My wife, Suzanne, and I went out to dinner at a restaurant which we go to rarely, because it’s so expensive, but like a lot. Also, I smiled a lot.
How is place important to your poetry?
I think the world, the world I find myself in, is poetic primarily, and my ideas poetic secondarily, in relationship to the world I find myself in. I guess I would say that good poems give us the world, this world, and that’s as true of Sylvia Plath’s poems as it is of William Carlos Williams’s.
What’s your favorite poem?
“Song of Myself.”
Which of your own poems is your favorite?
They’re all my favorites. I don’t think I could make a selected poems. But the one I read the most these days is “Trailing Clouds of Glory,” because of its pertinence to the current immigration debate.
* * * * *
Trailing Clouds of Glory
Even though I’m an immigrant,
the angel with the flaming sword seems fine with me.
He unhooks the velvet rope. He ushers me into the club.
Some activity in the mosh pit, a banquet here, a panhandler there,
a gray curtain drawn down over the infinitely curving lunette,
Jupiter in its crescent phase, huge,
a vista of a waterfall, with a rainbow in the spray,
a few desultory orgies, a billboard
of the snub-nosed electric car of the future—
the inside is exactly the same as the outside,
down to the m.c. in the yellow spats.
So why the angel with the flaming sword
bringing in the sheep and waving away the goats,
and the men with the binoculars,
elbows resting on the roll bars of jeeps,
peering into the desert? There is a border,
but it is not fixed, it wavers, it shimmies, it rises
and plunges into the unimaginable seventh dimension
before erupting in a field of Dakota corn. On the F train
to Manhattan yesterday, I sat across
from a family threesome Guatemalan by the look of them—
delicate and archaic and Mayan—
and obviously undocumented to the bone.
They didn’t seem anxious. The mother was
laughing and squabbling with the daughter
over a knockoff smart phone on which they were playing a
video game together. The boy, maybe three,
disdained their ruckus. I recognized the scowl on his face,
the retrospective, maskless rage of inception.
He looked just like my son when my son came out of his mother
after thirty hours of labor—the head squashed,
the lips swollen, the skin empurpled and hideous
with blood and afterbirth. Out of the inflamed tunnel
and into the cold room of harsh sounds.
He looked right at me with his bleared eyes.
He had a voice like Richard Burton’s.
He had an impressive command of the major English texts. I will do such things, what they are yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth, he said. The child, he said, is father of the man.
Leave a Reply