POET'S ANATOMY
427
"Facts," Daddy coached loudly, motioning with his toothpick
at Sandy's pocket. " I have here."
"I have here reports from ten top scientists, disagreeing with
each other about what the sun is made out of, and
if
those scientists
can't agree, it's up to us. They say they have to look at it in an
eclipse. Well, we ought to bring the thing down and have it looked
at in broad daylight. And we could too, if they weren't spending
all our money and keeping us cooling our heels out here in the
outfield, trying to tell
llS
what to do-"
"Drive it home!"
"It's up to every one of you to decide in his own heart. That
poor moon might be up there all this time, every day, and everybody
thinking it was the sun."
"No good," Daddy carped. "You missed the point: the sun
is
the moon."
I was shivering with attention and overwhelmed by what I had
heard. Were they seriously proposing that the sun
was
the moon?
Or were they propo ing that the two ought to be changed, could be
changed? I lay with my cheek on the table, rigid with wonder.
Though not the first, this was one of my earliest exposures
to the idea of transformation, which as the critics have noted,
recurs often in my poetry, and without which I would never have
risked the daring realism of utterly transforming myself into what
othenvise- for all the hacks and quacks around-would have re–
mained only potential in me for a lifetime. "It's all relative" is the
cant phrase you hear now even in grocery stores or on park benches.
And "It's
all
in your point of view"- far too easy, isn't it, and
any honest man, if pushed, will admit it's not quite true. One's
point of view- the eyes of the beholder--can't
really
transform a
thing. An additional step, a tougher and solider adventure is needed
before you can have transmutation, or crime, or poetry.
In any case, for years, Sandy used to practice a rhetoric of
sophistication and deceit (the kind he later used so successfully
to have his way with me), while I listened, rapt with admiration
and jealous of his skill and intelligence. I never managed to realize
that the five years' difference in our ages, by which he kept exactly
the same distance ahead of me all the time, had anything at all
to do with it; he seemed unreachably brilliant and beautiful: his
