When I saw our wedding picture
in
the paper:
My wife resembled-my wife
was-my
mother.
Still, that is how it's done.
In this house everyone's a mother.
-My wife's a mother, th\! cook's a mother, the maid's a mother,
The governess's-
why isn't the governess a man?
The things that 1 buy, even,
In a week or two they go over to my wife.
The Kerman, the Ensor, that grandmother's clock
Look by me with their bald,
Obsessional, reproachful eyes, a family
One has married into, a mother-in-law, a–
What is one's wife's mother's mother called?
Do all men's mothers perish through their sons?
As
the child starts into life, the woman dies
Into a girl-and, scolding the doll she owns,
The single scholar of her little school,
Her task, her plaything, her possession,
She assumes what is God's alone, responsibility.
When my son reached into the toaster with a fork
This morning, and handed me the slice of toast
So clumsily, dropped it, and looked up at-me
So clumsily, I saw that he resembled-
That he
was-
I didn't see it.
The next time that they say to me: "He has your eyes,"
I'll tell them the truth: he has
his
own eyes.
My son's eyes look a little like a squirrel's,
A little like a fir tree's. They don't look like mine,
They don't look like my wife's ...
