Because a man's immersion in pleasure stops as it starts,
he may spout bits of spasmodic wisdom
that seem leaked from the very plumbing of oblivion.
When my wife lay thrashing in the birthing room wracked
by the 17th hour of contractions and I passed a damp towel across
her forehead, I made the mistake of voicing the first words that
graced my mind.
I know just how you feel.
[LAUGHTER]
She looked at me and said, you don't know anything."
I used to have another ending and it's
kind of like I made another point and my friend
Lucia Perillo said, that's where the poem ends.
And I still feel kind of stumped off there, you know?
I feel like I wanted to have a fountain there at the end.
Get a fountain with some lights in it, purple lights.