This is the poem that got me in the worst trouble
in terms of a prophecy.
I wrote a poem about multiple births
about five years before I had twins.
So this is the problem's home.
It started because my daughter brought me a book of--
a black and white book, I remember
it was, with triplets all wearing polka-dot dresses.
And she gave me the first line of the poem.
She said, triplets are so embarrassing.
And that's where the poem started.
And then I had twins a few years later.
"Identity Principle."
"Triplets are so embarrassing, too
much soup in the soup of life.
Who needs an alphabet with three O's, a tangled birth,
a troika of woes?
Picture the mother, swelled as a cloud,
the gallop of three heartbeats like a posse through her.
Or twins, those clever monkeys, allowed to eat at table.
Identical birth marks, matching hairnets, the sound
and the echo, and old age.
One twin wheels the other before him,
meeting himself after the stroke.
So you decide, even among brothers and sisters,
raucous as wedding guests, to be an only child.
The stance you take in making love, and walking crookedly
in robbing the sperm bank, until you have a child,
and people say, she looks just like you.
In her face you see the same wish to be an island so distant,
she'll never see another pleasure boat."
So then twins came along.