I had to visit another group of captives
today, because I visited a high school here.
You think you're free-- you think
you'll never have to go there again,
and then they send you back.
I tell you, wow.
And actually it was a great group.
They were they were sweethearts, but I mean,
I confessed immediately that I had a punster father,
the kind that nudges you in the ribs and says "get it?"
And everything-- I was in advance
trying to take care of the groaners that would come.
Wordplay is my bête noire.
What Richard Howard says, poets have a strong weakness
for oxymoron like this combination of two words that--
I mean, and he's that case in point.
There's a guy who cannot stop playing with words,
and I confess it too.
And as I was telling them about this,
I remembered that someone had said that confession
was good for the soul the way a tweed coat is good for dandruff.
But yeah, it doesn't cure the condition,
but you just don't notice it as much.
So my father who used to say-- he
would say I take a bath once a month whether I need it or not.
He got all these lines from bad westerns and things like that,
and now he's 84 and he actually does dribble on himself.
So it takes on a certain poignancy.
Now he really does only take it once a month.
Now he means it.
So this is the bath poem for him, "The Water."
My theme tonight is water.
In case you don't notice later, you
will see that through almost everything.
The water took time to calm, but when its surfaces
had settled on a face, the image went far down
into its one lit lens.
Her head shone deepest in and farthest off,
its long hair dripping needle points up toward her eyes.
The world was outside down or topside in in broken rosettas.
Was one at all intelligible, used to partnerships,
two breasts implacable drank quite companionably there
at the pool, tip touched tip each with its other
a practical endlessness poured from a pair.
This was Mesmer to terrify mortals.
She rose from the tub world's calm collaborations,
rose in order to order herself, in order
to carry her own weight again and to take
on the old mundane emergency, the world at
large, the land of separations hefted.
And as she rose, her likeness fell away.
It wound from her in coil works and in thread works
spun of time.
It swept in shining down and fell behind
in the sense of eventual.
Now it was clear who was blind.