We greet each other cautiously, married
Man to unmarried woman. It's in those
Other moments she knows she has me: when she
Bends over so beautifully to breakfast
Her cat, or sweeps the back porch as if it were
Her lover's back, or slips from her bicycle
With that grimace of joy-To begin with these
Intrusions is, perhaps, to explain what's been
Keeping me from
this
act of apprehension
So long. Marriage is no substitute
For patriotism. So here I am,
No less than man, plunged and tossed
Amid Gods and ideologies, trying to find
The place where the least people starve and the most
Are concerned for one another, where my son
Can grow up with a love of the useful
And the beautiful and the powers
That provide for them. And seeing me slosh
Around in their bay of self-content,
The overseers of this civilization,
Wise as they are in profitable discord,
Have the foresight to invest
in
diversions,
Not to keep me, but to make me forget
I wanted to leave. Thus am I sucked back
To that jetty in the resort portrait
To wallow in the reeds offshore, racked with needs
I cannot account for: to spend myself
Into a woman I loved once, or into
A woman I have hated
all
my life,
Or simply to nab the first head that happens
Along and fasten her in her tracks.
All hands must knot their parallels: As the
Workingman is given a bowling alley
And two weeks in the Poconos to keep
Him from the just end of owning what he makes,
