Anyway, what can be more repugnant
than those perfumed magazine ads that we are subjected to?
I'm sure, one of the signs of a deteriorating culture.
So there aren't enough poems written
against things like that.
[LAUGHTER]
So this is the one--
Hello.
How are you, Danielle?
It's good to see you.
What a surprise.
So this poem is called "Summons."
"Suppose I can convince myself this world is my home only
by claiming it could never be and then assuming we
all share that feeling, a bond that anchors us
each to the planet, even those hired to populate
this photo spread across pages 24 and 25, a beach
party, the magazine scented because what else
should summon us to delusion but perfume?
Drifting up from the tanned and fiercely healthy
faces, a massaged glow in precise attunement
to the means implied by the Queen Anne porch and gables,
women in summer evening dresses, barefoot,
heels tossed in clumps of eelgrass, lighly wavering
stalks, and two men in tuxes about to heap driftwood
atop a bonfire, while a third lugs the straw
hamper of food and wines.
The model's laughter unheard, but booming out over dunes
and waves, joyful, efflorescent laughing, easy to envy,
and hidden inside their shouts, another shot of them later,
clothes stripped off, drunken, running down the beach
into a warm, plankton-lit surf, since these are the seas out
of which we once evolved, crawling,
and skittering over one another's backs."
I have to stop being a Puritan.
Another impossibility.